Customer Reviews

Astrid and Veronika

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a remarkable story of two women who meet under ordinary but perhaps unexpected circumstances. Astrid is practically a recluse who has lived almost her entire life under one roof. Veronika has traveled the world but at the time of their meeting she has retreated from her previous life and rented a secluded home in the countryside of Sweden that is within the view from Astrid's window. The two women have not led similar lives, they are not from similar backgrounds nor are they close in age. Each of them has separate reasons for distancing themselves from people and the world surrounding them. The contact between them begins reluctantly and continues very tentatively. With a very delicate touch and a precise focus, Olsson gradually removes veils of grief and allows the reader to watch a friendship grow between Astrid and Veronika as they share a brief time in the present and gradually share their pasts with each other. This is a very small story, set in a very small time and space, but it is totally captivating. While it is possible to read this novel as a story of one friendship, it also is a story of the power of human interaction to transform lives. Astrid and Veronika spend a relatively short time together, but as they find common ground they rediscover their essential humanity that enables each of them to better connect with their pasts and the world around them. Whether you view the essential common denominator as pain, as endurance or as love may be related to your personal view of the world. The novel is well written with an excellent sense of both characters and setting.

Astrid and Veronika meet as neighbors in a small Swedish village. Astrid is a hermit (the "town witch") and Veronika is a writer attempting to finish a novel. As their friendship deepens, the women find that they are each others' inspirations. Both are recovering from tragedies that have touched their lives, and the guilt that accompanies them. Much of the novel involves flashbacks as one character tells the other her secrets.

The book has its charms -- the prose is often lyrical, it moves quickly, and there is some nice location detail in Sweden, Japan, and New Zealand. Unfortunately, though, the plot is fairly obvious and the characterization is flat. At one point Astrid says to Veronika: "You pulled me out into the bright light again, opened my eyes. Made the ice thaw." The author doesn't do enough to plumb the relationship between these two. Most of these declarations don't feel earned. Astrid's character is similarly hard to understand. There is a lot of feminist subtext to her life, but a lot of it doesn't make complete sense.

In addition, the language veers into odd cliches. At one point, Astrid says: "My grandfather looked at me and it was as if we were the only two people in the whole world." Moments like that (there are several) drag the otherwise smooth narrative into soap opera territory.

I won't recap the story, as others have done that nicely. I will say that this book explores the relationship between two women, one who has always lived in one place, the other a world traveler, who come from different generations and different perspectives to share their respective losses and their respective guilt. In sharing, they are set free. What touched me so was the way the story was told. I did not find the movement from one time and place to another at all jarring. It seemed fairly seamless to me. What I enjoyed the most was the descriptions of places that were at once spare and lush, leaving enough to my imagination. The author writes with great discipline and an appreciation for detail.

This is the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between two women of dissimilar social backgrounds - Astrid, an 80-something recluse, who has never ventured out of her home town in Sweden, and Veronika, 31, who has traveled the world with her diplomat father and makes a living as a writer. When Veronika settles down in Sweden and buys a house opposite Astrid, they get to know each other as neighbours, and over time an intimate friendship develops.

Despite its shortness (250 pages), this is not one of those books that you can gulp down in one sitting. Instead, it is written in a manner that demands measured reading, frequent pauses and time for reflection. Each sentence is crafted with much attention to detail, tempo and mood. You can see that Linda Olsson is a great observer of people, with a fine eye for subtle nuances of body language.

My only criticism of the book is that it feels a bit disjointed at times. The story jumps from present to past as the main characters recount their lives. Just as you become fully engrossed in the plot of the past, however, you are jerked back into the present. Usually, I enjoy books with different layers of narrative, but in this instance - and to the credit of the author's beautiful writing - you become so emotionally invested in the story, you want it to continue on the same time scale. In short, I wish I had the chance to get to know the characters more fully - not just the major defining moments of their past, but also 'the in between'.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book for its fluid, beautiful writing and believable characters. ASTRID AND VERONIKA is an unusual tale of love and loss, friendship and healing that will stay with you for a long time.

I look forward to future works by this author.

The story kept me interested and overall I enjoyed it. I was left with several questions thought. Why did Astrid's mother commit suicide? Was Astrid afraid her own husband or her father would abuse Sara? Also, Veronika spoke of needing to face her own mothers abandonment of her, yet it was never addressed in the story, even when her father asked if she had spoken to her mother recently. Also, there was the weird statement at the end where the man says, "Sad the way she went, the old lady. But then, it was her choice" and then Olsson never explains that comment. What was that all about?

