First published in 1947, but new in translation, this novel, is somehow presented as a feminist classic of Scandinavian literature. I think that’s pushing it!

There’s not much to the story. A man meets a stranger on a railway platform and she comes home with him. Over copious amounts of alcohol and endless cigarettes, she tells him her life story, starting with a relationship with a local school teacher when she was only 17. The following morning, after he has fallen asleep she is gone.

The lifetime she recounts is quite appalling in many ways featuring unsuccessful relationships, terminations and what appear to be endless days sobbing on her bed.

There are moments when her life appears to improve but she is unable to take advantage of them, so things drift from worse to worse. When she leaves the man’s house, the reader has no idea whether she is dead or whether life goes on for better or worse.

That lack of resolution is the weakness in the novel. We cannot tell if she has changed by this Ancient Mariner need to tell her story or even if it has helped her. The man is anonymous and there’s no worthwhile interaction between them.

So, in the end, it’s just a sad story about a woman whose life is blighted, possibly by men or possibly by her own emotional breakdowns. It is not a jolly read and, perhaps a pointless one, except in highlighting how life can grind a young woman down.

Here we have a classic read, originally published in 1947 in Norway that grips its reader instantly with two key interesting characters. When our unnamed male protagonist meets a woman on a train he is fascinated by her mysterious energy and appearance. The book allows us to see these two characters interact with one another as the mysterious woman details her life telling the man of her years of pain, heartbreak and difficulties as a woman. The harrowing history of her relationships leaves us readers completely hooked and hanging on her every word but also in deep though and feeling. This is a book that will keep you feeling a lot of emotions towards the woman detailing her life and for some we may even find ourselves connecting with her in ways we wish we didn't.

I did find that my interest dipped a little midway through and felt it could have been a little shorter but aside from that this is a book I know will stay on my mind and stay with me for years to come. It's a classic read that I would recommend especially for a female audience.

First published in Norway in 1947 the book has an intriguing premise. An unnamed man meets a mysterious woman in a train station. Over cigarettes and schnapps, she recounts her history, twenty years of pain starting with an abusive and unequal relationship with her teacher and a cycle of self induced abortions, constarint, abuse and shame. The story is very bleak but at the same time the writing becomes very dull and plodding about half of the way in. I think novel would work better as a short story or novella.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7033796540

What a beautiful, heartbreaking book. Everything about it will stay with me for a long time.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC - I've very glad it has been translated into English so that I got to experience it.

First published in 1947, this book is still pertinent and laced with feminist themes.
The opening chapter was gripping and mysterious, and the overall plot told by the main woman character is timeless.
Had this been shorter and better paced, it would have been a more enjoyable read for me.
Nedreaas’ craft is compelling, though the story told via the same narrator the majority of the time was tiring at times.
3.5 stars.

This is one of those books which I appreciated in my head but which only intermittently engaged my emotions. It feels very stylised to me as well as hyper dramatic: a narrator describes taking a strange woman home one night and then she describes her life in a long monologue, culminating in anguish.

There are clear themes of social injustice and women as victims of both patriarchy and capitalism but surely that's not news?

In lots of ways this feels like it should be a play and the contours of the novel form don't necessarily make the best showcase for the contents. This would also probably have been far more shocking when it was published in the 1940s than it is today.

It's an intense text broken up by interjections of the first narrator which seem designed to remind us of the artificiality of the novel form and thus interrupts any deep identification with the woman, keeping us detached and aware of our position as readers/spectators listening in on this scene.

An interesting read.

Intense, breathtaking and devastatingly human. Brilliantly written and beautifully translated. At times it seems despairing: “we violate life itself. The world has been built crookedly with some kind of arrangement that makes lots of people into hunted animals and a few people so swimmingly well off they can’t understand why everybody else isn’t happy for them and willing to be beaten to death for their purpose.” But strong threads of hope and resilience are revealed to persist in the world: “Nature didn’t mean for things to be that way. Nature has enough for everybody” and in individuals “a hard pleasure from knowing there was strength hidden in my own consciousness, in my thirst for knowledge, in my sense of being a human being in a world full of human beings toiling in their chains.” Highly recommended. Special thank you to Penguin Press UK – Allen Lane, Particular, Pelican, Penguin Classics and NetGalley for a no obligation advance digital review copy.

