Customer Reviews

The American Girl

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Personally, I found "The American Girl," by Monika Fagerholm, to be an absolutely brilliant and mesmerizing work of contemporary literature. But be forewarned: this book is definitely not for everyone! With this review, I strive to reach out and communicate only with that small percentage of readers who would be sorely disappointed if they missed discovering this author and this work. At best, Fagerholm is capable of showing us a whole new way to use language in the service of literature. That is the strength of this book, and if that statement stirs your interest, then this book may be for you.

Although the true gift of this book is the author's inventive use of language, I must agree with a number of reviews here that this American translation is flawed. In particular, the lyrics to popular American songs from the 60s and 70s play an important role in the book, but the translator translated the Swedish lyrics into English rather than doing the research necessary to discover the original English versions. As a result, much of the musical magic of those lyrics used within the contex of the story is abrasively lost on the American ear. If I were Monika Fagerholm, I'd sue the translator over these significant errors! But despite this specific type of error, the originality of Monika Fagerholm's prose style does shine through in this translation -- one might only guess if this work would have been even better with another translator.

So what is this book about? Actually, it is best if you know very little about the plot. It might be easy to spoil the story with too much information...so beware of reviews that reveal too much about the storyline. All that I will say is that this is a dark, moody, twisted tale with potent mythical overtones. The reader is always kept off-balance and reality is a constant shifting, morphing, changing uncertainty. This book is about fantasy and game-playing, betrayal and loneliness, abuse and dysfunctional parenting, delusion and reality. It is a rich, subtle, nuanced gothic mystery. The prose has a unique architecture that compliments the mood and texture of the plot. One foreign reviewer has called this work a mixture of David Lynch and Joyce Carol Oates...and I believe that is a very apt description. I'd also add that although there is absolutely no comparison between the writing styles of these authors, I found the same type of breathtaking ORIGINALITY in the prose of "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy and "The Bone People" by Keri Hulme. Both authors were awarded the prestigious Booker Prizes for those works. This work by Monika Fagerholm has won a series of prestigious Swedish literary prizes and is getting rave professional reviews in its many translations throughout Europe.

As I read this work, it literally pulled me inside, time disappeared, and the real world faded -- I found myself transported to another linguistic reality. When I got to the end, I was wholly satisfied because the mysteries had been resolved, but what pleased me the most, were the words: "to be continued." It is obvious that the stories resolved in the first book are complete and will not be revisited in the second volume, but the dark, moody, twisted tales with potent mythical overtones will go on in another time period with other characters and perhaps some of the characters from the first book changed by time. When I completed the book, I felt just like I did twenty years ago at the end of one of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" television episodes: I could hardly wait for the next one!

If what I've said in this review appeals to you, then please give this book a chance and you may be pleasantly rewarded. If it doesn't, then this book is definitely not for you. Personally, I can hardly wait for the second volume, "The Glitter Scene," to be available in English.

Before writing this review, I did something I've never done before. I read other reviews of the book. Not because I wanted to get an idea of what to say in my review...but because this book left me so confused that I was hoping for some insight as to what happened. Even who I had been reading about, for that matter.

I'm not a reader who requires closure, or an ending all tied up with a pretty bow. Give me an unreliable narrator and I'm good. Most of the time. I love guessing, and not knowing EXACTLY what happened. But I have to have some idea that SOMETHING happened.

The other reviews that I read didn't give me any big clues, but they did confirm something I suspected...that something was lost in the translation. Some of the confusion in the narrative and certainly some of the repetitive phrases ("so to speak") must come from the translation that was done.

That said, "The American Girl" is not for the faint of heart. The character names, actions, realities are more than a bit ambiguous. Much of the work is left for the reader to do as s/he experiences life in "The District". The author has a neat trick of turning the lens as well as turning the hands of the clock either backwards or forwards so that without breaking stride, the reader learns what another character felt or did in conjunction with an event. Which can be illuminating...or confusing.

I think this is a story about human emotion, at its core. There is a mystery surrounding the American girl that came to The District years ago...but that may be just the center point around which all the other characters lives pivot. It's about the feelings involved in trying to find one's way in the world, especially when one is emotionally damaged.
In growing up, in discovering sexuality and maintaining relationships with others.

"Because what did this mean now? Was this the step into adulthood? The moment when everything changed at once and became something else? The moment when the story about Doris and Sandra took another road? But in that case, then which one? Was it the road toward the definite and limited, which also had a name? That which was not so open to all possibilities like the winding road they were now on?"

