★ 09/25/2023
Ravn (The Employees ) combines autofiction, criticism, and poetry for a remarkable experimental narrative that probes the dark side of pregnancy, childhood, and new motherhood. In vignettes that serve as a framing device, a fictional Ravn recounts finding a pregnancy journal four years after her first child was born, along with other pages written postpartum that she doesn’t remember having produced (“If it weren’t for my handwriting, I might have assumed it was all written by a stranger”). Credit for these writings is assigned to Anna, an authorial double named after the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook.” Anna devotes many passages to her anxiety, and she copes by reminding herself she has a way out with suicide. A new riff emerges on the classic doppelgänger trope of doubles in mortal combat, as Ravn imagines Anna stabbing her to death. It’s an unsettling and visionary fictional enactment of Ravn’s thinking, which is on glimmering display in chapters devoted to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , where Ravn considers how a woman writer’s creative output can be both dangerous and essential to her survival. This brilliant and unflinching work deserves to be a classic. (Oct.) Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the inspiration for the character Anna’s name.
"Explores childbirth and motherhood by mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, letters—with [Ravn’s] signature experimental flair."
The Millions - Sophia Stewart
"Beautiful, sinister, gripping."
"Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down."
"Through [the novel's] singular collage of prose, poetry, diary, script and even newspaper scrapbook, Ravn traverses a large swath of textual terrain to explore the surface challenges and deeper significance of her work as both writer and mother."
The Washington Post - Nick Hilden
"This novel from Olga Ravn, this new golden notebook, needs to be read by absolutely anyone who has known the quiet madness and claustrophobic happiness of the interior, especially mothers who also long for a life of literature. But this novel absolutely needs to be read by everyone else as well. Oh Olga Ravn, always inventing new forms, you are a genius, how do you do it?"
"Ravn has created a truly unique project which is not so much a story as it is an accumulation. It is all the selves, shed and grown, that mothers and birthing people encounter in the slippery aftermath of childbirth; it is the documentation of the mother/art monster problem, a problem that in Ravn’s telling, is as much about addition as it is subtraction."
The Brooklyn Rail - Amber Sparks
"My Work is ferocious, horrific, elegant, insightful, irreverent, and funny. Can a woman still be a person after motherhood? Of course not, Ravn argues, or rather, admits. And in prose, poems, and journal entries, she documents all the absurdity and repulsiveness of growing a creature in your body and then raising it. It is a magnificent and satisfying meditation. One of the most honest and revelatory works of fiction about motherhood I have ever read. Ravn’s writing is ecstatic, philosophical, and addictive."
"On the surface, My Work seems quite different in scope [from The Employees ]...but something tells me that interacting with humanoids and sentient space objects have more in common with the first stages of motherhood than one might think."
"[My Work] is exactly right, capturing the overwhelming disorientation of early motherhood… It should be read by everyone."
For a New Mother, and the Author Who Created Her, the Struggle Is Real - The New York Times - Thessaly La Force
"Ravn, a Danish novelist who wrote the National Book Award-longlisted “The Employees,” has internalized the tropes of motherhood, only to reject them with dazzling vehemence."
Olga Ravn, in 'My Work,' turns a jaundiced eye on the experience of giving birth - The Boston Globe - Rhonda Feng
"This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space."
The Guardian - Justine Jordan
"Everything I’m looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity."
"Funny and ruthless."
"My Work is a marvel, and it puts Ravn in rare company amongst contemporary authors. It’s not often that architects of such finely engineered structures point them toward our collective humanity instead of their own mechanics"
Words Without Borders - J. Howard Rosier
"In My Work, the line from why have children? to why write? is easy to draw. The two questions become almost the same."
The Limits of Agency: On Olga Ravn’s “My Work” - Los Angeles Review of Books - Ariel Courage
"At once irrepressibly lively and painfully elusive. The strength of this book is the way that it dramatises a gap between explanation and lived experience."
The Guardian - Caleb Klaces
★ 2023-07-13
Anna, a Danish author, and Aksel, a Swedish playwright, have just had their first baby. Or they are pregnant with their first baby. Or their eldest child is turning 4 and Anna is pregnant with their second. All these time frames are alternatingly true in this heady, iconoclastic examination of Anna’s journey through pregnancy and into motherhood. In the decentralized space of the novel, Anna’s diaries and journal notes have been compiled in a chronology that appears random, but would be better described as intuitive, by an unnamed curatorial presence to whom Anna has entrusted “the pages [that] lay haphazardly in a large pile.” This curatorial presence ascribes a pattern to Anna’s thoughts, which veer steeply into a dark psychology of anxiety, isolation, and fear as the pregnancy progresses, a condition that worsens in the early years of the child’s infancy. Anna describes the book she herself is writing in these pages as a “dirty book, a misshapen book, a book cut wrong….A book written in the child’s time. A chopped-up, stuttering book. A book with bottomless holes to fall into, like never-ending breastfeedings…a book that creates space for pain and from this space engenders a possible future happiness,” upon which the curatorial presence seeks to impose some kind of transliterated order. The fact that the curatorial presence is likely also the author, that Anna herself is an invention created to preserve a necessary distance between the experience of pain and the arrangement of pain into art, does nothing to lessen the intensity of the intimacy created between the reader and Anna. As page after page unfolds—sometimes in diary entries, sometimes in verse, sometimes in recorded scraps of pregnancy advice or ad copy—what is created is an unflinchingly honest reflection of a woman’s experience of her own body as it becomes a body that belongs also to the child. This experience includes beauty and pain, rage and tenderness, fear, suspicion, doubt, and the imperative Anna feels to do her work: the work of writing, of mothering, but above all, as Anna says, “These parts of me, separate yet linked, to connect them, to gather them in one place; that is my work.”
A stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night.