"Astrid and Veronica" by Linda Olsson illustrates the varied ways people cope with the past. Olsson suggests that the aging process involves facing the truth of one's life. For most people that means resolving unpleasant memories and unfulfilled longings that searing moments fling at us just when we feel most vulnerable. Painful, negative experiences of uncertainty and loss recede into our submerged selves until an understanding friend inspires us to disgorge those truths for our own happiness. We must face the past, recognizing as Astrid finally does, that recalling pebbles of love amidst the boulders of solitude and sorrow can redeem one from, not only emotional isolation, but the constricting ties of guilt and regret. In that respect self-disclosure is a necessary part of the process of self-discovery. Once embarked upon the journey to self-acceptance, one can experience peace at any age. Olsson reminds us through her characterization of two women that self-understanding may be all the more rewarding for the oldest and least engaged among us. All people, even the young, cannot hide forever. And so Veronica as well as Astrid must learn to comfort and to be comforted, each woman bearing in mind that emotional pain may not go away, but it can be lessened through love. It is an old message in the scheme of things, yet a timeless one.

Veronica is a young writer whose life has been lonely and unfulfilling. Abandoned by her mother as an infant, she and her father have lived in various locations due to his profession as a diplomat and his unwillingness after his wife's departure to live in a house again, with all its domestic symbolism and ambivalent connotations. A writer, Veronica has a story to tell, but she doesn't know what it is. She moves into an old house next door to an elderly woman regarded as a witch by the local townspeople. She observes the neighbor, Astrid, and reaches out to her. The two women become friends, Veronica teaching Astrid how to swim and to participate in the life of the town and Astrid teaching Veronica to hold onto her memories, no matter how unpleasant "because love is inside us." One never forgets love, Astrid points out; it is still part of us after the object of our love is gone. Love "simply is." This is why Astrid appreciates her memories, however sordid, and why she has held onto the family home even though within its walls were perpetrated unspeakable sorrows that diminished her capacity to reach out to others and ultimately resulted in a bitterness that caused the town to reject her.

Veronica has lost her fiance to an untimely death, has never known a real home since her mother left, and is incapable of intimacy with the man who loves her, yet she sees in her neighbor Astrid a loneliness she can relate to and thus makes the effort to be there for the woman. Her sensitivity to Astrid's needs is borne of her own loneliness and disengagement and so by helping Astrid to emerge from her seclusion Veronica grows in her own awareness and is thus able to open up to her seemingly distant, flawed father and to forgive him. This is a book about loneliness and pain and what it takes to heal and live a meaningful life. Veronica learns the simple fact of life all happy people realize at some point: that giving of oneself in terms of understanding and forgiveness of others allows us to live meaningful lives.

Olsson uses metaphors as well as characterization and spare, poignant dialog and description to convey her point. The house Astrid has lived in all her life is old and crumbling, the yard neglected and unruly. While it holds bad memories, it also offers solace because along with the bad associations exist the good, the memories of her daughter and Lars, the boy she loved. Although she does not appreciate the lovely view from the upstairs windows, she feels the house is the implement of her secrets and as such, it is a protector as well. It is her "skin"; it has "seen everything." The house "knows" her and presumably on some level accepts her for what she is. To her mother, the house was a symbol of her loveless marriage, which was a trap that she could escape only through abandoning the family and suicide, yet for Astrid, who has lived there all her life, it is a symbol of the continuity of her experience, her very essence. She is able to see the whole picture, and while she may regret the desolation of her bad marriage, her empty childhood and her cold, distant father who betrayed her trust, the house remains the omniscient observer of her life and thus has a meaning beyond its physical structure.

Veronica, too, notes in the house she rents a sentience, as if it is opening itself up to her, approving her. Later when she inherits Astrid's house, she enters it, realizing it was "as if the house was waiting for her." At the same time, just as Astrid did before her, she recognizes the necessity to "put her house in order" and that Astrid's house will be her last home before she ends up in the cemetery. Both women seem to realize simultaneously that "putting one's house in order" involves resolving the sadness of the past, and so they provide consolation and comfort as each listens to the tale of sorrow experienced by the other. This process results in their resolving their respective pain by realizing their formerly locked hearts have prevented, not only self-disclosure, but healing. In Jungian terms, the house is a symbol of the personality structure, so it is in Olsson's book. Although Astrid was formerly incapable of appreciating the panoramic view from the upstairs windows, she is finally able to gain a perspective on her own life and to embrace it all -- the pain and the love that made the pain bearable. Similarly, Veronica is able to grasp the significance of her suffering and to avoid the destructiveness of rejecting human intimacy, as her mother did. This Astrid teaches her by her devotion to her own house and her willingness to open up her heart to the entire "view," that which surrounds her and is part of her completion, if she will just allow herself to "see" it and to let it take hold.

