THE CHILD

In this memoirlike novel by prizewinning Norwegian author Skomsvold, a writer confides a stream of thoughts and fears to her second child, a baby.

Affected by memories of a debilitating illness, and struggling with anxiety and depression, the narrator is terrified of failing as a mother. "I’m useless when it comes to looking after things. I ruin everything, especially the things I treasure most." Before falling in love with her husband, Bo, she'd been resigned to not having children. After the birth of her first son, she became convinced her brain was altered. "The only thing I managed to write was that I was crying. I’m crying, crying all the time, I wrote." Now, with her second son, she's determined to return to writing. "I wake up in the mornings and look at you and say, today we must work, little one! It was as if you had to come, as if I had to have you to tell you all these things, you had to come and create another new beginning so that I could see in some reasonably clear light the years that went before, and see the change that has taken place." The book, loosely addressed to the baby, details her struggles and anxieties, family history, moments of both panic and calm. She tells him about a beloved aunt, about her and Bo's courtship, the story of a friend who committed suicide. The vivid, fragmentary narrative is shot through with a sense of the passing of time: "I didn’t realize how fast everything changes, how briefly the magnolia trees are in bloom, how quickly the pinched-handkerchief bracts of the dove tree disappear. I’d sat with the child in my arms all through the spring, the summer, the autumn; he was in my arms and in my heart and all the time he was changing ever so slightly. There was something new by the minute, and something else that was lost, and before I knew it that time was gone." As she writes her thoughts and observations, we witness her slowly gaining a greater sense of equanimity. "Fortunately it’s not just happy stories that end well."

An intimate, honest exploration of motherhood, compassionate and beautifully written.