There are some amazing insights into this book, complex thoughts summed up in such a simple way that they strike right to the heart of the matter. One is repeated throughout the book and stayed with me after finishing it:

"Belonged to the kind of hard things in the soul from which stories cannot be woven."

I just wish I understood more about what happened in "The American Girl". I know there are so many things I missed...and not for lack of description or detail. I can't believe it's all a function of the translation. And I know part of it must be me...but...

I don't know what was truth in this book. I do think the author got so far into the characters minds to make us understand that there is no one truth, and that even to a person who experienced an event, there is no one version as to what happened. Too much is colored by what happened before...and as time passes, gets colored even further by what happens later. Too much is interpreted in different ways by who we are. And that, I suppose, is the message in this book.

"But there are also storytellers, a special kind of mythomaniac who can serve versions of, above all, their own life stories, stories completely unlike each other, all just as false. And yet not lie."

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This is a difficult book to summarize, and in many ways an even harder one to read. Monika Fagerholm is a Finnish author writing in Swedish, and the book definitely had the disorienting feel of a translation. This was not a smooth, consistent reading experience for me.

The book starts out in 1969 in Coney Island where we are introduced to a young girl named Eddie de Wire. She goes to visit some relative somewhere on the coast near Helsinki. We know that Eddie has disappeared from there, and presumed drowned. Her death has become a mystery and almost mythologized by those who live nearby.

Other key characters are a young abused child named Doris, who commits suicide at age 16. (We know this almost from the outset, so no spoiler.) We also meet a young, lonely girl named Sandra, who's been primarily raised by her father, after her mother goes missing. Sandra and Doris become best friends and soul mates, and their relationship was one of the high points of the book for me.

There are plenty of other characters, including a young man named Bjorn who may have been involved with Eddie, who we also know very early on has killed himself after finding out Eddie died. His body is discovered by his troubled younger brother Bencku, who has made maps of the region's houses and yards. (Again, no spoiler, we are told this at the start.)

This is a long book - over 500 pages. It starts out by telling us about all these teenage deaths and by going back and forth through time. It's a bit confusing and have to say that there were times when I was a bit discombobulated and when I felt like I wanted to throw in the towel and stop reading. The fact that this is a translation and has an almost choppy feel to it only added to this being a slow-go for me.

Yet, if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed by all subplots and characters and all the jumps through time and story, hang in there. It really does come together in the end and all is explained. There are some good twists for those who like that sort of thing (and I do), and the book has a sort of epic feel to it - an almost dreamlike quality that makes it memorable and haunting. Just wish it hadn't felt like such work getting there.

This is a difficult review for me to write, in part because I'm still not quite sure how I feel about this weirdly fascinating, slippery trip of a novel. Reading it was sort of like falling down the rabbit hole. The preface to the novel does prepare the reader to expect to be confused, and that's probably a good thing. I don't know if I would have stuck with this if I didn't realize that it was meant to be somewhat maddening.

The novel, on the surface, centers around the mysterious death of the titular Eddie de Wire, an American who has come to stay with a relative in "The District," a place surrounded by ocean and marshlands and a heavy aura of dark mystery about it. There are some fairly odd characters in the novel in some fairly weird situations. Two of the main characters, Doris and Sandra, live in a teenage fantasy world in which they make up stories about what really happened to Eddie. In real life both are from dysfunctional families, and their stories are something of a survival mechanism. The line between fantasy and reality often blurs in this novel, usually with drastic consequences.

You never know whether you can quite trust the narrator or the characters of this novel; you can never quite be sure what's real and what's made-up. It's quite a mind game, but something about it kept me reading. The atmosphere was so gothic and strange as to be quite compelling, and I found that even when I wanted to give up on all of it, I just couldn't walk away without seeing it all the way through to the end.

What was off-putting about the novel, and what made me want to give up at times, was the awkwardness of the language. Perhaps this is an editing or translation issue that will be corrected with the final copy (I read an advanced reading edition). Some phrases were repeated ad nauseum--such as "in other words," or "so to speak," which sometimes recurred several times in a single paragraph. It was jarring and detracted from the story. The frequent back and forth in time can also be confusing--but this contributed to the overall sense of uncertainty that characterized the novel. This novel has its flaws and it's certainly not for everyone, but for those drawn to weird gothic elements and spooky settings, this one might keep you hanging on til the end.

