Crisis (74) (B)

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This (homo)sexual awakening -- slow and awkward though it is here -- is clearly part of Malin's beginning to determine and come to terms with her (actual) self. While Crisis is a fairly familiar story of a young woman beginning to find herself and trying to find her way to an adult future, Boye's approach is an unusual and formally creative one. Two years later Karin Boye published Gömda land in which she redefines previously culturally subdued powers of chaos and turns them into fertile forces in the service of renewal. At the same time, Karin Boye abandons Nietzsche’s extreme individualism. This dismissal is portrayed in her poems “Till en vän”, “Sånger om ödet”, and “Sköldmön”. Karin Boye continued to search for a place within language which would not imprison her within a fixed power hierarchy but within which she could be viewed as a freely creative female subject. She put both the male-defined concept of ‘god’ and the term ‘woman’ up for grabs. Kerstin Ekman (b. 1933) provides a literary smörgåsbord to choose from. She is the author of Childhood, and of our recently reissued Women and the City tetralogy. Begin with Witches’ Rings: the central character is a woman so anonymous that her name is not even mentioned on her gravestone.You can read excerpts from Ekman’s other work published in translation by our friends over at Swedish Book Review. Boye's 1931 novel Astarte was a criticism of the bourgeois culture, and won a Nordic novel prize. Her novel "Crisis" ( Kris) depicts her religious crisis and lesbianism. In her novels "Merit awakens" ( Merit vaknar) and "Too little" ( För lite) she explores male and female role-playing. [2]

Swedish Poet Karin Boye | Swedish Language Blog Highlighting Swedish Poet Karin Boye | Swedish Language Blog

Munken tar diskussionen med humanisten och teologen med medicinaren. Malin själv talar med läkaren och läraren om sina tvivel och känslan av meningslöshet inför Nya testamentet och budorden. ”Gudagrubbel” som någon kallade det. In 1941 Karin Boye’s lifeless body was found on a mountain near Alingsås at a view point which she had often frequented with Anita Nathorst. Opinions vary as to whether this was the result of a planned suicide or whether nefarious elements were involved. The police, however, made nothing of the fact that Anita Nathorst had advised them where she could be found. Crisis follows the story of Malin Forst, a woman who has just gone away to school to become a teacher around one year after the ending of World War I. Learning to navigate just exactly who she is, Forst quite literally goes through a crisis of her own and is unsure about what her future holds. As a religious woman, Forst finds herself fighting against predetermined ideas she’s believed her whole life. As the story is set in the early 20th century, she seeks medical help but doctors have few to no answers for her state of confusion.Sometimes, feeling tried and dejected, she deliberately walked a different way home from school and passed a house that was beautiful in its pure, balanced proportions. A friend she goes to visit recognizes that Malin is losing herself too deeply in her own thoughts, but can also only do so much in trying to help Malin, ultimately no more than nudging her in encouraging her to: Psssst, her biography is sort of a bummer. If you’re up for the drama, read on, if you’re more keen on some beautiful poetry, scroll on!) 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). What does it mean, this unease? Where does it lead? Driving one’s soul to relinquish everything it has, hindering it from searching for anything new. What is this great weariness towards everything she has found, what is this great longing for something that no one can find that drives us to fold our hands in our lap – and despair?

Lockdown reading: Karin Boye’s Crisis – Norvik Press Lockdown reading: Karin Boye’s Crisis – Norvik Press

As Boye had resigned as editor of Spektrum she earned her living from translations and writing short stories for weekly magazines. From 1936-1938 Boye was employed as teacher at Viggbyholm school, but suffered from periods of depression and suicide attempts. [2] So, for example, there are excerpts from classmates' letters and a diary, suggesting how they saw Malin -- "she's the kind of bookworm who's oblivious to everything", one suggests; "There's something so extreme in her opinions, and that strikes me from the start as being in some way -- improper !" another writes. When the Clarté circle no longer saw any political value in psychoanalysis but sought to refine their political and financial focus Karin Boye continued the circle’s former attempts at merging Marxist social analysis with psychoanalysis and tried to turn it into a form of liberation ideology. Her 1931 novel Astarte portrays her blistering criticism of a society in which God has been replaced by Mammon in norm-defying poetic prose. This is a society in which the Semitic fertility goddess of Astarte, who once ruled over both heaven and earth, has now become a mere mannequin. The emancipation of women, separated from its connection with life, is exploited according to the changing winds of fashion in a market where dreams are for sale. Although Astarte won a Nordic novel competition the leading literary critics remained completely unmoved by both its innovative use of language as well as its critique of contemporary bourgeois culture.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". Although the structure and content are in many ways dissimilar, at times I couldn’t help being reminded of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and its more modern, less philosophical perhaps, take on the female nervous breakdown, growing out of the ridiculous pressures society puts on women. Malin’s crisis comes about because of the extreme control of religion and the expectation by society that she will conform completely. When Malin cannot subdue her willpower and her independence, she’s mentally unprepared to deal with this; hence her emotional collapse. It’s a fascinating and sobering tale and yes, perhaps the Bell Jar of its time.

Karin Boye skbl.se - Karin Boye

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. Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, the most well-known of which are "Yes, of course it hurts" (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) [4] and "In motion" ( I rörelse) from her collections of poems "The Hearths" ( Härdarna), 1927, and "For the sake of the tree" ( För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (The Nine Society) from 1931 until her death in 1941. Crisis was obviously an innovative book in many ways; as well as the sometimes complex and unusual structure, it also allows the reader to look at Malin from a number of different viewpoints. The use of the device of her fellow students’ letters and diary entries lets us see Malin as she appears to others, which is very different to how she perceives herself, and not always flattering. The discussion sections reveal the issues at work in Malin’s psyche, as she struggles to find herself amongst others’ expectations. And the infatuation with her fellow pupil, which is never developed into more than a longing or crush (as it’s described by one character), hints at a lesbian subtext which could perhaps not be developed more at the time. Certainly, Boye herself moved from marriage to a man, to a relationship with another woman who was the love of her life, and it’s hard not to see the author in her protagonist. Domellöf, Gunilla, Mätt med främmande mått: idéanalys av kvinnliga författares samtidsmottagande och romaner 1930-1935, Gidlund, Hedemora, 2001Camilla Collett(1813–1895) is a pioneer in Norwegian literature. Translated by Kirsten Seaver, her novel The District Governor’s Daughters portrays a bourgeois society in which marriage is a woman’s only salvation, and follows sympathetically the struggles of one intelligent young woman to break out of this mould. The protagonist of Crisis is Malin Forst, a twenty-year-old woman studying to be a teacher in the 1930s. Deeply religious, she exists in a world where the belief in God appears to be fundamental to much of the instruction she receives. However, Malin is struggling with her faith and this develops into the debilitating crisis of the title. In what appears to the modern reader to be a crippling depression, Malin finds herself unable to undertake to the simplest of tasks, bursting into tears at the slightest provocation and finding the smallest act almost impossible. A paternally patronising doctor diagnoses anaemia; an old teacher fails to understand the depths of her despair; and her bullying father simply adds to the horror of her everyday existence. As Malin continues to search her soul for a solution, a chance glimpse of a particular female fellow student leads to an infatuation, a revelation and a chance of recovery.