I'm so sorry. I really wanted to like this book as it sounded intriguing and thought provoking. I didn't realise that it is a very old book rereleased and that may explain some of the issues I had with it as it did feel very dated which I thought was odd as I was reading it.
What could have been a beautiful story some how got boring.
It's possible that the translation didn't help.

I am grateful to Torborg Nedreaas, Penguin Press UK – Penguin Classics, and Netgalley for the Advanced Reader Copy. Here follows my review of the book.

The former English literature student in me was curious to read this book. The premise was interesting and a tale that may very well resonate with young people today who are dealing with unrequited love or, indeed, exploitation. The story follows an unknown woman spotted at the station by a man who is taken by this mysterious woman. He approaches her and guides her to his house where she proceeds to tell him the story of an obsessive infatuation she once had with her former teacher.

At first, the tale intrigued me. I was captivated how the book plodded along without naming the characters. Everyone was a he or a she, and the way you knew who was talking was from whether the writing was in italics or not. At first this was fun and novel. Given that the story has been slated to be about the effects of capitalism and patriarchist society on us, and in particular, women, I saw this storytelling device as indicative that the protagonist could literally be all the women. She could be you, your daughter, your friend…me!

However, I reached the 40% mark and found the book grew quite tiresome. The main character behaves as though she is in a trance-like state in that she has little awareness or care for the man in her presence, she just needs to tell her story. At the same time, she is sitting and smoking like a trooper, and the more she drinks, the more she goes off on a tangent and has to rein herself back in. In all honesty, as much as I wanted to hear all the details of this relationship, I was unable to dedicate any more time to her seemingly tipsy state, and I certainly did not want to reach a fully inebriated state. I also found that once the originality of using purely pronouns for the most part wore off (we do learn the lover’s name eventually), the inability to give everyone a name and a face kept me distant and unable to fully absorb and relate to the characters. The fact that the book contained a substantial number of errors did not help either. Words that contain ‘ff,’ ‘fi,’ and ‘ver’ were often misspelled from where these configurations were missing e.g., office became oce, first became rst, and over was simply o. It just became burdensome and zapped away the remaining possible enjoyment that might have been had.

I would not discourage anyone from reading this story. In the right headspace, having now had a dose of the book, I may even return to it in the future, albeit from a research perspective as it does make for a good study piece. The reader most likely to appreciate this book will be no stranger to Penguin Classics. They are also likely to enjoy the type of books presented for Writing Awards like the Booker Prize i.e., clever, and literary books, and translated texts, this book originally being written for a Norwegian audience. Consequently, at this time, I personally find the book to be below average with room for improvement and rate it 2/5, although I do ask you to note that I did not finish the text before coming to this conclusion.

"Nothing Grows by Moonlight," first published in Norway in 1947, is a rediscovered work revealing the unspoken struggles of women in a world that confines and ignores them. The story opens at a train station, where a man meets a mysterious woman. Over cigarettes and schnapps, she pours out her haunting past, recounting twenty years of pain and longing that have led her to this moment.

She recalls her youth as a small-town girl, dreaming of escape and beauty, only to become entangled in a doomed affair with her teacher. This relationship traps her in a cycle of heartbreak, hidden pregnancies, self-induced miscarriages, and societal shame. Her story becomes a indictment of the hypocrisy and cruelty women face under rigid moral codes that punish them for simply existing outside societal norms.

The novel offers a bleak sense of inevitability, capturing the psychological obsession and dependency that chains her to an abusive love. Her homelessness, both literal and emotional, reflects a soul searching for a place in a world that denies her autonomy and acceptance. Her longing for freedom and beauty stands tragically against the desolation of her circumstances.

For some, the novel’s sorrow may feel relentless and harrowing, yet the lyrical voice of the narrator lends a poetic light to the darkness, revealing a precious inner beauty even as her life crumbles. The prose, though sometimes heavy, gives a poignant and prescient voice to the female condition, reflecting the isolation and co-dependency many face in the pursuit of a life they are denied.

Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a haunting exploration of a woman’s yearning for life beyond the narrow limits of her birth.

I found the writing style a little difficult to fully absorb myself in, but the story itself was entertaining. The way the story was told made it feel like you were talking directly to the characters, which was an interesting way to present such a traumatic story. A different yet intriguing book.