Psykologisk roman thriller. En bok att sluka, vändningar som man inte trott, slut som man ej förväntat sig!! ( )

Like Alvtegen’s other work SHAME only fits within the confines of crime fiction if you’re open minded about how to define the genre. I’m very comfortable with this kind of elasticity but if you’re not, consider this fair warning. It is the most aptly named novel I have come across in quite some time as it displays and dissects the shame felt by two women and the long-lasting effects these deep feelings have on their lives.

Monika is a successful doctor with a less than perfect personal life. She has never allowed herself to be properly loved but when we meet her a man called Thomas has entered her life and Monika dares to believe that things might be different this time. Just as she decides she will share her secret shame with Thomas and see if he still wants her a dramatic event occurs. An event that proves to Monika she is not worthy of love. Not deserving. And she must do whatever it takes to make amends.

About the only thing Maj-Britt is successful at is eating. She has become so good at it that she is virtually housebound by her obesity and needs all sorts of home help just to survive. She is also mean-spirited. And just plain mean. Many of the helpers who have been assigned to her case won’t return because she is so horrid to them. Maj-Britt has a dark secret too but even before her darkest day she was almost full to the brim with the shame of knowing she had displeased her parents and their god.

For three quarters of SHAME the stories of these two women do not overlap. Their individual sadnesses, anguish and despair are revealed in parallel but separate threads with Alvetegen’s usual sparse writing and incisive observational eye. She really does have an affinity for bringing the voice of the world’s outsiders to life. There’s no overt sentimentality or mawkishness yet no deliberate unkindnesses either. I often find attempts at this kind of characterisation are either too politically correct for credibility or have ramped up the cruelty in some misguided attempt at ‘grittiness’. Neither Monika or Maj-Britt is particularly likeable in the usual sense of the word, probably not the type of literary character that will end up on lists of fictional beings to invite to a dinner party, but I found them believable, compelling and increasingly sympathetic as their secrets were laid bare for us.

Even Alvtegen’s minor characters are pitch-perfect. The two women who end up tying Monika and Maj-Britt’s stories together in the novel’s final act are Ellinor, the latest and most robust of Maj-Britt’s home aides, and Vanja who reconnects with Maj-Britt nearly 30 years after they were teenagers together in the same small town. Both characters are deftly drawn. As are the women’s parents who – it must be said – have a good deal to answer for, especially in the case of Maj-Britt. I’ve read a lot of stories in which awful things are done to children but the depiction of the way her parents ‘deal’ with Maj-Britt’s childhood ‘sin’ left me speechless at the insidiousness of their particular brand of abuse. I have to hope it was entirely from Alvtegen’s imagination.

I was a smidgen disappointed by the book’s ending. Not hugely and only when compared with the rest of this book; it’s still a cut above the vast majority of endings I encounter. But it was a little too clunkily neat for me…and for what had gone before. Though perhaps Alvtegen was concerned about leaving her readers in abject despair. It is a minor reservation only and should not prevent you from embarking on this beautifully told, sometimes challenging and never dull tale.

I discovered Karin Alvtegen in Barry Forshaw’s Death in a Cold Climate, and I started with Shame (the books are not part of a series) just because that’s the book I located first. I was quite impressed with Shame, and I’ve seen several blogs mention that it’s not her strongest work: I’m looking forward to reading more.

While the blurb on the cover calls it a “compulsive thriller,” I think the book is more suspenseful than full of thrills. Shame is the story of two unconnected women who are dealing with unresolved shame issues about their pasts. Monika is a doctor whose teenage brother died about twenty years before, and Maj-Britt is a woman who became a homebound morbidly obese woman because of her inability to deal with her past. Alvtegen doesn’t exploit her characters: she goes deep into the minds of these damaged women and conveys the depths and changes in their feelings very closely. The book is a compulsive read too because Alvtegen alternates perspectives in each chapter: the cliffhanger at the end of one character’s chapter isn’t resolved until two chapters later. Also, this is a book that deals with psychology, sex, religion, and death, but it’s not really centered on a crime.

I’ve read a few repressed-memory or woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown books in the past few months (Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and Peter May’s The Blackhouse), and I’m spent. I recommend Shame with the caveat that it can put you through the wringer emotionally.

First line:
~Dear God, take away all the war and all the violence and everything that is unjust and make it so that all the poor people have money so they can buy little food~

I don’t know what to say.

Another reviewer sums it up beautifully.

“Karen Alvtegen can keep you up way past your bedtime with these eerie stories of people gone off the curb.”

This is a psychological thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat and up waaayy past my bedtime. And it is definitely eerie. I loved this book which was my first exposure to Karin Alvtegen and certainly won’t be my last.

I have several books on the go at one time and they were all put aside so that I could focus on this one.

The characters were real. Although their lives do not mirror my own, in many ways I could relate to both of them. Childhood trauma inflicts deep wounds that take deep commitment to work through as adults. Both of these characters suffer greatly.

The only reason I did not give this 5 stars is because I found the ending just a little bit too neatly wrapped up. It seemed to me that the ending did not reflect reality but maybe that is a good thing. Alvtegen does leave us with some hope for all of us. ( )

aide memoire: an excellent but very very dark and grim thriller published in Britain 2006. Monika and Maj-Britt both severely physchologically damaged people whose stories eventually come together. Ends on a hopeful note. ( )