The Night Guest
“Knutsdottir has written an arresting novel about the intricacies and invisibility of female pain and the staggering cost of ignoring it.”
Thirty-nine-year-old Icelandic author Hildur Knutsdottir writes with a ferocious first-person voice that seems to come from a dangerous place. Her masterful new work, The Night Guest, chronicles a young distraught woman named Iounn who is spiraling out of control, disturbed by the sense the world has betrayed her. She suffers at work and feels ill at ease when she goes out with workmates for drinks who notice the bruises that cover her somewhat emaciated body despite her attempts to conceal them.
She goes to a health facility desperate for relief and is met with the judgmental authoritative face she abhors. The doctor appears to be staring at her and is barely concealing his disapproval. Tests indicated nothing is wrong with her, and she feels humiliated “Because there is nothing worse than having unexplained symptoms. Feeling there is something wrong—but nothing that can be measured in exams, and you know the doctor thinks it’s all in your head.”
Iounn’s sister died a few years ago from some sort of mysterious drowning incident that remains shrouded in mystery. Her distraught parents expect her to fill her older sister’s shoes and give up her dreams of becoming an architect. She complies and goes to business school as her sister was meant to and works in some sort of business facility doing work that is never explained to us. It’s clear she is terribly unhappy. She never questions her compliance with her parent’s wishes, or her willingness to give up her agency in so many areas of her life. She worries a lot about her appearance and seems disappointed with the empty promises feminism made that was supposed to bring women a new freedom when she is clearly gagging on the toxic fumes of patriarchy.
When she visits her mom and dad for Sunday dinner, there is a robotic nature to the questions they pepper her with that demonstrates their callousness to her needs. She has recently broken ties with a married man she was dating at work and is now seeing Mars, who once dated her dead sister, and seems to find in her a reissuing of her sister’s sweetness. But when she is with Mars, even while making love to him, she is elsewhere—the same way she was with her married boyfriend. Present but absent and seemingly somewhere above herself looking down in disgust. It bothers her when Mars speaks of her dead sister whom she was never close to and never really liked.
The worst she is facing is the pain she feels when she arises, which is so overpowering, she feels she can’t get out of bed. When she goes to brush her teeth, she stumbles to the bathroom, shocked by her body’s inability to walk properly. She examines her bruises and tries to remember how they occurred, but her mind is blank. She records herself sleeping and discovers she leaves her bedroom and goes somewhere for a few hours each night but has no recall of it. Some nights she can’t fall asleep at all and her mind races about something, but she can’t get a grasp of what it is that has her so lost from herself.
When she visits the healthcare center again, Iounn sees a lady doctor who gently asks her, “So, tell me, what are you concerned about?” She is unable to respond and keeps begging for sleeping pills until the lady doctor relents but is struck by the stark beauty of the question and the way in which it was expressed. It occurs to her it is the precise sort of inquiry continually denied her for reasons she doesn’t understand. Maybe she is too busy pretending, lying, or manipulating others, while running scared. It is one of the few times in the narrative we hear her yearn for human connection not warped by her mind’s endless machinations.
She wonders why she has become so isolated. She doesn’t blame herself but thinks the answer lies elsewhere. She thinks back to the male doctor who stared at her coldly and wishes she could have told him what she was thinking: “Hysterical women. I seriously wanted to lecture him about all the diseases women have had that have been misdiagnosed over the years—and how medication (not to mention everything else in the world) is designed for the male body-but I just didn’t have the energy for it. Or maybe I was chicken. Or maybe that’s the same thing because it’s a lot easier to gather your courage when you’re not dead tired.”
Author Hildur Knutsdottir is an accomplished writer of novels and children’s books but in this compelling page-turner she enters a new realm that seems personal yet shielded, too. She got the idea for the story when she herself was unable to get out of bed for almost two weeks after handing in a manuscript. It happened again a few years later. Both times, all her medical tests showed nothing was wrong, yet she was distraught at the lack of energy that had taken hold of her body. Her husband and two small children were worried.
In interviews, Knutsdottir speaks strongly about excessive consumerism, global warming, and the necessity of feminism, but becomes quiet when it comes to personal revelations. We sense Iounn was created from the crises she herself endured. It was as if some sort of toxic matter had seeped into her bloodstream and caught her unaware.
In the novel, Knutsdottir seems to tie Iounn’s breakdown to her passivity. Iounn allows her parents to quiet her and is jealous of other women more beautiful than she. She is drawn to men disinterested in listening closely to her, choosing to dwell on themselves instead. She knows the feminist movement knocked a huge dent into the patriarchy and opened many pathways in which women could find themselves. But in some ways, it didn’t address the more damaging slights that fester between lovers, or parents and children, or even girlfriends who swear they have each other’s back.
When another doctor calls to see if she is all right, she can’t summon the strength to speak to him with the energy he requires. It occurs to her how women are expected, no matter their state of mind, to be the ones to soothe and placate. Men can be silent and thought to be mysterious—even alluring. She walks to work attracted as she always has been to the stray cats. She wishes she weren’t allergic to them. She stops anyway, often stroking their necks and then walks on. Strange texts start appearing from Mars telling her never to contact him again or he will call the police. She can’t imagine what she could have possibly done. But we can. We no longer trust her. She has become weaponized in our minds as someone capable of harming others, and our sympathy for her deteriorates as we hang on for what is in store for us, knowing it won’t be pretty.
Readers who think closely about her Knutsdottir’s turbulent work will recognize her protagonist as one of the post-wounded feminists Leslie Jamison has written about. Jamison describes these women as lost in a state of helplessness. Jamison describes their pain as those who have “transitioned from performing woundedness, rising above it, and performing it again in jaded array.” They have become obsessed with the perfection of their own demise. They often take drugs, or booze, or have sex. It doesn’t really matter the act because they are always floating above it. They have lost their reflective voice, obliterated their backstory, and transformed themselves into a void of sorts that simply waits for a final act to sweep them away. Perhaps something as simple as a big wave, like the one that presumably knocked over her big sister.
Knutsdottir has written an arresting novel about the intricacies and invisibility of female pain and the staggering cost of ignoring it.