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Elastik
Elastik er en roman om at være kvinde. Om at være kvinde mellem kvinder, mellem mænd og om at være alene med sin kvindekrop. Alice bryder sig ikke om at være kvinde. Hun føler sig fremmed i sin krop, med sit køn.
På samme tid er Elastik også en moderne, høvisk kærlighedshistorie. Om Alices fortiede, men stormfulde forelskelse i den enigmatiske Mathilde. En forelskelse, der ikke findes plads til hverken i Alices forhold til kæresten Simon, til Mathildes mand Alexander eller i Alice selv.
Elastik handler om ikke at ville nøjes med at finde sig til rette – i parforholdet, i samfundet og i sig selv. Om at ville kærligheden og fællesskabet, men ikke kunne løsrive sig fra sin egen egoisme og narcissisme. Hvordan kan vi være sammen? Det spørgsmål bliver i Elastik til: hvordan bruger vi hinanden?
På samme tid er Elastik også en moderne, høvisk kærlighedshistorie. Om Alices fortiede, men stormfulde forelskelse i den enigmatiske Mathilde. En forelskelse, der ikke findes plads til hverken i Alices forhold til kæresten Simon, til Mathildes mand Alexander eller i Alice selv.
Elastik handler om ikke at ville nøjes med at finde sig til rette – i parforholdet, i samfundet og i sig selv. Om at ville kærligheden og fællesskabet, men ikke kunne løsrive sig fra sin egen egoisme og narcissisme. Hvordan kan vi være sammen? Det spørgsmål bliver i Elastik til: hvordan bruger vi hinanden?
183 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2018
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234 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 11, 2021
Bored people decide that polyamory is a cO0L experiment.
Fun is had.
Experiment goes wrong.
People return to being bored.
Fun is had.
Experiment goes wrong.
People return to being bored.
April 18, 2018
Det her ville være en fin bog, hvis den var den eneste af dens slags. Men den er nærmest identisk i både form og indhold til 1000 andre nye(-ish) bøger af kvindelige skandinaviske forfattere (ex: Mona Høvring, Stine Pilgaard, Ida Holmegaard). Det er bare ikke super interessant at læse endnu en historie om en semi-deprimeret, lidt seksuelt forvirret ung københavner. Ikke bare er den historie blevet fortalt, den er blevet fortalt på præcis samme måde med samme skrivestil og lignende historier.
August 7, 2019
In the very first scene of Johanne Bille’s brief but incisive novel, Elastic, we find a woman in the shower, probing her own vagina and considering it as an alien entity: her labial folds are “a curse,” “pink curtains of flesh” that she hates. She concludes succinctly, “Today, I think cunts are ugly.” Bille’s book explores gender identity and body discomfort from the inside; as can be seen, often in a quite literal sense.
This woman in the shower is Alice, our narrator, and the locus of an extreme interiority of perspective. We only experience the narrative through her eyes and her mind. It is the core strength of the novel that Alice’s mind, as expressed through Bille’s elegant control of narrative voice, is acutely attuned to the sensual, physical world. Nearly every page is awash in sensuous, erotic similes. A half-erect penis is described as “caught between two poles, like a ripple moving across the surface of the ocean.” A door with a faulty latch keeps “creeping open like a stab in the back.” A character is described as “enthroned like a kingfisher in a nest of cotton.”
The latter character is Mathilde, and she is the focal point of Alice’s attentions, her lusts and desires, and, increasingly, Alice’s sense of self. Mathilde is also the central point around which the plot, such as it is, swirls. Elastic is decidedly not a plot-driven novel, it’s a story of personality and personhood, and that story can be summed up thusly: Alice, in a foundering relationship with the rather hapless Simon, becomes infatuated with her co-worker Mathilde, who is in an “open marriage” with Alexander. These characters overflow with desire(s), and as they try to navigate a kind of quadrilateral relationship Alice finds herself increasingly destabilized by her self-consciousness about all this openness and her consuming love for Mathilde.
The novel’s preoccupation with the physical and the bodily is bound together with its broader thematic concerns. Alice is hyper-aware of the bodily condition of being female. The menstrual cramps, the intrusions of contraceptive devices (the IUDs and their discomfort, the pills and their side effects), the simple fact that “I have a hole that a penis can fill,” all contribute to a yearning to transcend the normative definition of femininity, and here the bodily and the conceptual become inextricably intertwined.
