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In “My Other”, the author of the “Book of Dina” trilogy tells the story of a Norwegian couple who crossed paths before their trajectories collided for good.
If we had to name the greatest quality of the Norwegian Herbjørg Wassmo, we would strangely say: she believes in it. She believes in her characters. She believes that the novel must tell the truth about them, that the novelist, or the novelist, must commit to that, with all the strength of her talent, with all her humanity. The author of the trilogy the Book of Dinaof Cent Ansborn in 1942, recounts in My Other the story of a couple. A lightning-fast prologue sets the scene. Originally from Northern Norway, they crossed paths before their paths collided for good. Her name is Rut, she is a painter. His name is Gorm, he runs a business and a clothing store, a family business which is his right, being not the eldest but the only boy. His sisters had no say in the matter. This injustice weighs all the more heavily on Gorm’s baggage as depression runs rampant in the family. He inherits two suicides and the consequences of an incestuous relationship. Perhaps he thinks that only harmless traces remain: the habit, for example, of kissing his favorite sister on the nose.
Gorm has a daughter from a first marriage. Rut has a 17-year-old son in 1984; the book runs until 2019, the telephone undergoes the evolution that we know. The son in question, Tor, started a salmon farm. As we are not in an American novel, we are spared technical considerations. It is enough
