The Child By Kjersti A. Skomsvold (tr. Martin Aitken)

Review by Rachel Farmer

‘Home again, I lay awake crying over the trauma I'd been through. Is it OK to call something a trauma when it's your own doing? Whatever it was, it left me hopeless and helpless. But I couldn't lie like that for long, because then there'd be someone else crying, someone who needed me.’

Here, in one of The Child's opening paragraphs, Kjersti A. Skomsvold lays bare her confusion and ambivalence following the birth of her baby. In a fragmented style reminiscent of Jenny Offill and Rivka Galchen, the book offers snapshots of the author's experience of motherhood, the intense grief and guilt she feels as a result of her friend's alcoholism and suicide, and a surprisingly candid examination of her relationship with her current partner, the father of her child. It is a raw and sharply observed memoir-of-sorts, taut with nuance and containing a web of interconnected subjects and themes.

Skomsvold describes the feeling of knowing she and her partner have conceived, the closely guarded, joyous secret that colours the world afresh: "We went out like we were brand new. I kept thinking that everyone could surely see the thin violet stripes we carried, which divided our lives into two, because now nothing would ever be the same again." Yet she is also consumed with worry, imagining a woman stabbing her in her pregnant belly, imagining throwing her baby off the balcony, imagining disease and decay sweeping over the pair of them. Contradictions abound—a reflection of reality that rings startlingly true.

In this vein, the theme of past and present—the pathways and fissures between then and now—is woven throughout. The author reminisces about her great-aunt Edel, who helped raise her, and who is growing increasingly frail, living out her last days as the new baby is just starting to grow and flourish in the womb. Similarly, the author's first tentative steps into her relationship with Bo, the man who would become the father of her children, were shaped by the prior loss of her friend to alcoholism, her ability to trust another man marred by the guilt and trauma inflicted upon her. Upon the birth of her two children, she describes an awareness, suddenly awakened, of the wounds inflicted upon her by her own parents, which she is desperate not to pass on. Here, the past and present weave together yet remain distinct: a time before and a time after.

Skomsvold being a writer and her partner an artist, the topic of art and creativity pervades her prose. She frets over her ability to capture enough through her writing, while also hesitant to dedicate too much time to it so as to remain present in the real world. She describes her craft almost as a debt she owes to the world and to her own experiences, yet something that needs to be squared with her tangible desire to fall in love and start a family. Writing, and art as a whole, is repeatedly compared to love and the act of loving—the fear of exposing oneself to the judgement of others—but also the knowledge that, in both her relationship and her writing, she is enough.

Like her fiction debut The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am—a gem of a novella centred around the musings of its aging, eccentric narrator—Skomsvold’s latest work makes for a memorable reading experience. Aided by Martin Aitken's smooth translation, The Child is an absolute joy—one to be savoured slowly.

The Child is published by Granta, 6th May 2021