In straining against a plethora of binaries – monogamous coupledom, masculine/feminine, internal/external – Alice finds herself stretched to a breaking point. She yearns to be, like the elastic of the title, pliable and flexible; in her romantic life, in her sense of identity, in her relation to the world around her. But elastic can also be a constricting agent. Recall the childhood game of wrapping a rubber band so tightly around a finger that it turns purple. Also, elastic can only be stretched so far before it snaps. The novel’s principle concern is Alice’s struggle, and that struggle is a pushing against all of the limitations set upon her by the societally/culturally defined existence of the “female”. And, at least in this narrative, the struggle is deranging. Some binaries, some imposed norms, seem capable of being bent, pulled, stretched any which way, while stubbornly refusing to break.
There is a sense here that the author, in lending such potency to the gender-coded language of the body, is using her narrative to try to explode that language, and its concomitant normative coding, from within. From that angle, the author’s struggle mirrors Alice’s struggle to escape the construct of femininity. If the novel doesn’t entirely succeed in that struggle, it is surely no discredit to Bille. It is, after all, a huge and extremely fraught task she has set out for herself, and which she tackles bravely, with vulnerability and mordant humor.
The question of the “feminist novel” is unavoidable here, and it is hardly the place of this male, white, hetero reviewer to declare whether or not Elastic meets this or that feminist criteria. It would seem that the author does consider her book to be of at least a certain feminist stripe, and it if is, it’s in the way it gives Alice free reign to be as messy, contradictory, unreliable, and irritating as any human being can be. Dramatizing the tussle between constructed feminine identity and the hunger for liberation as potentially psychologically destabilizing places Bille’s novel comfortably alongside the works of other explorers of the female uncanny, such as Deborah Levy and Ottessa Mosfegh.
Elastic allows its protagonist to be bracingly, absurdly, wretchedly human. But its extreme interiority of perspective has certain pitfalls. Alice is given vivid life. She is the only character allowed such vivacity. The male characters are basically ciphers, though I suspect this is intentional – a wry turning of the tables on the usual secondary treatment of female characters in male-dominated novels. The guys (and they are best described as “guys” rather than “men,” to mimic the Danish word gutter) share beers and smokes with Alice, they talk bullshit, they fuck her or want to fuck her, but they don’t really get to her. They don’t reach her core.
Simon is needy, devoted (though not above lying and deception), and possessed of a vague sense of social responsibility. Alexander is “beautiful” in an undefined way, and atavistic and amoral in his desires (though scrupulous about condom usage and etiquette). That is as deeply as we know them, and that’s fine – it isn’t really their world we inhabit.
Mathilde – Alice’s true obscure object of desire – is more problematic. She is given far more presence and life than the guys. Her introduction is another splendid bit of minute physical detail: “A dried bit of sleep was caught on one of her short, greyish eyelashes, and the little, bright speck moved up and down when she blinked.” Yet since we hew so tightly to Alice’s viewpoint, we only get to see Mathilde through that singular, blinkered perspective. As such, Mathilde the character remains remote. More than once she is described as the “queen” of her festive surroundings, with all the haughtiness and remove that suggests. With Mathilde accessible only via Alice’s obsession, she becomes in some ways merely a reflection of Alice’s overwhelming desire.
This may be purposeful. Certainly mirroring imagery recurs throughout the text, and thematically it fits with the novel’s concern with entrenched binaries that fragment but refuse to shatter entirely. Yet still, there is a lingering sense that a surface is being skimmed, where even greater insight might be yielded by penetrating through the reflective pool. Such quibbles hardly sink the novel, and don’t detract from its force and insight.
In the end, Alice is the one who breaks, not entirely without forewarning and not entirely without agency – at one point a friend cautions, of Mathilde and Alexander, “they’ll chew you up and spit you out … and then they won’t want to be around you anymore because you don’t have your shit together.” The breaking point is reached with an act of violation (of penetration, in fact), the consequences of which – hinted at but never made explicit – could be more far-reaching than Alice is prepared to handle. It is to Johanne Bille’s credit that we reach the conclusion with fused sensations of calamity, bereavement, and, strangely, calm. As readers we arrive at one terminal point in Alice’s tumultuous journey, but clearly it’s an excursion that will stretch beyond the page.
This woman in the shower is Alice, our narrator, and the locus of an extreme interiority of perspective. We only experience the narrative through her eyes and her mind. It is the core strength of the novel that Alice’s mind, as expressed through Bille’s elegant control of narrative voice, is acutely attuned to the sensual, physical world. Nearly every page is awash in sensuous, erotic similes. A half-erect penis is described as “caught between two poles, like a ripple moving across the surface of the ocean.” A door with a faulty latch keeps “creeping open like a stab in the back.” A character is described as “enthroned like a kingfisher in a nest of cotton.”
