Best for:
Those who like a pretty horrific psychological tale.
CONTENT NOTE: There are cats that start out alive but are not alive at the end of the book.
In a nutshell:
Iðunn is exhausted but doesn’t know why, and doctors aren’t helping. But we eventually know what is going on … sort of.
Worth quoting:
N/A
Why I chose it:
I somehow ended up following author Knútsdóttir on BlueSky. No idea when that came about. But I’d been wanting to read this since she announced it, and saw it available on Libro.FM as an audio book.
Review:
That was a wild ride. This horror novella is fascinating, but fair warning up front: the ending is ambiguous at best. There is a subredding thread discussing it with little agreement. So just be warned.
Iðunn is our narrator. She’s exhausted even though she’s sleeping through the night, and tired of medical professionals dismissing her. At one point she has a giant bruise, and so seeks out a second opinion, but still gets nowhere. A colleague at work suggests Iðunn isn’t getting enough exercise and thus not energized, and suggests a pedometer, she Iðunn purchases a fitbit-style watch. She takes it off at night, but one night forgets to and wakes up to find it has something like 40,000 steps on it.
While she’s been asleep.
The novella unfolds as Iðunn tries to figure out what she is doing in her sleep. She’s mostly off work, but we do get a glimpse of office dynamics as she tries to avoid her former romantic interest, who she left but still works at the company. We also learn of her parents, who don’t seem to really know her (the mother keeps buying meat for when Iðunn comes over for dinner, despite her being a vegetarian).
We do eventually learn what she is doing in those lost hours. And it’s not great.
As I said, the ending is a bit up in the air, but I enjoyed the writing and thinking about how people might handle facing the knowledge that they are living an entire life they aren’t aware of. We’d all seek help, right? Immediately? Or would we be afraid of what would happen to us if people knew?
I’m a bit annoyed at the ending, but I’m still glad I read this book, as I think Knútsdóttir is trying to leave open a few different interpretations that all could be equally interesting. I hope to read more from her in the future.