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Great Translations: The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
A powerful book. It’s a feminist text but some readers may not like the main character’s brand of feminism. It’s about love and sex, social class and status, wage-work and friendship.
The Setting: Modern Sweden. The author is Swedish and the story is set in the small city of Norrköping, a real place in eastern Sweden 50 miles or so from Stockholm. We read a lot about the city and its architecture and attempts to revive it from its days as a depressed former mill town. The author must have an interest in geography (I’m a geographer) because she’s spot-on when she writes things like this: “Back in the nineties ships were supposed to travel to the new Baltic, I don’t remember where, Tallinn or Riga. Nobody used the ferries, and the plans were canceled after just a few trips. Nobody from a dilapidated harbor town wants to sail across an ice-cold sea to another dilapidated harbor town, they should have been able to work that out.”
The Story: We have a young woman (age 27) who is bright and ambitious and she knows she wants to be a writer. She has had some college and hangs out with other young women who went to, or are currently in…
