Astrid and Veronika : Linda Olsson

                                                          Image Credit : KDL
It's been a long torturous week for me. A blazing sun and a little tipple had me reaching out for the deep dark corners of the earth, somewhere cool to bury myself in and forget that my head comes with an ache. Ouch. You can see I am still not recovered when I type sentences like that. And adding to my misery was Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olsson.

A book about friendship is one that I certainly think I would like. It was on that premise that both Astrid and Veronika came into my life. But strangely, I didn't like either of them much. Or rather, 'like' is the wrong word to use. I didn't warm to them much. Didn't feel for them. Here was a book I really felt I should have liked EVEN as I was reading it, but somehow the lush descriptive prose left me feeling barren and empty, and the deep sadness in both the main characters was never magnified down to the reader, and in the end, I was just waiting, just waiting to reach the end of this little story.

And the story is simple : Veronika comes to a little village in Sweden, hoping to escape the memories of her past relationship. Across her house stays Astrid - an old woman who the village has shunned as a 'witch.' An unusual friendship develops between these two women from different generations. Together, they learn to bury their past ghosts and attempt to reconcile with the present. And the way they do that is to share the secrets in their past - recollections come tumbling forth and shards of memories are tremblingly laid at each others feet. All of it comes through some exquisite prose, but my mind kept wandering through it. I am just such a bad reader when I am not totally with the story, breathing through the story and feeling the story. I become just a shell within a carcass within a coffin if I don't like the story. As Danielle Torres says in her review here, I guess I am in the minority in not liking this book.

Verdict : Slow. Boring. Redeems itself a little in the end, but the end was not worth the 200 pages before it.


Rating: 2/5