The Child - Softcover

Skomsvold, Kjersti A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194883040X ISBN 13: 9781948830409

Publisher: Open Letter Books, 2021

Synopsis

A young mother speaks to her second born child. Since the drama of childbirth, all feels calm. The world is new and full of surprises, even though dangers lurk behind every corner; a car out of control, disease ever-present in the air, the unforgiving speed of time.

She tells of the times before the child was born, when the world felt unsure and enveloped in darkness, of long nights with an older lover, of her writing career and the precariousness of beginning a relationship and then a family with her husband, Bo.

A portrait of modern motherhood, The Child is a love story about what it means to be alive and stay alive, no matter how hard the journey.

About this title

About the Authors

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold made a sensational debut with The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, published by Dalkey Press in English. The book won the Vesaas First Book Award, was shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize and has been sold to publishers in more than 25 countries. She is the author of four acclaimed novels, a book of poetry and a children’s book.

Martin Aitken is a translator of Scandinavian literature, whose translations include work by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Olga Ravn, and Hanne Ørstavik. He was shortlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award in 2017, was a finalist at the US National Book Awards in 2018, and received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It was a new year, a new beginning, and outside the first rain was falling. It felt like a belt tightened around my waist, loosened, then tightened again, all through the night, through the morning, through the day. The rain washed the snow away and the next night I awoke as if by ambush. A thrusting pain in my back, someone punching as I slept, so hard it brought me to my knees, as if I wasn’t there already.

Bo went out in the morning and came back from the bakery with a sixty-kroner loaf. I had no idea bread could be that expensive, he said, but if there was ever a time we deserved it I guess it’s now. I held on and held on, soaking up the punches, the minutes ticking, the hours ticking, and there was the moon again, but I didn’t want to go yet. Normally I worried about being late, now about being early. They’d said not to come too early. The sounds inside my body, as if from a tortured animal, escaped from between my lips as the pain gripped me tighter.

I clung to the light of the moon, barely able to stand, let alone put one foot in front of the other. Eventually I realized that if I didn’t go now I wouldn’t be able to go at all.

I vomited in the taxi, vomited in the waiting room, but all the time I was in the woods, my thoughts beneath a tree, looking up into the branches. Pain tore me up; without pain I was nothing. I had no idea such pain could exist on earth, in heaven, that something inside me could hurt so much. In my pain I resided. But it was a pain I could not withstand, a pain that could never be kissed better, a pain that held me in its command. I could do nothing.

The midwife snapped at me in the delivery room. Screaming’s not going to help, she said; it was about the only thing she said to me. I lost heart then, because what else could help? I’m useless when people are angry, and anyway it wasn’t me; the scream was torn from my throat. I knew I wasn’t going to cope, there was no way I could handle it. But then the woods appeared again. As a new surge of pain racked my body, my thoughts took me away into the woods to stand under my tree and everything around me was bright green, everywhere around me, under and over, please let it soon be over.

The new midwife was kind and considerate, she asked if it was all right for them to stick this thing inside me, to empty me out, and I said do what you want, just make it stop. She said your baby’s got hair, feel, your baby’s got hair, urging me to be a part of something I wanted nothing to do with. I said no, I daren’t, but she took hold of my hand and guided me. I felt the baby’s head, felt its hair, and that was when I understood that a living baby, an actual human being, was going to come out of me.

She heaved at her end and I heaved at mine, we were at each end of a rope, a homespun rope she’d made out of bedsheets with a knot at each end, and now we were heaving with all our might. The white rope was what rescued me, the midwife in white my human saviour, and I heaved with my arms, braced with my legs, the midwife, me and my uterus pressing and pulling and squeezing and straining, extracting the baby, the life and the heavens from my body. The pain was gone in an instant, like a balloon slipping from the hand of a child and drifting away into the clouds.

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Letter Books
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 194883040X
• ISBN 13: 9781948830409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160