In this novel a man is surprised to find that Pandora’s box is full of bad things.
Horrifyingly, it is the story of the author’s actual marriage. It is TMI and yet strangely transfixing. This guy is the editor of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and like him his novels are based on making his personal life public. In this case he gives himself the project of trying to imagine his wife’s affair from her perspective. It’s a premise both bold and stomach-churning.
This protaganist/author and his wife are both in relationships when they meet, and they leave their partners for each other. The marry and have children and are pretty happy for ten years. The husband is kind of titillated by the idea of his wife with other men, and likes to involve her in fantasies about this. He also tells her their marriage is so strong that he feels she can be free to explore within their relationship. It is all almost creepily modern, like so much about Scandinavia. Then the wife starts to spend a lot of time with one of her colleagues at work, and all of this modernity goes straight to the wall, replaced with rage and jealousy.
He does kind of an interesting job trying to imagine what his wife thought, though some of it is very clearly a man imaging what women think. E.g.: “He was taller than me, she’d noticed that immediately.”. It also has moments of unexpected comedy:
Paul Edvin and I were left to cultivate that male form of human interaction which involved giving each other brief lectures on one thing or another.
But I think this lengthy extract from the end, when its practically over, will best capture what is most eyeball peeling about this book:
I am holding my penis, the thought occurs to her that she is seeing this for the last time, it goes white and then red then white then red again, I pull the foreskin back and forth, slowly at first and then faster, rhythmically, in a movement somehow disconnected from any other in the world. Soon I’m just a man she has known, one that she lived intimately with, once in an earlier life. She looks at my hand as it moves . . in that unique way that resembles nothing else. Well, yes, it resembles a body itching, a dog scratching behind its ear, its tail slapping rhythmically against the floor. And that’s it precisely, she thinks. I’m having a scratch, it’ll soon be over, I’m trying to rid myself of a dreadful itch.
Officially, more than I ever wanted to know about anyone’s divorce. And yet it was refreshing to find someone willing to be this honest about how wrong it all went, foreskin and all