The latter character is Mathilde, and she is the focal point of Alice’s attentions, her lusts and desires, and, increasingly, Alice’s sense of self. Mathilde is also the central point around which the plot, such as it is, swirls. Elastic is decidedly not a plot-driven novel, it’s a story of personality and personhood, and that story can be summed up thusly: Alice, in a foundering relationship with the rather hapless Simon, becomes infatuated with her co-worker Mathilde, who is in an “open marriage” with Alexander. These characters overflow with desire(s), and as they try to navigate a kind of quadrilateral relationship Alice finds herself increasingly destabilized by her self-consciousness about all this openness and her consuming love for Mathilde.
The novel’s preoccupation with the physical and the bodily is bound together with its broader thematic concerns. Alice is hyper-aware of the bodily condition of being female. The menstrual cramps, the intrusions of contraceptive devices (the IUDs and their discomfort, the pills and their side effects), the simple fact that “I have a hole that a penis can fill,” all contribute to a yearning to transcend the normative definition of femininity, and here the bodily and the conceptual become inextricably intertwined.
In straining against a plethora of binaries – monogamous coupledom, masculine/feminine, internal/external – Alice finds herself stretched to a breaking point. She yearns to be, like the elastic of the title, pliable and flexible; in her romantic life, in her sense of identity, in her relation to the world around her. But elastic can also be a constricting agent. Recall the childhood game of wrapping a rubber band so tightly around a finger that it turns purple. Also, elastic can only be stretched so far before it snaps. The novel’s principle concern is Alice’s struggle, and that struggle is a pushing against all of the limitations set upon her by the societally/culturally defined existence of the “female”. And, at least in this narrative, the struggle is deranging. Some binaries, some imposed norms, seem capable of being bent, pulled, stretched any which way, while stubbornly refusing to break.
There is a sense here that the author, in lending such potency to the gender-coded language of the body, is using her narrative to try to explode that language, and its concomitant normative coding, from within. From that angle, the author’s struggle mirrors Alice’s struggle to escape the construct of femininity. If the novel doesn’t entirely succeed in that struggle, it is surely no discredit to Bille. It is, after all, a huge and extremely fraught task she has set out for herself, and which she tackles bravely, with vulnerability and mordant humor.
The question of the “feminist novel” is unavoidable here, and it is hardly the place of this male, white, hetero reviewer to declare whether or not Elastic meets this or that feminist criteria. It would seem that the author does consider her book to be of at least a certain feminist stripe, and it if is, it’s in the way it gives Alice free reign to be as messy, contradictory, unreliable, and irritating as any human being can be. Dramatizing the tussle between constructed feminine identity and the hunger for liberation as potentially psychologically destabilizing places Bille’s novel comfortably alongside the works of other explorers of the female uncanny, such as Deborah Levy and Ottessa Mosfegh.
Elastic allows its protagonist to be bracingly, absurdly, wretchedly human. But its extreme interiority of perspective has certain pitfalls. Alice is given vivid life. She is the only character allowed such vivacity. The male characters are basically ciphers, though I suspect this is intentional – a wry turning of the tables on the usual secondary treatment of female characters in male-dominated novels. The guys (and they are best described as “guys” rather than “men,” to mimic the Danish word gutter) share beers and smokes with Alice, they talk bullshit, they fuck her or want to fuck her, but they don’t really get to her. They don’t reach her core.
Simon is needy, devoted (though not above lying and deception), and possessed of a vague sense of social responsibility. Alexander is “beautiful” in an undefined way, and atavistic and amoral in his desires (though scrupulous about condom usage and etiquette). That is as deeply as we know them, and that’s fine – it isn’t really their world we inhabit.
Mathilde – Alice’s true obscure object of desire – is more problematic. She is given far more presence and life than the guys. Her introduction is another splendid bit of minute physical detail: “A dried bit of sleep was caught on one of her short, greyish eyelashes, and the little, bright speck moved up and down when she blinked.” Yet since we hew so tightly to Alice’s viewpoint, we only get to see Mathilde through that singular, blinkered perspective. As such, Mathilde the character remains remote. More than once she is described as the “queen” of her festive surroundings, with all the haughtiness and remove that suggests. With Mathilde accessible only via Alice’s obsession, she becomes in some ways merely a reflection of Alice’s overwhelming desire.
This may be purposeful. Certainly mirroring imagery recurs throughout the text, and thematically it fits with the novel’s concern with entrenched binaries that fragment but refuse to shatter entirely. Yet still, there is a lingering sense that a surface is being skimmed, where even greater insight might be yielded by penetrating through the reflective pool. Such quibbles hardly sink the novel, and don’t detract from its force and insight.
