Fall 2023 Fiction Preview: My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith
Today’s Fall 2023 Fiction Preview features Olga Ravn’s My Work, translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith!
From the acclaimed author of the International Booker Prize–shortlisted literary sensation The Employees comes a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.
Anna is utterly lost. Still in shock after the birth of her son, she moves to snowbound Stockholm with her newborn and boyfriend, where a chasm soon opens between the couple. Lonely and isolated, Anna reads too many internet articles and shops for clothes she cannot afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she must read and write herself back into her proper place in the world.
My Work is a fervent, intimate, and compulsive examination of the relationship between motherhood, writing, and everyday life. In a mesmerizing, propulsive blend of prose, poetry, journal entries, and letters, Olga Ravn probes the pain, postpartum depression, housework, shopping, mundanity, and anxiety of motherhood, all the while celebrating the unbounded that comes from the love in a parent and child relationship—and rediscovering oneself through art.
“Olga Ravn has not only added a highly personal and literary page-turner to her body of work: she has made a brave and important contribution to literary history and social debate, which since the 1970s has been in dire need of writing that incorporates lived experience.” —Børsen
We’re thrilled to share an introductory video from Olga Ravn!
In addition, we’ve selected an excerpt from the novel to share with you today. My Work will be released on September 5, 2023, and is available for pre-order from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore.
FIRST BEGINNING
Who wrote this book?
I did, of course.
Although I’d like to convince you otherwise.
Let’s agree right now that someone else has written it. Another woman, entirely unlike me. Let’s call her Anna. Let’s say Anna has given me all the pages that follow this text. And let’s say that with these pages, Anna has given me the task of arranging them. Let’s say that some nights, after reading these many, many pages Anna has left me, I’m gripped by greed and hysteria. I don’t want anyone but me to read Anna’s texts. I don’t want anyone but me to know her.
For many months I tried to get to grips with Anna’s papers, and during this work I was again and again overcome by something I cannot describe as anything but an animal impulse, a deep instinct that made me jump up from my desk, propelled by a single thought: Anna’s papers should only be read by pregnant people and parents with small children.
And each time, I had to sit back down at the desk, breathless and baffled by my own foolishness. But I admit I was seized by this microscopic rapture often.
Perhaps I thought that such a select readership would protect Anna by keeping her experience a secret. These pages she left in my custody – reading them has felt like carrying confidential information.
My biggest challenge has been understanding Anna’s relationship with time. She doesn’t seem to adhere to any chronology, and I cannot pretend to grasp the timelines of her writing. The pages were piled haphazardly when she gave them to me. In the notebooks, one event might follow another which took place years before, as if she suddenly gained access to a different layer of time in the text and carved out space for it.
Meanwhile, like all new mothers, she seems obsessed with the passage of time relative to the child’s development. She often notes the age of the child, sometimes down to the number of days, at the top of a text, even if what follows is not about the child.
Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Her work combines several genres, often crossing over into visual arts. Her debut poetry collection, I Devour Myself Like Heather, was published to critical acclaim in 2012. Alongside Johanne Lykke Holm, Ravn ran the feminist performance group and writing school Hekseskolen from 2015 to 2019. She has also worked as a critic, teacher, and translator. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal, she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. The Employees, translated into English by award-winning translator Martin Aitken, was a finalist for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Ravn lives in Copenhagen.
Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith are translators living in Copenhagen. They received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for their co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s All the Birds in the Sky in 2020. Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Asymptote, EuropeNow, Poetry International, and on stage.
