About Nothing Grows by Moonlight, all I can really say is wow: this is a brutal, terrifying novel.
Set in Norway following the Second World War, the novel provides an unyielding view into the experience of women in working class communities. Torborg Nedreaas, who was born in Bergen, and who, I've learned, emerged as of the preeminent Norwegian novelists of the last century, knew exactly what she wanted to say, and presented that vision with tremendous courage: this is novel about the abuse of women, about gender inequity, about violence, and, to a certain extent, about the relationship between motherhood and childhood.
Norway today is seen as a progressive nation with considerable financial means, but the country eighty year ago -- the country that Nedreaas knew -- was entirely different: this was an impoverished, solemn, isolated nation concerned less with the rights of working woman than with the evolution of a capitalist system.
Nedreaas tells a simple story about this world, but it is one of tremendous emotional weight: it is one of pregnancies and abortions, alcoholism and loneliness. The story is also one of psychological and religious awakening, followed by unrelenting waves of economic tumult, turning everything black.
Nothing Grows by Moonlight has much to say about what happens at night: about the silence and the stars and the things which intrude upon them. I can't remember the last novel I read which struck such a nerve, and which served as a reminder of how brutal -- truly, how brutal -- life was for so many, so recently. This novel is an exercise in honesty and clairvoyance, a paean to the strength of women forgotten by time. I could not put Moonlight down. And yet, when it was over, I felt a palpable sense of relief.
