Helle captures with uncanny grace the relationship between an unnamed mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter following the former’s cancer diagnosis ... Helle’s capacity to make compelling fiction out of the most ordinary objects and events is partly a matter of tense ... Helle is masterful at giving us a laconic description of something that might well be darker ... A world of loss and lyricism.
It’s serious work, and precisely through being so ordinary, it becomes deeply affecting ... Gentle ... Aiken has a formidable task in conveying all this beautiful subtlety, but he manages. In particular, he captures perfectly the texture of Helle’s sentences, their lilting rhythm and slow focus.
A deceptively slight, minimalist novel that packs a huge emotional punch in its superb translation from Danish by acclaimed translator Martin Aitken. Each austere sentence brings a wealth of information about the mother-daughter relationship at the center of the narrative ... Beautifully investigates how people face the end of their shared world and shared story not with drama but with quiet, dogged determination. Helle Helle challenges the reader to find the meaning, the love, and the sacrifice buried deep within the most ordinary and prolonged silences.
