Oneiron, Laura Lindstedt
Oneiron won the Finlandia Prize, Finland’s main literary prize, and I picked it up on the recommendation of a bookseller when I was there a few years ago. The description on the back cover was highly intriguing: basically, seven women are in a white space where they can’t see or feel anything besides each and the whiteness, and quickly determine that they are dead. As they begin to recover their memories and try to figure out exactly what happened to them, they help each other discover things about themselves, and also to figure out what is next for them. Lindstedt does a good job of portraying through her characters the main causes of women’s deaths – men – while also sprinkling in other causes, and also goes into great detail regarding each character’s life, even though their death is always looming in the background. Surprisingly, none of the characters are from Finland: they are from Austria, the U.S., Senegal, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Russia, so the book is filled to the brim with interesting tidbits of language and culture that I am sure took ages for her to research. With such an interesting premise, I had a lot of questions, and I have to say, Lindstedt left many of them unanswered, which I feel was on purpose. More fun/interesting to keep thinking about it, I guess. 😉
Ain’t I a Woman! A Book of Women’s Poetry from around the World, Illona Linthwaite (ed.)
I was given this poetry collection by a friend (thank you, Veronica!) some years ago, and although I occasionally read a poem here or there, I had never read it in its entirety, so I finally sat down and did just that. The range of poets included in the collection is very broad—from Sojourner Truth, from whom the collection derives its name, to Alice Walker, Gabriela Mistral, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, and even Sappho—so many women from different places were included. The poets included were from all around the world, including the U.S., Cuba, Chile, China, Greece, South Africa, India, and so on, and the poems were arranged chronologically by topic: from birth to death. It’s an interesting idea for a collection, and well executed. I am not the biggest reader of poetry, but I still enjoyed the collection greatly. One of my favorites was “Invitation,” by Grace Nichols, who was born in 1950 in Guyana. I will leave part of it here: “If my fat / was too much for me / I would have told you / I would have lost a stone or two / I would have gone jogging / even when it was fogging / I would have weighed in / sitting the bathroom scale / with my tail tucked in / I would have dieted / more care than a diabetic / But as it is / I’m feeling fine / feel no need / to change my lines / when I move I’m target light / Come up and see me sometime”.