Something that Helps

In Something That Helps, acclaimed Norwegian writer Mona Høvring offers an intimate and gripping portrait of a young woman poised between childhood and adulthood, where sexual awakening, grief and the turbulence of family life converge. Laura is in her late teens, spending the summer before her final year of school in a small coastal town in western Norway. A setting of shorelines, this oceanic and wet environment is an extension of Laura’s life events and body.

Her mother’s suicide has left an absence that quakes open a wound in Laura’s life. Her relationship with her fisherman father is strained and her brother and closest friend have both moved away. Adrift and without the guidance she once might have relied upon, Laura is at once fiercely independent and profoundly vulnerable, attempting to construct an identity from the fragments of a family marked by loss.

The plot takes a decisive turn when Laura encounters Vivian Koller, an older and more experienced woman whose presence initiates a series of events that will alter the course of her young life. 

Høvring crafts a complex and contradictory awakening in Laura. She is simultaneously childlike and prematurely adult, curious and naïve, self-determined and susceptible to forces she does not yet understand. Desire becomes a terrain of education and not necessarily a safe one. External influences and an internal darkness converge and propel Laura toward increasingly hostile territory. The novel’s coastal landscape becomes inseparable from this emotional turbulence. Laura tests limits, her ice-water plunges become symbolism for freedom and danger. Independence is thorned with desire. 

Written in sensual prose and masterfully translated by Kari Dickson, Something That Helps is ultimately a complex coming-of-age story about the painful construction of selfhood. Høvring, whose work frequently explores young women searching for identity and a place within the world, refuses the neatness of conventional narratives of maturation. Many times, the novel shifted into the sublime. 

Norwegian author Mona Høvring, born in 1962, has built an acclaimed literary career across poetry and fiction. Her first collection, IIK! Ein dialog, published in 1988, precluded six poetry collections and four novels. Høvring’s fiction is marked by a distinctive literary voice that has earned both critical and institutional recognition. In 2012, she received the Språklig samlings ‘litteraturpris’ for her body of work, while her novel Camillas lange netter (2013) was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her fourth novel, Fordi Venus passerte en alpefiol den dagen jeg blei født (2018), received the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature and was also nominated for the Booksellers’ Prize. Høvring’s work has since been translated into several languages, extending her reputation beyond Norway, and she received the Dobloug Prize in 2021 for her overall literary contribution.

Two of Høvring’s novels have been translated into English by Kari Dickson, Something That Helps and Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day That I Was Born, bringing her work to a wider English-language readership. The international reception of the latter has been particularly strong, with the novel receiving attention in Denmark and Germany as well as in its English translation. 

Kari Dickson is a Norwegian-Scots literary translator whose career has been devoted to carrying Norwegian literature across the linguistic border into English. Born in Edinburgh and raised bilingually, Dickson studied Scandinavian Studies at University College London before earning an MA in Translation from the University of Surrey. Her route into literary translation began through theatre, where she produced literal translations of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler, before moving from commercial translation into literature. Her extensive body of work encompasses literary and crime fiction, children’s literature, theatre, nonfiction, and poetry. She has translated writers including Rune Christiansen, Erika Fatland, Karin Fossum, Thomas Enger and Gunnhild Øyehaug. Her translation of Roslund & Hellström’s Three Seconds received the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger, while her work has also earned recognition through the National Book Award longlist. 

I was drawn to how Laura observed and felt the world around her, yet, as the novel progressed, I realized this microscopic lens of the texture of her world was a reflection of the depression consuming the young woman. “I was suddenly acutely aware of all the small details, the mundane moments.” These small details are recorded, the world becomes vivid. “When I cycled home, it was still morning and our little town was coming to life. The air was full of smells: sun-warmed asphalt, fresh bread, and raw meat, and some of the open windows I caught the aroma of tobacco and freshly brewed coffee.” As much as the protagonist careened quietly into a downward spiral, the texture of the Norwegian setting was rich and alluring. 

The details surrounding the mother’s suicide imprinted upon me too as a reader. “I remembered something that had happened when I was five or six. I was standing nake on the sand and watching my mother make a fire pit by the shore. We’d found a spot that was sheltered from the wind, but I was still cold and shivering so much that my teeth were chattering. When my mother had managed to light the fire, she stood up. ‘My little sea thrift,’ she said. ‘Tremble, tremble.’”I could hear this ‘tremble, tremble.’ I felt quietly disturbed knowing this commentary reflected something more painful. 

“‘Tremble, tremble,’ she said again, and then she started to rub my body, and that was when I saw her skeleton through everything else, through all that was round and soft, through her jellyfish-pink skin, through the muscles that resembled lumpy roots, blood vessels that looked like bluish-purple rivers, the multi-armed sinews: frozen greyish-white branches, lungs that made me think of seaweed and kelp, sea grass, bioluminescent shimmering hair, tiny, tiny shells that hung on long peach-coloured threads. Ripple, rustle, I heard from inside her, but I didn’t tell her what I saw, because I didn’t want her to worry. Instead I closed my eyes and she started to sing, and her voice was clear and warm.” 

Ripple. Rustle. Like the pages that turned and I read through suspenseful in wondering, what becomes of them? 

The way these women melted into the oceanic world around them left nightmares and wondering in my head of the vivid descriptive language, that is simultaneously alluring as it is haunting. 

“I often thought it must be nice to die as my mother had done, to wander along the beach, to walk in the clear air, to move out into the water with a heavy stone in your hands, to hold on to it with a passion and allow yourself to sink down into a natural grave, to give up your breath and perhaps see wonderful things from the seabed: fish and starfish and the sunlight glittering and breaking through the surface. And at other times, I didn’t think that at all. I almost couldn’t breathe. Then I thought it was a shame that I hadn’t got to know my mother better. There was so much I wanted to ask her, so much I wanted to tell.” 

The reality that this woman would have not responded in the instinctual way of life, to let go of the stone, to resist or not contain the natural bodily responses to drowning as she should have done, reflects the immensity of disparity and mental health subtly propelling the plot of this novel. 

An expressive coming-of-age story exploring queer sexual awakening, complicated relationships and the moments that leave behind soulful fingerprints, Something that Helps is an unforgettable novel. Despite its short length, this novel leaves a lasting impression and tells a story beyond the perimeters of its own pages. 

Thank you to Mona Høvring, Kari Dickson, Bookhug Press and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.