Reviews

Historie om et ekteskap by Geir Gulliksen

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morteno's review against another edition

3.0

Interessant vinkel - han fortæller hvad han forestiller sig hun tænkte og oplevede. Indledende beskrivelse af et parforhold i forlis.
Sproget er lige vel tungt/omstændigt og bliver lidt for ømt. Jeg mangler også at føle mere med protagonisten.

kirst1lucie's review

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4.0

Jon og kona "Timmy" har et spesielt sterkt og nært kjærlighetsforhold, i hvert fall tenker de slik om det selv. De gir hverandre frihet og er rause med hverandre. De kan snakke om alt, til og med andre mennesker de finner tiltrekkende. De liker å tro at deres eget forhold er så sterkt at det kunne tålt små forelskelser i andre, kanskje de til og med kunne være glade på hverandres vegne. Derfor blir Jon først ikke bekymret når Timmy forteller at hun har truffet en mann hun liker veldig godt. Han vil høre mer om det, det blir en kilde til erotisk tenning for dem begge. Kanskje det til og med gjør ekteskapet deres mer levende en periode. Men hvor lenge kan noe slikt utvikle seg uten at menneskelige følelser og behov kommer i veien?

Det gjør vondt å lese om hvordan Jon hele tiden prøver å vise storsinn og være glad på Timmys vegne, samtidig som han går på akkord med sine egne følelser og prøver å undertrykke sjalusien og redselen for å miste henne.

Og Timmy, som lener seg på friheten hun har, synker ubevisst dypere og dypere ned i forelskelsen, og ser ikke at følelsene for Jon blekner gradvis, før det er for sent. Og da er bruddet eneste utvei. Man kan ikke redde et forhold med noen man ikke lenger vil ha.

paradismaja's review against another edition

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4.0

Underbart språk att bara glida med i, vissa stycken skakade om ordentligt.

kvammeh's review

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4.0

Årets julebok! Eg vart fanga av kjærleiksforteljinga mellom Han og Hun. I deler av boka vert karakterane sine kjensler gjengivne av eg-personen. I andre deler fortel eg-personen om sine eigne kjensler gjennom augene til dei andre. Det fungerer veldig godt somme gonger, som når sonen ser på faren etter at ekteskapet med mora bryt saman. Andre gonger vert det litt kronglete (han vet at hun synes han…).

Det finaste med boka er at den følest så utruleg ekte og aktuell ut. Gulliksen set ord på vanskelege kjensler utan at det vert så overdrive at karakterane opplevast falske. Nokon vil oppleve denne boka som melodramatisk til tider (og det er den kanskje), men det gjer den ikkje inautentisk. Anbefalast!

natasha29singh's review against another edition

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2.0

What are you thinking?
How are you feeling?
Who are you?
What have we done to each other?
What will we do?

This is my favorite quote from [b:Gone Girl|19288043|Gone Girl|Gillian Flynn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554086139l/19288043._SY75_.jpg|13306276]. It is also the tenor I was expecting when I went into a book called [b:The Story of a Marriage|36860750|The Story of a Marriage A Novel|Geir Gulliksen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513958172l/36860750._SX50_.jpg|47444288]. Unfortunately, I was not only disappointed but also a little bit disgusted.

I get that this is kind of on me for expecting something radically different from the novel, but in my defense, it opened on a very encouraging note, with the narrator (Jon) interrogating his wife about what went wrong with their marriage. When she refuses to answer, then Jon says he will (you go, Jon!), and then promptly devolves into a lengthy, confusing, and ultimately inconsequential account of their marriage.

The story is about a cheater and a cuck, who encourages his wife to pursue other men so he can suck their cock afterwards - not even making this up. The story is largely him describing the minutiae of their shared life, which I admit was very beautiful (I read the book because I'm trying to read writers from different countries, and Gulliksen did a wonderful job of not only describing the cold, desolate beauty of Norway, but also using it to foreground the story.) He makes some glancing references to Beauvoir and Murdoch, so the reader can realize that his desire to pimp his wife out is actually a very broad-minded consequence of him illuminating himself with feminist literature.

Enough snarking – let me try to level with Gulliksen for a second. A recurrent motif in the book is Jon’s latent fear that their mundane life together fails to adequately differentiate them from other couples. He speaks of their nice, normal neighbors with an-almost ludicrous degree of contempt – because in his mind, they are markedly different from them. This probably explains why his protracted descriptions of their domestic rituals are almost always followed by (and at one point, interspersed with) a page or three where him and his wife are having sex - the sex in question consisting of him pressed against her, whispering how he pictures her with other men. The idea is that the book upends the typical feminine tiptoeing around the indiscriminate male sexuality (lifting almost directly from the book here) - but cuckoldry is an overwhelmingly male fetish, so I'm not sure how effective that point was. I don’t blame Gulliksen for being just like every other male writer, who feels compelled to reframe his base urges as some sort of phrenic enlightenment, but this book fails crucially to make the only point it sought to - for an account so Timmy-centric, I still have no idea who Timmy is or what she thinks, because the entire book is narrated by Jon. None of this is helped by the fact that after fifty-so pages he is literally just making things up. Would I have a different perspective if I accepted this book at the outset as the distracted but erotic portrait of a marriage it is marketed as? Probably, but not enough to keep me from rolling my eyes at the smug self-indulgence of it all.

Postscript: I just found out that his ex-wife publicly criticized him for sharing the intimate details of their marriage, in response to which he torpidly offered no comment. No words to describe how unimpressed I am right now.

michellekmartin's review against another edition

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4.0

The writing in this book is amazing. The story is sad; it follows a married couple as they drift apart and try to grapple with this fact and what it means for their family. But wow! Gulliksen's writing was absolutely lovely and I found myself underlining page after page. This was also a short and relatively quick read.