Book Review

By Derryll White

Alvtegen, Karin (2005).  Shame

So, love is investment. We all know that on some level.  Dr. Monika Lundvall knows this too well.  She also knows we all harbour secrets – events and thoughts that we have suppressed, buried in our past.

Maj-Brit Pettersson is much the same. She, however, has retreated into an eating disorder and, angry and friendless, cannot leave her flat. Karin Alvtegan takes a serious run at God and church in Swedish society. Maj-Britt is the daughter of a pastor and had been pledged at a young age to a boy she didn’t really know.  On top of that she committed the young sin of pleasuring herself.

Her father was punishing her unmercifully and when she announced her love for another she was banished from the family home.  Alvtegen is not generous in her responses.  She questions the God who created everyone with free will but damned those who did not do His will. Monika, doctor and repressed spirit, is another of the characters that gets crushed by the weight of daily life and expectations.

These are disparate characters forced together by the intricate mind that created them. Karin Alvtegen is unrelenting in shaping these characters, all the while exploring the deepest inclinations of the human mind. At all points it is a sad story.

The author does, however, insist that the readers consider alternatives. Can one change what seems given or unalterable in one’s life? Can one shape a new life through wilful determination? Can one reconcile the shame harboured in the past?  Alvtegen leads the reader to believe all is possible.  ‘Shame’ is a heavy read, but nevertheless very worthwhile.

Excerpts from the novel:

TV PROGRAMMING – “Jesus.  Dumbing down has really taken over.”

    Maj-Brit pretended not to hear.  As if that would help.

    “Do you know that people in all seriousness sit and discuss these programmes, as if they were something important?  The world is going under out there, but people say the hell with it and get involved in stuff like this instead.  I’m sure there’s a conspiracy behind all this shot; we’re supposed to become as stupid as possible so that the powers that be can do as they like without having us complain about it.”

DESIRE – “The shame of desire is that it is independent of will.  Virtue demands complete control over the body.  Do you understand, Maj-Brit?”

RELIGION – We had just read in school that Christianity wasn’t the biggest religion in the world, and I remember how surprised I was by that.  If there were more people who believed in a different God then maybe they were the ones who were right!  Jesus, how angry he was.  He explained that those sorts of thoughts would land me in hell, and even though I didn’t believe him, it took a long time to get over his words.

PERSONAL FEAR – I was so bone-tired of always being afraid.  Maybe only a person who has lived in constant fear for a long time can understand how it feels, and how powerless you become in the end.

LIFE – There is no hell after death to which your God can condemn us.  We create our own hell here on earth by making the wrong choices.  Life is not something that “happens to us”, it’s something that we create and shape ourselves.

THE CONFUSION – She couldn’t even share Goran’s anger.  Only a huge black sorrow at all the ineptitude.  Her own and her parents’.  At Goran’s, who could not understand what he had caused in there.  And at the Lord’s, who had created them all with free will, but who still damned those who did not do His will.  Who was always intent on punishing her.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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