(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The nameless protagonist does everything but talk – here it is not given at the doors, in a 163-page fight for the right to shut up when things are difficult.
The text's 'I' is a young woman who has moved in her mother's obituary, without her mother being dead. It is not good to say what is truth and lies in the text, but it is built around the conversations the psychologist and his girlfriend try to have with the young woman. It is clear that there is something seriously wrong with the young woman's emotional life, but for a long time we get no other explanation than that she is jealous of her brother. Eventually, prohibition, law, sin, and God slip into the text.
Guts and action film jargon also appear. "Family literature" takes on a new meaning when we become acquainted with the intestines of the main character during a family dinner on page 36: "I eat some of the fish and feel my knees ache and my intestines lie on the floor." There are hard roofs in the home.
The woman wonders if it would have been good to tell, but she does not trust what the story brings. For language constructs reality and makes it true. "Is that how it is, if I have said so?" she asks – implicitly: If I do not say so, it may not be so.
Some of the beauty of it forsnakkelser is there boundlessness in the text, as when the conversations that take place around the main character on the bus flow straight into the narrator's monologue: A boundlessness that resembles a psychosis, but is it the text or the lady in it who is eager? The narrator is not only unreliable – she makes her unreliability one of the main themes.
The emotional impenetrability of the main character is described by Kristin Ribe through a prose that is also difficult to penetrate. Sometimes she lets us get away cheaply with absurd truisms, as on page 111: "You do not know the word of it until you say it, and you do not say it." Still, it is a text to sharpen up on, and it must be allowed to ask oneself if one bothers. Together, however, it is a solid debut, where language and content go hand in hand. She gives us a lot of trouble, but in the end the protagonist considers joining those who believe in the importance of speaking. If she's not exactly talking loose.
