'The Blue Room' by Hanne Ørstavik

The narrator of this beautifully written, subtle and hugely uncomfortable book awakes to find herself locked in her room on the day she intended to accompany her boyfriend, a young man she met working in the canteen of the university at which she is studying psychology, on a six-week trip to America. In a series of claustrophobic flashbacks, she recounts her life living with her mother and attending the student church, and her developing relationship with Ivar, the canteen worker. Her yearning for Ivar is such that the reader begins to suspect that the intimacy she relates is entirely her fantasy, and we come to suspect the veracity other aspects of her narrative. The narrator is also subject to disturbingly sadistic erotic fantasies, intimating something in her life too terrible for her to look at directly (and powerfully kept out of sight by the author). Over all this presides the nebulously frightening and contradictory figure of her mother, a figure handled with admirable restraint by the author (it would have been so easy to have flattened the unsettling power of this novel by overdoing it). Is the narrator unable to leave her room and join her lover because her mother has locked the door, or is it her 'internalised' mother preventing her from reaching the point where reality could liberate her from a fantasy which is at once naively consoling and ultimately imprisoning and harmful? 

Jan 2015