[ book tip by Ide Hejlskov ] Mirja Unge is quite simply a literary force of nature. Her writing makes you feel as if your inner sense of time has been shattered – as indeed happens to Hanna, the main character in Tide. It's painful but afterwards, once you've discovered that time zones haven't actually been dislocated, you find yourself elated by her stumbling, unruly language.      

Hanna's friend, Thora, has been killed while they were backpacking together in Asia, and Hanna has no idea what to do with herself and her life. Tide doesn't put words to her emotions. Something else happens. Everything is actions and unfinished sentences. Sentences stop dead. Just like everything inside Hanna. And just like time. Worn down by the constant admonishments of her clinging New Age mother and sisters, Hanna moves in with her German grandmother in the city. Her grandmother has lost all sense of time, too, and Hanna joins in her strange life and relationship with her neighbour, an author, the minutiae of whose life they follow right down to details like what he does when he goes to the toilet. Hanna also supplies the hair for her grandmother's bizarre dolls, which represent death and Hitler.        In the midst of this universe in which time and emotions have been shattered, it becomes clear that the grandmother regrets her somewhat less than hands-on approach to bringing up Marika – Hanna's mother. Not that she is capable of talking about emotions. When Hanna finally breaks down, her grandmother merely points out that she'll get tears on the cheese she's eating. This suppression of emotions is endemic. Just like Mirja Unge's black sense of humour.      

It soon becomes clear that the novel is about a dynasty of three generations of females, all of whom find it difficult to let go of their emotions. The grandmother neglected the mother because the social mores of her day prescribed that mothers maintained a distance to their offspring. Marika is the clingy mum who forced her daughters to live in an unrealistic and puritanical world devoid of newspapers, TV, Barbie and sweets, making them even more dependent on her. Hanna's friendship with Thora was informed by her mother's warped sense of love. The contours of a story about personal liberation, caused by Thora's sudden death, are also sketched out.       

Mirja Unge uses a revolutionary and very different language in Tide, replete with references to all of the senses. Tide is also original because of the way in which Unge portrays the close friendship between two girls, who both reflect and invert destructive mother-daughter relationship patterns that span generations.

[ book info ] Unge, Mirja: Mod uret. (Book language: svensk) Athene, 2007 . ISBN: 8711171138.
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