A major and complex symbol is the "Mitzuko." This refers to the "water children," which is a central metaphor of the book and a complex one at that. The term refers to those children who are stillborn, who must pay penance, as do their mothers, for the sadness they've caused. Olsson words it such: "These are the children who never made the transcendence from water to human life." This grim usage suggests that Olsson regards life as complex and replete with inexplicable guilt as part of its condition. Both Veronica and Astrid are victims of their mother's actions over which they had no control but which severely wounded them. Their own penance is the arduous task of trying to fathom the reasons for their suffering while their mothers are denied absolution for their unconscionable legacy of selfishness and withholding. Although both daughters lived, they were in pain their entire lives. In their own way, they were stillborn. The violations their mothers inflicted numbed them permanently.

Lars gives Astrid strawberries, a symbol of the sweetness of life. Olsson wants us to understand that life is indeed sweet, if not always. The strawberries are those little gifts of love for which every person should be grateful all her life. They are a summons to pursue the light in which they grow and to savor them, never knowing when they will be out of season, gone for a while and revisited only in dreams and memories. Astrid notes that Veronica "pulled her into the light." And she hopes that Veronica will realize the futility of denying the light for herself and instead submerge herself in memories that call to life the moments of sweet pleasures lost for now but capable of restoring balance, if one does not lose perspective on the value of human community, something Veronica has inadvertently imparted by her seeking out the "old woman" in the first place. Astrid notes in her final letter to Veronica, "[you] pulled me out into the bright light again, opened my eyes, made the ice thaw. An I am so very grateful." Human connection for Astrid, achieved through her friendship with Veronica, has renewed her desire to live and transformed her from a dying, cynical old woman to a loving, generous friend. That is all the human can hope to achieve in life, Olsson reminds us. And that is worth a lot.

Finally, the book is about the human heart and the tendency by those who hurt or are disillusioned with the imperfections of life to close their hearts to the beauty and solace of a world that allows suffering. Both women have experienced pain and disillusionment in connection with marriage, intimacy and human love, but in the end both realize the cessation of hope is a temporary phenomenon, if one can gain perspective on the importance of human connection. Veronica notes as she looks deep into the pendant's stone her fiance gave her, "I think I can see the beauty again." She understands that "if you have the right heart you can see everything you love in here. The lakes the forests, the sky. The entire universe." She acknowledges that she hasn't worn the ring "since James died," because "I lost my heart." She puts it back on to convey that now at last she is ready to open her heart again, much as was her boyfriend Johan, whom she foolishly rejected because she was not then ready to love.

The book is about regret and the sense of loss that results from locking down the human heart. To be sure it is an old concept, nothing new; it is the theme of most literary fiction, going back to Austen or Tolstoy. In "Astrid and Veronica" this timeless verity of the human heart is depicted in simple language, definitive characters, spare dialogue and various symbols, most of which have been used before. There is nothing new in this book, but it is sure to gratify many, particularly the elderly who look back on life with some misgivings, no matter how open they might have been to the beneficence of the universe. All people experience regret. Olsson prepares a road map for those who still suffer as well as those who merely contemplate the tragedy of others conducting their lives without self-awareness. For locking up the human heart, the main subject of Olsson's book, also means locking down the human capacity for intimacy and passion, and, yes, joy. One doesn't really want to seal herself off in a water tomb. God knows we all need to get a grip on that and swim on and on and on...

Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer,
Author:Bread of Shame

"It is as if time is irrelevant. My life's memories take up space with no regard to when they happened, or to their actual time-span. The memories of brief incidents occupy almost all time, while years of my life have left no trace."

"I think that perhaps there are no such defining moments at all. Beginnings and ends are fluid, long chains of events where some links seem so insignificant and others so very momentous, while in fact all have the same weight. What may appear as a single dramatic moment is just a link between what was before and what comes after."

Astrid & Veronika by Linda Olsson

I'm finishing this book today, and I have not fully processed all my reactions to it yet. It is a stunning novel, sparse, concisely detailed with no extra fluff. Two intertwining life stories of completely different people, and the serendipitous connections that unite them. Astrid is an elderly woman, isolated socially and geographically, and is haunted by horrific memories. Veronika is a modern young woman who befriends her, as she is recovering from her own tragedy. They discuss their pasts and help each other move on. Reading details about Sweden, an area completely unknown to me was especially pleasant (if I go I had better learn to like rye bread and herring). It made me also want to go hug my mom.

