Reviews with content warning for Pregnancy - My Work

Reviews tagging 'Pregnancy'

My Work by Olga Ravn

9 reviews

dizzzybrook's review against another edition

emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

What Ravn has done here is quite impressive. Utilizing a variety of writing styles and techniques that force readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about childbirth and motherhood, the narrator brings to light some daunting questions about identity. While there are many undeniably striking prose and sentiments throughout, I can’t help but think that the structure of “My Work” ultimately distracts from the story being told. About halfway through, I had a feeling that I knew where the book was heading and unfortunately I was correct. If you have read works like Nettel’s “Still Born”, or Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs”, you might know what I’m getting at here.. I do not think this is a must read by any means but I did enjoy my time spent with it. This is not a book that will work for everyone but as far as experimental writing goes, I would say Ravn succeeded in crafting a piece of writing worth exploring.

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ameliasbooks's review against another edition

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dark reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

There are strong passages in this book and situations and thoughts to dwell on. The rawness and the insanity of the situation of carrying and bearing another human being is portrayed in a way that confronts the reader with their own expectations and prejudices.

As much as I was into a lot of the reflections the book presents, it somehow often kept me at a distance and in some parts it even lost me a bit. But this is something Ravn herself is fully aware of and questions in the book if that is going to happen.

So if this was done on purpose, because the author/Anna feels like she is not really a part of this world anymore, after becoming a mother, I can't tell.

Everything is very meta, which I personally enjoyed.
But although I'm a poetry lover, I could have done without the poems, because for me, they didn't add anything to the testimony of the story.

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errie's review

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3.5

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saraspages's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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zoebaillie's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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moa's review

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Content Warnings

brogan7's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

3.75

This is a difficult book, at many different levels. Anyone who writes about motherhood and how society lies about motherhood is already on the path to something interesting. However, parts of this text dragged and were boring, some of the form was irrelevant (although the short sections and the scrambled order made sense, in keeping with the disrupted attention span of a mother and the mix-up of memories from difficult times in one's life, there were moments when it felt forced and unnecessary, like she was belabouring the point).

I liked the intention, if not every detail, which makes it hard to recommend.

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abbie_'s review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for a review!

This was my last pick for Women in Translation month and it was absolutely brilliant, one of my favourites of 2023 and one of the best books about motherhood I’ve ever read! It’s been translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith and they’ve done a stellar job, especially given the medical snippets and poetry throughout.

I’m not a mother and have no intentions of being one, but anyone who wants to come close to understanding what it is to be a mother should read My Work. Ravn exposes the incongruity of the stories we tell about motherhood and what it’s actually like to undergo such a radical process and come out the other side responsible for a human being. The protagonist Anna is struggling with postpartum depression, and the structure of the book is incredible in the way it reflects her scattered mental state.

Anna often is at odds with her partner Aksel, as she doesn’t believe he fully ‘gets’ what it is to be a mother. And it’s definitely true that most men are not shouldering the same amount of mental, emotional and physical labour a mother does when it comes to parenting. When preparing for a child it’s not men who are pummelled by the constant barrage of warnings and risks that could harm the future baby, things you’d never think of like hair dye and chemicals within mattress stuffing. A lot of Anna’s obsessive thoughts revolve around time and how it seems to slip away from her, something I related to hard as I’m constantly aware of and counting time. Ravn’s depiction of anxiety and depression is breathtaking.

I’ve read quite a lot of books about motherhood that don’t shy away from the nitty-gritty, but My Work takes the cake. I’ve never read a book which lists out times and details of Braxton Hicks, which talks about colostrum and all the other details regularly glossed over in media.

Anna is a writer, and Ravn draws on a lot of other women writers who have experiences of childbirth, pregnancy and motherhood to discuss what it means to be a mother and produce art.

Some of my favourite quotes (taken from an e-ARC):

‘Why am I trapped in the belief that writing about motherhood is shameful when I know that creating life where once there was none, creating flesh where once there was no flesh, is one of the most radical and outrageous things a person can do?’

‘Is telling a mother-to-be the story that upon the birth of her child she will feel indescribable happiness a way of giving shape to the shapeless? To put the formless event of birth into a form? And to call that happiness?’

‘The notion that one must sacrifice everything for the sake of art - that only in this way can it become sublime - implies that anyone who is forced to take care of others, to perform manual labour, cannot become an artist.

If you have family members who are sick, children to raise, expenses to pay through work that's unrelated to art, you cannot be an artist.’

‘And each child comes into the world as themselves, through their own channel. And I became, I was, sheer channel, nothing but a channel of flesh for the child. And all my walls screamed with pain when he was born. And what was I then, after his arrival, but a used channel? A husk, a slough, discarded by a baby. The eyes moved away from me, they turned to the child. They took him into their arms. I'm still lying on the delivery table. I can't get out. Many years have gone by since then, but no one has noticed that the night they welcomed the child, I died, and what now walks around among them is not a human but the discarded channel for the child's arrival.’

‘I need to stop thinking that my husband can see all these things that need doing and instead understand that I alone read the apartment as a to-do list that needs completing to sustain the child’s standard of living.’

‘To give birth to a child is also to give birth to a future corpse, you make a death, have you ever thought about that?’ ‘Um, no’

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partycoolphysicist's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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