I loved this so much but I wish it were five times longer. ( )

Ellen, an eleven-year old girl stops speaking during to a family crisis. Her older brother is holed up in his room (as some teens do), her father is dead, her mother—an actress by trade—acts as if all is normal. Ellen goes silent but speaks from behind her silence to the reader.

While I had difficulty accepting that the language of this narrative, not quite stream-of-consciousness, came from an 11-year old girl (13 or so seems more realistic) I nonetheless enjoyed this short book of one young girl’s psychological response to trauma. The prose is captivating in some places, lyrical in others. Can't rave about it, but it's an interesting, short read. ( )

Ellen doesn't speak or write anymore. She thinks, though. She sits in her bedroom and thinks. Through her thoughts, we see her memories of her family and friends. We see what is currently going on with her family now, after her abusive father's death.

At times this book is hopeful, promising redemption and a pain worked through. Other times it seems dangerous and depressing because life is messy.

I did keep wondering about the mom. It didn't appear her daughter got the help she needed but, as she said, it might not have worked anyway. Very fast read, one afternoon. ( )

I am quite taken with this slim novel and its young female narrator, Ellen, who takes the reader to the heart of her very troubled family. People seem to throw the term dysfunctional around too much, but it settles in and finds a true home with Ellen, her parents, and her brother. Two key things about Ellen: she has decided to stop talking completely, and she is sure that she’s responsible for her mentally-disturbed father’s recent death, a death that she repeatedly prayed for on many occasions. She decided to stop talking because she simply didn’t think there was enough room in her life for both speaking and growing up. Her father’s body was discovered after several days in his apartment, because he missed some counseling appointments.
The father may have tried to kill his entire family with the apartment’s gas, was a source of immense darkness in the family, and had been institutionalized at least once. To quote Ellen’s thoughts, “It felt like we’d been living under the foot of a giant pressing us down.” Her brother was a constantly brooding and threatening presence for Ellen, and she avoided him as much as possible in their small apartment. He recorded music with quite an array of equipment in his bedroom, the door of which he constantly nailed shut. Ellen’s mother acted on the stage, and while she was quite a narcissist, at least she wasn’t a bodily threat to anyone.
During the book’s storyline, her brother has a girlfriend who he records singing and photographs in the nude, and the mother has several lovers from her stage companions. Owing to the apartment’s thin walls, Ellen is most aware of everyone’s actions.
This is a short novel, written very simply, in mostly brief sentences. Having read it twice in a day, I can report that it has a real power to it. It has a stream-of-consciousness style, and while the time does jump around, and you can’t always be sure of the truthfulness of our narrator’s words, I love the voice, as Ellen attempts to make sense of her world.

A bit of housekeeping: Yes, Linda Boström Knausgård was Karl Ove Knausgaard's first wife, and her first novel (The Helios Disaster) will finally be released in April of 2020. ( )

‘Maybe the silence was always inside me.’

This short novella from Sweden’s Linda Bostrom Knausgard packs a whole heap of stuff into such a short space of time. It is a compelling portrait of a family on the brink of collapse: 11-year-old Ellen is our narrator, having decided that she will refuse to speak; her older brother locks himself in his room by nailing planks of wood to his door; their mother, an actress, tries to keep a bright and breezy outlook, keeping the family together. Ellen’s father is dead, and she is convinced that she – and God – are to blame. His drinking and mental health had driven him from the family home and Ellen, in her nightly prayers, had wished him dead.

Very little happens here, so this is not the kind of book for someone who is looking for exciting car chases, or lots of action, or, let’s be honest, a plot. This is a meditative reflection on family relationships, on the flashes of love and frustration between siblings, and on a mother’s love for her daughter. Ellen’s refusal to speak seems to be some way of her seeking a form of control as her family spirals out of control, but she also is aware enough to see the problems that it also causes. Moments of ‘normality’ interrupt the book: her brother brings a girl home for dinner; her mother starts a relationship with the young director of her play. But there are also external threats that are embodied in other events, as Ellen’s school is set on fire by two pupils, and she keeps seeing her dead father in her room. As these external forces are removed – both her brother and mother seem to end their respective relationships – the ‘normality’, for Ellen at least, manifests itself in the status quo, the way things were at the start of the book:
‘An old, familiar mood settled over the apartment. My brother nailed his door shut again. Dad kept away, or else it was me who made sure. It was a delightful time.’

The writing is sparse, yet poetic, and the reader is never fully on firm ground with the strange situation. It feels in the realm of the absurd, and I was struck by its feel of Camus, or Beckett, or Ionesco. Many will come to this because of the author’s ex-husband, but this fully deserves your 100% attention for what it is: a compelling, moving account of a family, and a young girl in particular. It is a voice of protest, of seeking understanding, but without being sure what it is protesting about. In an unsettling world, this is a perfect expression of how our separate worlds are desperately fragile. A brave and sensitive piece of writing. ( )