My mother's gifts from Cecilie Enger Review

The following sample essay on My mother’s gifts from Cecilie Enger Review. At the entrance Ruth asks very enterprisingly: “Let’s go in here where I’ve never been we want to see what awaits us there?.?” It is the entrance to her home, has brought here since Anne Johanne, the younger sister of the narrator, Ruth six months ago. At that time, Ruth lovingly Little Wau, the favorite in her arm dedicated

The threadbare plush toy dates back to 1938.

Ruth was born three years earlier. Who she is now, after seventy and a few years? If she still remembers Hon, the house where she had lived for decades with her family? Or they just busy yet what surrounds them now? Is it perhaps not to leave as an airy cover, by the time rushes through without even a movement? Even her oldest daughter Cecilie, the author feels more and more often as “just any man” who comes to Mother’s consciousness and goes until it soon disappeared.

What remains Cecilie there’s more than rudimentary to search contacts – Mutters, “hand hold” “reciprocate frightened look” her? With each visit Cecilie growing inner emptiness upset them “a deaf lack of feelings,” she recognizes the inevitable loss of the family and their own past. “Oh, Mama, can I nothing ask”

So little is left of a dedicated, militant woman, mother of three children, a fearless “Neinsagerin” ( “No to the closure of village shops, no to transport dangerous routes to school, no to grades in school, no to new hydroelectric power plants”).

Get quality help now

WriterBelle

Verified

Proficient in: Culture

4.7 (657)

“ Really polite, and a great writer! Task done as described and better, responded to all my questions promptly too! ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

The red lady’s bicycle, with whom she went every morning to the primary school where she worked as a secretary, was her trademark. broke through the zeal in the political debate on Norway joining the European Community in 1971 her marriage to Finn, in a leading position in electrical and mechanical engineering group NEBB.

Yet Ruth has left a real treasure as Cecilie cleaning out the parental house Hon for the pending sale finds. In an old drawer, they discovered a lot of papers. In addition to high school diploma, medical certificates, a collection of songs for anniversaries, a poetry album (1942-1948) and the like her a stack “perhaps from an arithmetic book torn out” falls plaid double sheets in the eye, and held together by a paper clip.

random Fund offers Cecilie a deep insight into the character of her mother and access to their shared past. There are fussy run handwritten annual reviews since Cecilie’s birth in 1963; the last is registered in 2003. In the first column Ruth each thirty to forty names of near and distant relatives, friends, acquaintances, domestic workers, school children’s friends, etc.. Some Cecilie has long been forgotten; now they emerge from the depths of her memory again, as “the incredibly freaky young neighbors who smelled of spices and sweat, naked running around in the summer.”

In the column next to it has allocated mother what received by persons of small or large, self-made or mass-produced gifts for each holiday season and have (if any) given. Cecilie holding a giant old-fashioned pre-Excel database with thousands of gift items in the hands, created from an apparently organized well for perfectionism aspiring women.

Now the author crawls every year through the records, draws examples accept gifts out of their history, they revived their own memories, and leaves us, readers, in this way insight into an extraordinary family the maternal grandparents (1963:. self-made blue-checkered cushions for the kitchen chairs and a the first photo of the granddaughter Cecilie; 1964: an embroidered with cross-stitch edge light blue cotton blanket, plus a smoked sausage) were artists, “sublime, original … like deities for her two children.” They led a life “far ahead of us on the horizon,” the rest of the family languished behind. Her life was even drawing “a treasure of stories and myths”, from the Cecilie for their novels.

Cecilie remembers the “vibrating heat haze” of their childhood summers in the house of the grandparents that led them to a seafaring novel “Rutland” had called; to the “outhouse”, the “water pump in the backyard,” the “cowbell that called for dinner,” the discussions of adults … Cecilie found it “exciting to listen to it, and the only thing I was then realized I did not understand what they read as talking. “< It is beautiful, of all the lovingly selected gifts, their donors and beneficiaries and to the memories that entwine the everything. Cecilie Enger maintains a vivid style, as is appropriate for biographies – time reporting and proper stresses once theatrical and dialogue, sometimes with a hint of irony, rarely melancholy. It complements the narrative part by stimulating reflections about the ethnographic findings that the French sociologist Marcel Mauss in his “Essai sur le don” ( “The Gift”) in 1924 formulated. All cultures have rituals emerged the exchange of gifts with the categories “performance and consideration” are linked. Then “gifts” get a coercive nature, are “purposefully and nutzorientiert” solve a debt of.

However, hooked the novel concept, it tilts with the perfectionism and the completeness claim the list. Unlike her mother, the author by no means all of the persons listed therein knows knows almost nothing to say about many ( “was gold digger in America”, “never married”) would like but true to the ambitions of her mother as many people as possible make a place and what it can no longer ask trace somewhere. The farther they are in more remote regions away (about to friends of siblings or parents of grandmother’s sister …), the more power and intensity she withdraws her novel. For us readers the narrative meanders there aimlessly, lost in the many figures, not striking impressions leaves more. the author himself would have on the other hand to the innermost circle really familiar relatives and acquaintances is limited, then what purpose could have had even the orientation on the list?

The mother’s sad Alzheimer’s disease history is cause and background, but is not actually issue. We know of course from the course and from the serious concerns and needs of the members, while the once-vibrant mother forfeited. These pages provide ample opportunity over in public debate often read phrases such as “every day gets life given” thinking.

The Norwegian author Cecilie Enger, born in 1963 in Oslo, is relatively unknown in Germany. After her history and journalism studies, she worked at one of Norway’s leading newspapers and wrote novels in passing. ” Mors gaver < “, her seventh book was a bestseller in Norway and has been awarded the Booksellers Award. Gabriele Haefs it has translated.