Publishers Weekly
02/22/2021
Lindstedt makes her English-language debut with an uneven transgressive novel chronicling the relationship between an unnamed psychologist—whose gender Lindstedt leaves unspecified—and their patient. The psychologist narrates the story as a dishy, somewhat unhinged case study, beginning with graphic designer Natalia coming to them for help with obsessive sexual thoughts. After the first session, the psychologist realizes Natalia, who makes erudite, provocative digressions on cultural references, is perfect for the psychologist to practice the method they defended for their PhD, designed to let patients “bounce and rebound” through free association. Divided into weekly appointments, the chapters chronicle an intensifying mental and sexual power struggle between psychologist and patient, such as Natalia’s determination to keep time in the sessions with an alarm clock, and to bare her sexual prowess by sharing her sex tapes. Throughout the novel, Natalia riffs on Sartre, Beauvoir, and others, baiting the psychologist with sexually charged critiques of patriarchal philosophy (“Sartre wrote: The female organ is like all other holes, a plea for existence”). Though often humorous, some of the arch prose falls flat (“The distance between her mouth and eyes was greater than scientifically proven patterns of beauty would allow”). Still, fans of subversive stories of psychoanalysis may want to take a look. Agent: Rhea Lyons, HG Literary. (Mar.)
Seija Rankin
"This provocative Finnish author enters the fray of American literature (thanks to translation from David Hackston) with a racy, wonderfully weird novel about a therapist's sessions with a sex-obsessed woman."
Helen DeWitt
"I was tremendously impressed by My Friend Natalia. . . . Laura Lindstedt has a very Finnish take on sophistication (downbeat, deadpan), is disconcerting, dissonant, peerless in deferred resolution, a blithe dissolver of the regular association of ideas. Why did I not use lockdown to learn Finnish? Why?"
Hermione Hoby
"Sly, intriguing.... The deeper, indeed more layered, mystery is, it emerges, the novel’s chimerical narrator."
Paul Lisicky
"Smart, dark, funny, and weirdly exhilarating, Laura Lindstedt’s My Friend Natalia is both pitched on the brink and absolutely alive. An absorbing discourse of sex, power, and boundaries, in sentences that lift like music."
Kirkus Reviews
2021-01-27
An unnamed therapist develops an unusual relationship with a client in Finnish author Lindstedt’s first book to be published in the U.S.
From the moment Natalia first shows up in the office of the narrator, a therapist who is neither named nor gendered, she proves she's not like other clients. She is the first to lie down on the office couch, the first to address a strangely magnetic painting hanging in the office, the first to bring an old-fashioned alarm clock to sessions and lay it on her stomach as she spins story after story of her past. The therapist diagnoses Natalia with “hypersexuality” and leads her through a treatment regimen the therapist calls “layering,” a “guided associative process” that consists of taking words from Natalia’s recollected stories and asking her to create stories that use the words in new ways. The effect is supposed to drag patients out of the “current” of their habitual thinking, resulting in deep changes to their thought processes. Like a lewd Scheherazade, Natalia weaves these new stories, collaging in poems, drawings, philosophy, and, most of all, epiphanies of her sexual life. As they move further into Natalia’s psyche, the therapist begins to wonder what Natalia’s true motives in seeking therapy may be. Lindstedt’s novel reads like the love child of a pornographer and a high theorist: Derrida meets Anaïs Nin. Ultimately, this is as much a novel about language as it is about sexuality or psychology, and translator Hackston has performed a virtuosic task capturing the Finnish pyrotechnics in English. Lindstedt may not be looking to make an exact analogy between the work of therapy and the work an artist does, but it’s hard not to read this as an ars poetica: “If you talk a lot,” the therapist says, “the sorrow might permanently change shape.”
Bawdy and beguiling.
