She’s neurotic, but not entertainingly so, unfortunately
IN the previous book, The Marvellous Misadventures Of Ingrid Winter (2017), readers meet the titular character navigating through life as mother, wife, and literature professor in a Norwegian university. In essence, Ingrid tries to be an attentive mother to three daughters, a dutiful wife to her accountant husband, and a with it colleague and professor at the university.
And then Ingrid’s perfect world starts to crumble: Her job is on the line unless she goes on a study tour to Russia, her husband may be having an affair, she’s losing touch with her daughters, and her house needs repairs. All of these imperfections propel the story, told with often exaggerated humour.
In Winter In Wonderland, author J.S. Drangsholt sets her protagonist on another series of (mis)adventures through life.
The Winters are still repairing the house, and it’s busting the budget. The daughters are growing up way too fast, and each requires both emotional and financial attention to ensure she gets through whatever phase she’s in without emotional scarring. And hubby Bjornar’s accounting firm is not doing as well as before. Which all adds up to irritatingly tight finances – and Bjornar having to cancel his dream trip to Italy.
At work, Ingrid is increasingly anxious; she feels her students are disaffected, that none of them seem to take much of an interest in the knowledge she is imparting to them. This makes her feel somewhat responsible for being a disappointment to her students.
“Did I mention ‘below average’? No one likes my lectures. Everyone thinks I’m too into my subject matter!
“These Snapchat kids are apparently not that fond of me. They probably think I’m boring and longwinded,” Ingrid moans to Bjornar, in one of many similar scenes throughout the novel.
One cannot help but agree with Ingrid that she is longwinded. Editing her moaning a little would have made the novel better.
To make matters worse for Ingrid, Drangsholt has the perfect couple move in next door. While Katti, Steinar and the twins are regular people, to Ingrid they seem the perfect family, something that Ingrid wishes she could have.
Much like Ingrid’s anxiety over her students, Drangsholt drags the scenes between Ingrid and Katti and Steinar out a tad too long, often prolonging the neuroses inside Ingrid’s head, which, sadly, does not generate much humour.
In a bizarre attempt at comic humour, as well as to help her protagonist cope with the problems that seem to be encroaching on her, Drangsholt sends Ingrid and her family (including Ingrid’s aged mother) to the Norwegian mountains to ski. The result can be best described as slapstick, with Ingrid not able to balance herself on skis (a flimsy metaphor for Ingrid’s incapability to cope in life, perhaps?).
One of the pitfalls of translation work is the original meaning of the work does not necessarily come through when moving from one language to another. Perhaps in its original Norwegian, Winter In Wonderland reads better, with sharper humour and a more logical storyline.
Though there seems to be a bit of a re-tread from the first novel and major incidents that don’t make much sense, Winter In Wonderland is not atrociously bad – if one does not question the plot holes and the trivial issues that Ingrid seems very hung up over.
The positive is Winter In Wonderland does not pretend to be anything more than what it is: a simple tale of a neurotic Scandinavian woman who is trying to be the model mother, wife, daughter, lecturer, neighbour, and citizen, and, in Ingrid’s case, trying to find her place in the titular wonderland.