The American Girl is the first book in what will be a set of two. I can't wait to read the next one.The book begins with a girl named Eddie de Wire visiting Coney Island Beach in 1969. She records a song in one of those record yourself booths and wanders around then returns to Helsinki. She is next staying with a sister "the Baroness" who has a Glass House in a small village near Helsinki. The villagers are fascinated with Eddie and call her the American Girl. After she drowns in a pond in a marsh, she becomes a legend and incites many fantasies. Two young girls who are about 13 at the beginning of the story start to play "the Eddie Game". They sing the song she recorded called " Look what they've done to my song, Mom" and start to live in their own world of fantasy and magic.There are many events in the book, it is a long book. The book is amazing, it kept me fascinated for two days while we have been snowed in. Reading it put me in almost a dreamlike state. It is almost impossible to retell the book, I can only highly recommend it to anyone who likes reading a really, really good book. It stays with you after you have finished it.

The American Girl tells the story of four deaths; two murders, two suicides. It's set in The District, a rural area near The City by the Sea, which one assumes is Helsinki. The first hundred pages are so confusing and off-putting that any reader must exercise great patience, but if the patent reader makes it that far, the story of an emerging friendship between two young and damaged girls is well worth reading to the end.

Sandra is the only daughter of two wildly beautiful and immature people who are part of the "jet set." She is given to crying fits and tantrums, and has a cleft palate that she refuses to allow her parents to repair. Doris is a talkative, engaging girl who almost glitters with mischief, intelligence, and the pain of being raised by extremely abusive parents, her "marsh mommy" and "marsh daddy." The girls are rescued from isolation when they find each other. They become obsessed with the life and death of the titular American Girl, Eddie de Wire, who fell into the swamp and drowned, causing the suicide of one of her young lovers and the mental disarrangement of another lover (called alternately Bengt and Bencku because this book can't possibly be confusing enough, it has to keep making things even more confusing). Sandra's story unfolds; the defection (or is it?) of her lovely mother, her father's drinking, partying, hunting, excesses, the strippers and prostitutes who flit in and out her her home and life, the cousins and "cousins' mama" who make up Doris's foster family. But as the girls try to figure out the mystery of Eddie de Wire's life and death, they come too close to other mysteries, and the results are painful.

Sound interesting? It is, very, a portrait of an utterly foreign time and place, a strange countryside, a different world than I have ever read about in a novel, to be honest. The language is at times quite beautiful, the plot intriguing, the characters very well-drawn. But this is an enormously difficult read. The plot isn't just circular, it's like a big ball of knotted yarn that unwinds and then tangles up again and then unwinds a little more. The viewpoint jumps and hops and jumps again, sometimes within a paragraph. The translations can be so clumsy. The slang has a sort of "Golly Gee!" exuberance to it. Whatever is trying to be said just hits the ear wrong, especially the translations of pop songs. The worst offender is the line from Janis Joplin's "Look What They Done To My Song, Ma," which is repeated over and over again as "Look, Mom, they've destroyed my song..." This happens with other familiar songs ("I'm Not in Love") and it yanks the reader right up and out of the story. And the characters get lost in all this plot swirl; they fade in and out, change too much, seem oddly younger or older than they are supposed to be (though part of this is just the vagaries of the narration as it flits around in time). Still, I stuck it out because there were some jaw-dropping moments in here and I wanted to see how it all came out.

If you are in the mood for an extremely arduous read, one that will challenge and eventually reward you, then by all means, The American Girl will provide that. Commit to reading through the first hundred pages regardless of how badly you want to put down the book, because without that commitment you'll never make it. And be prepared to spend the next four hundred pages chasing two very messed-up girls down various rabbit holes, only to discover that you've been completely deceived, duped, taken in, because the plot does have some shocking places to take you. A sequel is in the works and I am not sure I'm up to it. I probably need to rest up a bit.

This is an incredibly difficult book to review. Apart from the fact that I was reading an ARC, this book was translated into English from the author's language of Swedish, and that is what makes THE AMERICAN GIRL a hard book to recommend.

I can only hope that when this book is released in February, 2010, the editors make a lot of changes. I cannot possible list all of the problems in translation, but I'll give a few examples. First, the use of the phrase "so to speak" is used so frequently that on page 176, I actually began to underline it whenever it appeared. By page 226, it had appeared nine times. I've read entire novels where this phrase didn't appear once. On page 218 the following appears: "So. Okay. If someone told a lie, if the story had holes in it, and you knew it, what would you do with that knowledge? If the story, so to speak, had holes." Is this really the way the author intended this to read? Then, there is my favorite odd translation of the whole book. Page 296: "The rats from the boomtown orchestra might read it and be impressed because later they would want a "punk hit" or whatever it was called that would climb the charts with the song "I Don't Particularly like Mondays"." Okay, here's my translation of that: "The Boomtown Rats might read it one day and be so impressed they would write their hit song "I Don't Like Mondays."

