Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Av måneskinn gror det ingenting

Translator – Bibba Lee

Source – Personal copy

There is a wave of books being published in the last few years that capture extraordinary female voices from across Europe as we try to fill in the gaps that have been overlooked, from Tore Ditlevsen to Natalia Ginzburg, to name two. I had seen this book being mentioned as coming back out; it had come out in the late 80s but was overdue for a reissue and is from a prize-winning and controversial writer when it was published, with its look at back-street abortions and how women had to go to these people to avoid children.  She was also a writer who focused on working-class voices in her literature and was a lifelong communist; she asks us to consider what we would do in the main character’s life and what options we would have.

“This must be god-awful boring to you. Well, I assume you’re telling the truth. Love, well. There should be no name for it.

Because it is… well, it’s not something you can put a name on.

Some of the murkiness that lives its bacterialike existence in a young girl’s fantasy is mixed up in it. No, I’m lying. The murkiness has more profound causes, of course. I’ll leave that to psychoanalysts to mess with. But then a man arrives, a real live man, and he’s been there the whole time. Some are stuck on movie stars during that period, some on sports idols, but those of us who are basically faithful continue to build on our childhood infatuation. Caress it maybe, nourish and cultivate and all the stuff we do to explain the facts. All right by me.

she was 15 when she started her relationship with Johannes

The book is framed by a man meeting and taking pity on a woman at a train station, then taking her home. The book is him looking back on this extraordinary evening and the nameless woman whose path he crossed that evening. The book is the story of this woman’s life. She is a working-class woman who has desires, but when she meets an older man, when she is just 15, she starts a sexual relationship with the older man. He, Johannes, is a school master; he is her lover on and off in this affair for the next twenty years, as it seems he has her at his beck and call. This also affects her everyday life, as all this happens in the small mining town they live in. So when she falls pregnant for the first time, we see her description of visiting a backstreet abortionist; as the years move on later in the book, she performs this herself. This is a tale of a woman who had sexual desire but is caught up by what now would be seen as a predatory male figure. all over the course of one evening, this life is spilt out to this man and us as the reader.

‘Up there where we live. It’s different. Maybe it’s the same other places too, but up at The Mine and in our town especially you have to be like everyone else. You can’t hurt, not any worse than others. You can’t have fun; you can’t show you’re having fun, at any rate. Yes, it’s worse than anything, showing you’re happy. And above all you must never be different than you normally are; they can’t take any surprises from anyone. Take, for example, a girl who never goes dancing, who isn’t interested in kissing the boys. A girl who gets paler and more silent and ugly and hollow-eyed every day, a girl who goes to church and cries during the singing of psalms.

‘She can’t suddenly one day go to the youth centre and start dancing, laughing, and taking a swig with the boys behind the barn the way the other girls do. There would be an earthquake at The Mine and down in town.

The small town she lives in shuns her after the affair and the way she lives her life !!

The voice of the narrator in this book captures her life as she pours out to this man, over the course of one night, twenty years of her life. Visiting a back-street abortionist reminded me of scenes from the film Vera Drake about a woman who was a back-street abortionist in the UK. I was also reminded of the kitchen-sink dramas of the sixties; here, this is a sort of anti-Taste of Honey: the woman who chose her life. It makes you question the society at the time; it shocked the country when it came out with its graphic descriptions, especially when she =uses kiniting needles to do an abortion herself. But it is meant to make you question it all; that is the point: this woman is a sort of everywoman; how many women have faced the decisions she made? nameless, but everyone in a way? What also struck me is how much, within the US, certain states are now taking back years of women’s rights to decide about their own lives; how much more poignant this book is now than even ten years ago! A powerful tale that captures human suffering and a broken woman so well .