Therese Bohman

Sometimes the title of the book gives you more than a good sense of what a book is going to be about. Therese Bohman's The Other Woman is one such title. There's no doubt that it's about an affair. What you still have to read it to uncover is the actual story though because all affairs are both alike and yet unique to the two people involved.

Our attractive, young, unnamed narrator is a working class girl taking a break from her education for lack of money. She works in the cafeteria of a show more hospital in the small Swedish city of Norrkoping and leads a monotonous, conventional life. But the narrator wants to write a novel and she wants to have a life worthy of being possible subject matter for that novel. The boring meaninglessness of her life, of her very existence, won't do. One day she sees an attractive, married, well dressed older doctor in the cafeteria, a man she has occasionally wondered about having an affair with and she accepts a ride home from him after missing her bus. As she is getting to know Carl and ultimately seducing him, she is also getting to know Alex, a girl her age who is exciting and friendly and who has a secret that will change everything for the narrator and have repercussions that resonate both in an out of her inevitable affair with Carl.

The novel is a slow psychological study with a selfish and often unsympathetic narrator. But for all that, she's still rather fascinating. Her pursuit of Carl and her subsequent fantasies inserting herself in his life feel predatory even though he is equally culpable in their affair. Her relationship with Carl and the jealousy she feels towards his wife and children is not the only destructive force here though. There are several depictions of power imbalances, the darkness of money and class differences, and the question of fidelity and its worth. The first person narration puts the reader directly in the narrator's head, seeing the manipulations as well as the naivete. The story is quite slow starting and very philosophical in tone. The narrator's pre-affair life is dull and no recounting of it will change that so it's a bit of a chore to get past it to the real meat of the story. Once you do though, you see that the narrator is creating a version of herself, the other woman, a writer, something more than her surface suggests. Even when her choices go from bad to worse, she is forging the identity of the woman she will become on the other side of this affair and the other side of her friendship with Alex. This is a translation from the Swedish and will appeal to readers who don't mind extended character studies, moral ambiguity, and a lot of introspection balanced with a healthy sense of self-worth. show less

"Dypest sett har jeg alltid vært ensom."

En kvinne i midten av 20-årene jobber som renholder på et sykehuskjøkken i en liten industriby ved kysten i Sverige. Hun er opptatt av litteratur og kunst, og vil bli forfatter, men er stuck i en stygg liten hybel og med en dårlig betalt vikarjobb.

Ensomheten ligger som et tynt slør over livet hennes. Dette illustreres også i boka ved at det hele tiden er dårlig vær. Grått og fuktig. Klamt og kaldt.

Hun treffer Carl, en gift lege som jobber show more på samme sykehus og innleder et hemmelig forhold med ham. Nå får hun kjenne på en annerledes følelse av ensomhet. En følelse som forsvinner når hun er med ham, men intensiveres og blir sterkere enn noen gang når han er med familien sin. Hun kjenner også på en stor urettferdighet. Hun er misunnelig på kona hans som lever det livet hun, jeg-personen, ønsker seg: et liv sammen med Carl, med en god jobb, i et vakkert hjem.

Hun søker lindring i alkohol og tilbringer mye tid med Alex, en ny venninne med tvilsom moral, en skjult fortid og en egen grunn til å ville ødelegge for denne Carl. Jeg-personen skjønner det ikke før det er for sent, eller så bryr hun seg ikke. Uansett ender ting stygt, men jeg-personen får i hvert fall noe ut av situasjonen da Carl og kona tilbyr henne penger og en leilighet i Stockholm for å bli kvitt henne fra livene deres.

Da en mer privilegert venninne etterspør moralen i det å ta penger fra noen på den måten, svarer jeg-personen at "moral er for de som har råd." dette er en godt skrevet moderne skildring av en intelligent ung kvinne med små midler og muligheter for å realisere seg selv og oppnå sine mål, og alt det kan føre med seg av fysiske og psykiske belastninger. show less

I read Bohman's other book, The Other Woman, and while it wasn't great, it was compelling in the way it tried to think about class differences and how it shapes gender relations.

This book felt like it had something more going for it. It's a thin story held together by thin characters, and that's fine if the language or the style was striving to be something unique, of its own. But it was, in the end, a rather conventional book. There's a great image to work with embedded within the story, show more but the ekphrasis just sort of faltered.

Something that bothered me in The Other Woman and is a lot worse here is Bohman's style; there are commas where periods should be, and I'm not sure if it reads differently in the original Swedish and if the translator Marlaine Delargy should have reworked it so it doesn't read like this in English: "They met at a party while she was still a student, he tells me how beautiful he thought she was, pale skin and strawberry-blonde hair, I swallow, I have to look away, gaze at the moon, which has moved a little farther across the sky, it just seems to be getting bigger and bigger."

I'm all for twisted female relationships, troubled sisters, and the hell that is heterosexual love under patriarchy (I'm thinking of Theweleit here, who said oppression of women occurs through "exaltation" of certain women via imposed standards of beauty), so I'm sad that I didn't quite like it. show less

For a short book where not a ton happens, it's really good. It makes you think about your whole life and how it goes by and the connections with people that you have within your life. The first part of the book is from the girl's perspective. And the second half is from her boss's perspective. I loved that they did that! I gave it 4 stars because I did feel like at times it was a little slower, but overall, I really enjoyed it.

[spoilers] A young woman starts at a publishing company as an show more intern. Gunnar, one of the publishing directors and manager of an imprint, Andromeda, sees her and asks her opinion on three books. She was nervous she was going to say the wrong thing. And she didn't know how to respond as to which one she liked. She was out with friends and realized, she shouldn't be as basic as them and went with her real thoughts. Gunnar and her hit it off as working partners and he asks her to work with him. Slowly, she starts to do more and more and their working relationship is spot on. It's her dream job. And she's knowledgeable and feels like she fits into the world with Gunnar. But times goes on and he gets old and sick and is forced to leave. He loses control not having the publishing life anymore and drinks a lot and eventually dies. The young woman doesn't know how to feel. She was never sure if she had romantic feelings for him, but they just connected. And every Thursday when they were working, they would leave early and drink a bottle of wine together, but nothing ever happened. Just a connection between two people. The second half of the book, we get his perspective and he doesn't seem to be as much of an ass as he seems in the first half and he has as much respect for the young woman as she had for him. It sounds like he would've taken it farther. And even in the young woman's perspective, she says, I don't know if he's ever thought of me that way. And he has and he did. But truly he enjoyed the conversation and he was afraid to step over any lines. Even though his marriage was not great. We learn more about his childhood and growing up. And I feel for him, because it just feels like he hadn't met his people to fit in, always on the outside. Having the perspective from Gunnar really changed my opinion of him. And he realized he was aging out of publishing and the books from the Andromeda imprint weren't that amazing. And with the young woman, he finally felt seen and heard like he wanted. One thing the author says in the book which I thought was interesting is that when you're in relationship, you get comfortable. You don't want to introduce "new" things because this is just how it is now. And when people cheat, it's about being seen as something different and introducing those things that just don't feel right in the marriage or long-term relationship. Overall, it was a great read! show less