Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Crisis by Karin Boye

1 review

avocadotoastbee's review

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Initially, I wanted to read Crisis because it was mentioned and briefly discussed in the Swedish Netflix show Young Royals. For those expecting a sapphic romance novel: Crisis is not what you are looking for.
Yes, the main character Malin Forst, a 20-year-old student, has a crush on another woman, Siv, but that's just a subplot. The main plot of the novel is Malin's Glaubenskrise (german for crisis of faith).

Malin is a deeply religious Christian. She is studying at a teacher's college to become an elementary school teacher. Just about all of her classes revolve around theology. Suddenly, she has a crisis of faith and wonders what it means to be faithful to God. Malin comes into conflict with her religious consciousness and thinks of herself as selfish.
Her parents take her to a doctor and she confides in a teacher, but everyone seems to ignore her inner pain.

"She was hardly a person any longer. She existed as a kind of bundle that could be placed and positioned anywhere, but which couldn’t move on its own."

But then she falls for a fellow student, Siv. Instantly, everything becomes clear to her again, even though Siv and Malin hardly interact with each other and Malin's relationship with Siv seems to play more in her head, in the form of daydreams, than in real life.

"[...] Siv was more than just Siv, she was the revelation of a new life course."

As an atheist who was not raised Christian and has not really been exposed to religion in any other way, I found it difficult at times to understand the religious language and allusions.
The fact that Malin has a crush on a woman, while extremely important to the story, was not the central idea of the book, which I thought was good (because being queer doesn't always have to be the whole plot), but I was also kind of hoping for more "Sapphic action".

There is some dialogue at the end of the book, a discussion about Malin's transformation that involves a lot of different people. I absolutely hated this as part of the ending because most of the participants in the discussion said how selfish and disgusting Malin is for following her "desire" instead of her beliefs. This just confirms Malin's biggest fear and thoughts throughout the novel.


What saved Crisis for me was Karin Boye's peculiar and interesting writing style. Boye incorporates dialogue, a chess game, excerpts from other people's diaries, and inner monologues that give the reader an overall picture - both from an outsider's perspective and Malin's.
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