Not all is lost here. There is a story, and a somewhat interesting one, but it gets lost in all the "wordiness" and that makes for an incredibly dull read. Honestly, had this not been an Amazon Vine choice, I probably would not have finished it. But for those who choose to read this one, be prepared, and be patient.

I had high hopes for "The American Girl" as I have loved books by other Scandinavian authors. Most start out a bit slowly, but captivate the reader so completely that the novels are impossible to put down. However, this book, in my opinion, is impossible to read and impossible to recommend.

The publisher's preface letter to readers (of the Advanced Reader's copy) actually tells one to be patient through the first fifty pages. Having never previously abandoned one of my Vine selections, I kept plugging along through the first 250 pages. However, when I would rather work on income taxes or clean house than read, you know that a particular book has little to recommend it.

I found "The American Girl" lacked cohesiveness and fluidity in its progression and thoughts. The author's abstract writing style was less than appealing. The characters were not ones which elicited a sympathetic response. Further,the author revealed the most important aspects of her work in the first fifty pages. In an attempt to determine whether I was simply not grasping the artistry of Fagerholm's writing, I read the first three reviews of this book. I found those reviewers no more captivated by this book than I had been. I do, however, commend those first reviewers who were able to read and summarize the plot of this book; they did an admirable job.

I cannot recommend this book and only hope the author will rethink her writing of its sequel.

I'm a fan of Scandinavian crime fiction, so when I saw The American Girl billed as a "Crime mystery and gothic saga" that had been a bestseller in Sweden, I eagerly snapped it up...and lived to regret it.

This has to be one of the strangest and least engaging books I've ever read. It's written in a choppy, repetitive stream-of-consciousness style that is clearly deliberate but very hard to follow, and in the context of 500+ pages, it becomes really wearisome, particularly as the narrative constantly jumps back and forth in time. Because we're told the main events right up front, there's not a lot of suspense, other than to fill in the details of what really happened and why. And it sure takes a long, l o n g time for that to happen. It's never clear whose point of view is being presented, and the whole conceit of the book is that you never know what's real and what the two girls are making up as part of their role-playing games. A character mentioned on p. 9 is not reintroduced until the very end of the book, nearly 500 pages later, by which time I'd completely forgotten she even existed. The entire story is told at arm's length. The father is always called "the Islander," the adoptive family of several characters is called the cousin's father and the cousin's mama or cousin's father's wife. Sandra's father's mistress is Bombshell Pinky Pink. Bengt and Bencku are one and the same, but you have to figure that out on your own. Sandra and the Islander's house is always "the house in the darker part of the woods." It's virtually impossible to care about the characters because they are all so peculiar and sketchily drawn, and the setting is never really brought to life, despite the fact that it's apparently on the coast, with marshes, beaches and woods, which would suggest really evocative scenery.

Bit by bit it's possible to piece most of the story together, at least by the end, but by then I was long past caring. After moving at a glacial pace for nearly 450 pages, the narrative practically sprints to the end, as if the author was almost as eager to put the book behind her as I was. The end itself is far from satisfying. Getting through this book was a whole lot of work, requiring the kind of effort I used to have to muster to complete assigned reading for college. The fact is, if I didn't feel obligated to review The American Girl as part of the Vine program, I'd have abandoned it early on.

Two stars only because the author had literary aspirations and was willing to experiment. The scary part is that this is only part one of a two-part story. Having waded through this bizarre, dense and ultimately depressing book, I have no interest in revisiting the same territory and will give the sequel a miss.

This was my book club's most recent pick and I looked forward to reading it as the storyline sounded interesting. Unfortunately, I couldn't even finish it for lack of interest. The translation from Swedish to English is not well-done therefore leaving it confusing and difficult to follow. I need a book to capture my attention within the first chapter and this book definitely does not deliver. Those who finished it in my book club, only 2 of the 9 members, said they felt it got easier to follow after page 150. They said the storyline kept their attention however they did still struggle to follow at times. The author jumps from past to present and uses different names for the same character without explanation. I look forward to winding down at the end of the night to read and unfortnately, this book became a chore.