In the end, Alice is the one who breaks, not entirely without forewarning and not entirely without agency – at one point a friend cautions, of Mathilde and Alexander, “they’ll chew you up and spit you out … and then they won’t want to be around you anymore because you don’t have your shit together.” The breaking point is reached with an act of violation (of penetration, in fact), the consequences of which – hinted at but never made explicit – could be more far-reaching than Alice is prepared to handle. It is to Johanne Bille’s credit that we reach the conclusion with fused sensations of calamity, bereavement, and, strangely, calm. As readers we arrive at one terminal point in Alice’s tumultuous journey, but clearly it’s an excursion that will stretch beyond the page.
August 27, 2024
2-2.5-3 can't decide.
It's giving girl so confusing
It's giving girl so confusing
November 23, 2021
Four tedious people fucking each other (up), seasoned with banal observations, unleavened by wit or humour.
September 9, 2020
One of the best books I've read in a while is this one by Johanne Bille. Wish I could give more than 5 stars to this book.
Elastic- stretchable, malleable but also prone to slacking over time. That’s how I would describe Alice’s story- something that she herself doesn’t understand before it is too late. The book starts with the protagonist, Alice examining her vagina and feeling alienated from her own body and disconsolate about her sexuality.
She is content with her partner Simon, they love each other and live together and things are fine. Enter Mathilde, and Alice’s life changes. Mathilde is Alice’s colleague and Alice is drawn to Mathilde like a moth drawn to a flame. Enter Alexander – Mathilde’s husband – and things take an even more complicated turn. Alexander and Mathilde are in an open marriage and to get closer to Mathilde, Alice starts to sleep with Alexander. Alexander is merely the means to get to the end, to Mathilde.
Eventually, Alice also discovers secrets from Simon, and after that, it’s a roller coaster ride that takes us through this quadrilateral relationship- of love, of intimacy, of desire, of jealousy, of hate, of queerness, of identity and of feminine struggles.
Johanne Bille did a marvelous job with this book- amalgamating the many sides to human identity and relationships into one story narrated by Alice’s complex character. Despite the many themes and the many moods of Alice that the book touches upon, the writing is perspicuous through and through.
I thought, I thought and I thought and could not think of any adjectives to describe the book. The imagery is wonderful, the translation is lyrical, the writing is brilliant, the story is emotional and I just choked up in the end. So many thoughts on this book. Please read it, NOW.
Elastic- stretchable, malleable but also prone to slacking over time. That’s how I would describe Alice’s story- something that she herself doesn’t understand before it is too late. The book starts with the protagonist, Alice examining her vagina and feeling alienated from her own body and disconsolate about her sexuality.
She is content with her partner Simon, they love each other and live together and things are fine. Enter Mathilde, and Alice’s life changes. Mathilde is Alice’s colleague and Alice is drawn to Mathilde like a moth drawn to a flame. Enter Alexander – Mathilde’s husband – and things take an even more complicated turn. Alexander and Mathilde are in an open marriage and to get closer to Mathilde, Alice starts to sleep with Alexander. Alexander is merely the means to get to the end, to Mathilde.
Eventually, Alice also discovers secrets from Simon, and after that, it’s a roller coaster ride that takes us through this quadrilateral relationship- of love, of intimacy, of desire, of jealousy, of hate, of queerness, of identity and of feminine struggles.
Johanne Bille did a marvelous job with this book- amalgamating the many sides to human identity and relationships into one story narrated by Alice’s complex character. Despite the many themes and the many moods of Alice that the book touches upon, the writing is perspicuous through and through.
I thought, I thought and I thought and could not think of any adjectives to describe the book. The imagery is wonderful, the translation is lyrical, the writing is brilliant, the story is emotional and I just choked up in the end. So many thoughts on this book. Please read it, NOW.
August 31, 2024
it’s not a good book, but the main character was making so many terrible life decisions that i needed to see what happened in the end. annoying writing and format too.
June 7, 2021
This little novella by Danish author Johanne Bille (translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg) is about the shifting nature of relationships. It exposes relatable moments of life's expansiveness, everyday trivialities, and relationship dynamics (some that are openly spoken about, others that are left under the covers in a dark bedroom or on a cold bathroom floor).
The book's title is a interwoven symbol in the story. Elastic is flexible, it bends and pulls at your tug, it repels and returns; it is breakable ('snapable'), it is penetrable, it is designed to keep the body under conformity but easily slips away and slackens to expose the body (especially the female body when it comes to lingerie, removed willingly or by another hand).
