Literature and Fiction · Hardback

The Power

Norwegian title: Makta

Heidi Furre

I can often see it in others. I don’t exactly know how I can see it, because it’s fleeting. It inhabits their face. It’s in their skin, around their mouth, in their eyes. Some women carry the pain in their face. Men too. It’s difficult to pin down, it easily slips away. It defies youth, it defies beauty. I’ve seen it in others since I was a child, before I knew what it was. I’ve seen it in children. I’ve seen it in elderly women. Some days I’ve seen it in myself. In my pores, in my skin tone, in the lines on my face. If I don’t watch out, it seeps through.Liv is a nurse. She takes good care of herself and others. She is a normal person hiding a normal secret. One night, many years ago, she was raped. By a man she willingly followed home. The Power is a novel about power, but also a book about having the power. The Power to move on.

Unsafe spacesA thing that I value with Furres writing is how the feelings of her characters are taken seriously. Especially in her two latest novels the specific female experiences, that before might have been dismissed as overly sensitive, is given space and explanation. In The Power the personal experiences are also highly political, without the author turning it into a gender discussion about how men can not relate to the lives of women. Instead, The Power is a concrete tale of the experiences of Liv, a story many women can relate to as we step of the bus late at night and must walk the last stretch home on a dimly lit road.MORGENBLADET

A totally normal type of rapeOne out of ten women become victims of rape. (…) With The Power Heidi Furre shows what those statistics actually mean. The topic is harsh and painful, but The Power is also good literature. (…) A novel about rape and the effects it has both on an individual and general level will obviously never by a “nice” feelgood book. But Heidi Furre manages to take good care of the reader none the less in this wise and clear book.DAGBLADET

Accurate about the relief of traumaIn Heidi Furre´s hard striking novel The Power a mother of small children is trying to take back the control of her own life. What has happened cannot be undone. And this grey zone rape never ends up in a court of law. But Heidi Furre has found a different sort of relief in her precise sentences. A form that finds the reader.NRK

One of this falls most important books.framtida.no