So after all is said and done, and despite dragging my feet I've finished reading Linda Olsson's Astrid & Veronika (and I returned it late to the library, too, oops). There is a lot to like about this book, but to be honest I'm left feeling a little bit ambivalent about it. I really liked the stories within the story, but for some reason I never could really warm up to either Astrid or Veronika. Certainly it's okay to feel separate from the characters in a book, but the author tries to convey such a warm feeling of friendship between the two, my emotional distance sort of took away from the pleasure of reading it. The story is also a very touchy-feely sort of story, and I'm not at all that sort of person, so maybe I simply had problems identifying with either of the characters.
Astrid & Veronika is the story of a life altering friendship between a young woman at the beginning of her life and an older woman at the end of hers. When Veronika arrives in Sweden from New Zealand she's an emotional wreck. One snowy night she takes up residence in a house in the countryside where she hopes to work on the book she's writing. Across the way her only neighbor is a reclusive widow known in the little village as a 'witch' (a stereotype unearned in this situation it seemed to me). At first the house seems empty. No lights show, though the kitchen window is occasionally open a crack. Veronika takes to waving, certain her neighbor is inside watching when she passes by on her daily walks.
The ice is broken when Veronika is taken ill and Astrid notices her absence. When Astrid checks on her and cooks her a nourishing meal, a tentative friendship is formed. As they spend more and more time together, their friendship deepens and they share their histories and secrets, which are at times painful and shocking, but neither woman is ever critical of the other. The novel moves back and forth in time as each character shares her story.
I felt a little bit that the contemporary Astrid and Veronika were not fleshed out enough perhaps to carry the heavy pasts they were burdened with. An author will often leave it up to the reader to fill in gaps, but I wouldn't have minded knowing a little more about the motivations behind some of the actions that occurred in the past. Part of my dissatisfaction was wanting to know more and feeling that there were too many unanswered questions. That said, Olsson writes with a nice clear prose, and at times her descriptive passages are lush and elegant, which is just what I expect the Swedish countryside to be like. The cover is very evocative and fits well with the story. The changing seasons are captured gorgeously and yes, those strawberries pop up all throughout the book.
I think I'm in the minority when it comes to not being completely sold on this novel. While it wasn't a perfect read for me, there were things that did work and were enjoyable. It took me a while to catch on that Veronika was also Swedish and was returning home (for some reason I had it in my mind that she was from New Zealand). Linda Olsson, the author, was born in Sweden but now lives in New Zealand. She wrote the book in English, and I thought it interesting that when it was published in Sweden she tried to do the translation but found she was rewriting the book rather than translating it. In the end someone else did the translation. Olsson has a new book coming out in February called Sonata for Miriam.