WINNER OF THE HAVMANN LITERARY PRIZE 2019.

Transformation is a novel about returning to everyday life after a brutal rape.

K. is a young, Norwegian writer living in Paris. Early one morning, walking home alone after a night out with friends, she is assaulted and raped outside her own house. We follow her in the hours, days and weeks after the events as she deals with the experience and meets the institutionalized procedures. After spending a few months in Oslo, surrounded by close friends and family, she returns to Paris and tries to resume her normal life.

K. has often made untraditional choices, driven by an open attitude and adventurousness. She has travelled alone, met new people, learned new languages. She thinks about her life in the same way as the stories she writes: She is the one driving the events, giving meaning to what happens. But the brutal assault is an event she herself hasn’t chosen, and it forces her into a story she doesn’t want to be part of, into a language she doesn’t want to use.

I like beginnings, she thinks. Sitting in the plane seat, the row to herself.

It’s late. The sun was still up when she presented her boarding pass at Gardermoen Airport. Perhaps I prefer prologues, she muses. Best of all I like the suggestion, the vague or less vague promise about what is to come. Then I just want it all – the promises of what is in store, the hope, the vision, the idea, and then I want it to stop before the continuation, and later the disappointment, sets in. I just want to start and start and start, she thinks, to sit on the plane to, always to sit on the plane to, always to travel to something new.

A young girl moves to Paris to study and write. While she is waiting for the beginning to continue, she meets him – an elegant and seemingly worldly boy with an Algerian background who has grown up in a suburb of Paris. He has well-meaning eyes, and may be able to provide her with a foundation and a sense of peace. The city sucks her in, but rejects her at the same time. Her bank account diminishes steadily, winter never ends, and in her apartment mice scramble and crawl. Her anguish and desperation increase, the silence grows between the lovers, and she starts dreaming of disappearing.