Each year, London-based publisher Peirene Press translates three novels by three contemporary European authors and brings them out under a single unifying theme. The third novel to appear in this year's cluster is The Looking-Glass Sisters by the Norwegian writer Gøhril Gabrielsen.
The theme for this series is “Chance Encounter: Meeting the Other”, and we discover early into Gabrielsen’s quietly unsettling novel that the ‘other’ is a male presence in a female world. One of the sisters of the book’s title quickly accepts and embraces this new arrival but the younger one does not.
What follows is a powerful tale of loneliness, lovelessness and defiance.
The bulk of the novel is sandwiched between two short sections set in an attic. Gabrielsen’s protagonist has been “stowed away” there, if not out of mind then at least out of sight.
We never get to hear her name, only the stream of insults flung at her by her sister and her partner downstairs. All we are told of the Norwegian setting is that it is a house “in a remote spot in a northern, godforsaken part of the world.”
The era is also withheld, although fleeting references to a “master race” and the “fatherland” suggest either a recognisable past or a hypothetical future. What we do learn early on is that the narrator is partially paralysed and dependent on older sister Ragna. Of late, however, Ragna has been ignoring her cries for food and water, and when she has appeared in the attic it has been to punish her.
The events of the main middle section of the book take place downstairs and one year earlier. Gradually, we discover what has led to this neglect and imprisonment.
Tough, no-nonsense Ragna has been a reluctant carer to her sibling since the early death of their parents. Both sisters are “two stationary people in a constantly shifting world, the two of us holding on tight to each other”. But Ragna has also been a volatile adversary, an on-off enemy who, when not bathing and feeding her sister, plays cruel mind games on her.
Those games become more invidious when Johan arrives and offers Ragna something other than a life of domestic drudgery.
Soon Ragna’s sister is made to suffer for her antipathy towards Johan and her intrusive third-wheel status, and is banished upstairs where her fears and suspicions coalesce into waking nightmares.
As we read, an outline emerges which indicates this character’s fate. Tired of being dragged down and held back, Ragna, with help from Johan, is clearly plotting to bundle her burdensome sister off to a care home. Or is she?
The couple’s efforts are routinely thwarted, and when we get to the book’s last section we notice it picks up from where Gabrielsen’s opening section left off: one sister slowly starving upstairs while the other digs a huge hole in the garden.
A hole big enough for a body? And yet by this point we have come to wonder just how reliable our narrator is. Did she witness or merely imagine her sister’s “moral decline” at the hands of a pack of drunken Finns?
Is she an innocent captive, callously ignored, or a mad woman in the attic, a victim of her own fantastic delusions? “Help me, anyone who can,” she says at one point. “I’m a woman on the periphery of all truths.”
It is this teasing ambiguity and catalogue of feverish thoughts and torments that give weight to Gabrielsen’s writing, and which transforms a seemingly predictable tale into a dark psychological drama of great depth and intensity.
There is no denying the bleak austerity of The Looking-Glass Sisters; like the landscape in the novel, there is little warmth and colour, and no hint of a thaw once the chill has set in.
At the same time, even the harshest scene possesses a raw, stark beauty. Our narrator expertly conveys the inherent difficulty of “branching from the same rotten trunk” as her sister, and the despair from isolation and enduring a life without love.
Excellently translated by John Irons, Gabrielsen’s novel disturbs and challenges. Once we have begun, though, it is near impossible to pull away.
Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.
