Monsterhuman is an autofictional tour de force―a funny, sad, astoundingly energetic novel about suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, the power of writing, and the twenty-first-century Norwegian literary life
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When Kjersti Skomsvold was seventeen years old and about to start engineering studies at college, she found herself almost unable to move. “Laid out like a relic” in a nursing home, she listens to an old woman dying, watches her boyfriend drift away, and makes compendious lists of her worries (that she will have to go speed-dating in a wheelchair, that she will be afraid and in pain for the rest of her life). She also begins to compose a novel on Post-it notes that she sticks on the wall above her bed.
Monsterhuman is an autofictional tour de force―a funny, sad, astoundingly energetic novel about suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, the power of writing, and the twenty-first-century Norwegian literary life.
Kjersti Skomsvold was born in Oslo in 1979. She published her first novel in 2009, Jo fortere jeg går, jo mindre er jeg [The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am], which won the Tarjei Vesaas’ Debutant Prize and is available in English from Dalkey Archive Press. She is the author of several novels, plays, a poetry collection, and a children’s book.