The Danish author on her new hybrid novel about maternal ambivalence, her debt to Doris Lessing, and attempting to read Freud aged 10
Danish author Olga Ravn, 36, made the International Booker shortlist in 2021 with her first book to be translated into English, The Employees, an experimental novel about a partly humanoid space crew. Fans include Max Porter and Mark Haddon; a French critic called it Alien as told by Samuel Beckett. Her new novel, My Work, is her second book to be translated into English. Mixing fiction, essay and poetry, it follows Anna, an isolated young writer navigating pregnancy and motherhood as well as mental illness and the medical system. Ravn spoke from her home in Copenhagen, where she was born and raised.
Where did My Work begin?
I started writing it on my phone late at night in hospital after giving birth to my first child in a very complicated delivery. I became obsessed with documenting what was happening – I was really weirded out and writing was the only place I felt a little like myself. Later, I realised I had postpartum depression and I asked myself how, from an artistic point of view, I could stay true to the experience; it was important to me that readers who had experienced something similar would feel I had respected it. When strangers ask me how much of the book is true, I don’t know how to answer. I wanted the reader to have an experience of extreme intimacy, to feel that everything is being shown – but that’s not autobiography, it’s technique.
What drew you to the book’s hybrid form?
In writing school I’d been taught that a great novel is a third-person psychological portrait of an individual who learns something and either perishes or is victorious. This novel is published every day; I tried to write one and it felt dead on the page. Reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook at night when the baby slept changed everything. It was like a lifejacket. She’s struggling with linearity; one response to that could be fragmentation, but that’s a broken form, and she’s interested in something more holistic. She takes seriously how the experience of motherhood might influence a novel’s form.
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/MpzDsAN
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