I appreciated that nothing in this was Hallmark movie-of-the-week material, and as each chapter unfolded I was genuinely surprised at some twists the story contained. Usually I can predict pretty well what comes next, and this had me floored. One character realizes that her decades old anger was directed at the wrong person, and that she had to recover from the damage that anger caused. It's not an easy story: technically it's simple to read but it brings up some very painful emotions, those that caused me to put it down for a day or two. Again, it's not a happy story, but it was strangely uplifting, in that these ones were able to see forward and not dwell on the past. Most of all, it seems to send the message that we can't possibly know what events have shaped the people we love, and all the pains they may have endured, but we can try to find a way to love them as is. Without feeling like we have to judge or condone what we don't understand.

The plot of this lovely novel can be summarized in a few words. Over the course of nine months, on the outskirts of a Swedish village, two lonely damaged women become friends and restore one another to life. The two are fifty years apart in age. Veronika, a novelist around 30, returns to her native Sweden from New Zealand, where she has suffered a great loss. Astrid, immured in the old house next to hers on the hill, is an 80-year-old recluse, commonly referred to as the village witch. Their personal stories will gradually emerge through flashbacks, but most of their interaction with each other takes place in the simplest possible ways: walks in the woods or by the river, cooking and eating local food, listening to music. It is a similar rural simplicity to what makes Per Petterson's OUT STEALING HORSES so effective; simpler still, this might almost be its feminine counterpart.

Linda Olsson's second novel, SONATA FOR MIRIAM, is about a composer, and it is clear that music plays a special part in her life. Two pieces that Veronika plays on CD at pivotal moments are worth seeking out and hearing, both for their own sake and for the way they share the spirit of the book: the slow movement of the Brahms Violin Sonata in d minor, and Swedish composer Lars Erik Larsson's choral symphony Förklädd Gud (God in Disguise). Olsson is also sensitive to poetry, and prefaces each chapter by a short quotation from mostly Swedish poets in her own translation. I am not sure that these fully work, because none of the quotations are long enough to establish context, and some come over as sentimental rather than meaningful. But Linda Olsson is very much the poet in her own writing. There is nothing overcharged about her prose style, nothing that demands to be singled out as a luscious quote. But there is something more important: a seamless exchange between present and past, action and memory, description and imagery. She has us enter not only the bodies of these women, but also their minds.

ASTRID AND VERONIKA is a book that, in its striking truth and gentle understatement, can only be written once. SONATA FOR MIRIAM would require more plot, greater complexity of structure. One of the characters in that later book says: "Simplicity is underrated. It is possible to consciously create the complex, the contrived, but it is impossible to manufacture simplicity." Perhaps it will take Olsson a novel or two more to find the ideal balance, but it is the achievement of ASTRID AND VERONIKA that gives her the right to preach simplicity.

This is the tale of a friendship forged between a younger and older woman during a year in Sweden. The tone of the book is quite somber, despite the blossoming friendship that is at the center of the book. Astrid (the elder) and Veronika are neighbors in a small village who eventually find comfort in sharing their life stories with one another. Both of the women have dealt with tragic life events and you can sense the relief - particularly from Astrid - that sharing their stories brings to them. The story takes place in Sweden, and Veronika's back-story takes place in New Zealand; the settings play an important role in their individual stories. I expected the ending long before it happened, just based on the overall tone and writing. I wish the story had been more "cheerful," for lack of a better word. The friendship was wonderful, but I felt that the somber tone overshadowed it a bit. It was a 'hard' read because the story skipped between the two women and went from the past to the present quite often. It took a while to get the story started and to understand and care about the character. Also, there was a lot left unfinished - I didn't feel that Astrid's story was completely told to us. The book is worth reading though, and recommended.

Overview:
"Veronika, a 30-year-old Swedish writer, rents a home in a remote village to finish work on her second novel. Her only neighbor for miles is Astrid, a reclusive octogenarian who has earned a reputation (perhaps undeserved) as the village witch. Veronika and Astrid gradually become friends, taking long walks and sipping wine made from the wild strawberries in Astrid's garden. Each shares painful secrets along the way. Veronika abandoned a devoted boyfriend to take up with a bartender from New Zealand. They fell passionately in love, then tragedy befell him, leaving Veronika incapacitated by grief. Astrid endured sexual abuse from her father and a long loveless marriage to a man chosen by him. Until now, she has never told anyone the truth about her infant daughter's death."

I liked this book and the writing was truly beautiful. I enjoyed how the two women, alone in their own worlds, became such good friends. Their friendship was truly self-less.

The only thing I did not like about the book was that we never knew the real reason behind Astrid's secret. I felt a little cheated that this was not further explored.