The story is told in a softly fragmentary style, reflecting the protagonist, Alice's, inertion and indecision, her experimentation with polygamy, her sexual fluidity. She vacillates between desire and loneliness, longing and abandonment.
There's an undercurrent that I think many readers will relate to and a contemporary setting that grounds the story in the current day. It was dizzying to wander into my own past and reminisce about my time exploring Copenhagen with a lost love. Place names, the intoxicating culture and the relaxed pace all came back to me in a whirl.
"I tumble around in white lies about timing or my general behaviour, small things that neither provide nor avoid explanation."
“She and he, girl and boy. Language changes too, splitting into oppositions. And they’ll still play together, the boys and the girls, but the game will be different, something else will be at stake. Touches and glances will take on new meanings, fights will attain a new kind of seriousness. It’s just genitals, just pink and blue, just he and she, Adam and Eve, but it’s more than that. [...] We have the seeds of difference inside us. We can’t escape.”
The book's title is a interwoven symbol in the story. Elastic is flexible, it bends and pulls at your tug, it repels and returns; it is breakable ('snapable'), it is penetrable, it is designed to keep the body under conformity but easily slips away and slackens to expose the body (especially the female body when it comes to lingerie, removed willingly or by another hand).
The story is told in a softly fragmentary style, reflecting the protagonist, Alice's, inertion and indecision, her experimentation with polygamy, her sexual fluidity. She vacillates between desire and loneliness, longing and abandonment.
There's an undercurrent that I think many readers will relate to and a contemporary setting that grounds the story in the current day. It was dizzying to wander into my own past and reminisce about my time exploring Copenhagen with a lost love. Place names, the intoxicating culture and the relaxed pace all came back to me in a whirl.
"I tumble around in white lies about timing or my general behaviour, small things that neither provide nor avoid explanation."
“She and he, girl and boy. Language changes too, splitting into oppositions. And they’ll still play together, the boys and the girls, but the game will be different, something else will be at stake. Touches and glances will take on new meanings, fights will attain a new kind of seriousness. It’s just genitals, just pink and blue, just he and she, Adam and Eve, but it’s more than that. [...] We have the seeds of difference inside us. We can’t escape.”
July 31, 2018
Sproget fanger mig og jeg føler at bogen indeholder et enormt godt flow. Det kan godt blive lidt ensformigt til tider og vi kender alle sammen den klassiske fortælling om en ung kvindelig københavner som er forvirret- seksuelt primært. Men for mig, var beskrivelse om SIMS feks, det hele værd. Dét var anderledes og jeg blev dybt fascineret af det.
February 8, 2025
2 stars bc it was easy to read but i didn’t get anything out of it really.
it didn’t really have much story, just ideas, but the ideas were either lukewarm or just not to my taste.
There’s a bit where she says that female friendships are all for appearances and temporary and that this was just a fact of life, and that just reads to me as a very fake deep person who is mean and convinces them self that everyone is like this. which is something we’ve all seen a million times before. That isn’t even a hot take that’s just the classic sexist ideas of women from the 2000’s.
the book just gave off that energy. like obviously it’s trying to do the whole sad hot girl deep unlikable main characters thing but there was no creativity to it, no new spin, no fresh ideas. yawn.
it didn’t really have much story, just ideas, but the ideas were either lukewarm or just not to my taste.
There’s a bit where she says that female friendships are all for appearances and temporary and that this was just a fact of life, and that just reads to me as a very fake deep person who is mean and convinces them self that everyone is like this. which is something we’ve all seen a million times before. That isn’t even a hot take that’s just the classic sexist ideas of women from the 2000’s.
the book just gave off that energy. like obviously it’s trying to do the whole sad hot girl deep unlikable main characters thing but there was no creativity to it, no new spin, no fresh ideas. yawn.
October 4, 2018
Den her bog har samme følelse, som en grå efterårsdag. Den er anstrengende og ensom og ret tung at danse med. Den er flyvsk og farer med hovedpersonen Alice rundt i København, uden rigtig at holde fast i noget eller nogen. Alice der advares om afgrunden og alligevel styrer direkte mod den. Alice der flygter til Serbien af alle steder for ikke at eksistere, for ikke at kende nogen. Og Alice der lader det hele slippe gennem hendes fingre, fordi hun ikke tør. Ikke tør være i live.
September 23, 2025
Think: Danish Sally Rooney. The millennial malaise is sticky and sexy in this novel, and for all its familiar existentialism, I loved it. A sharp dispatch on how we crave what’s forbidden—and the addictive high of that self-flagellating pursuit.
November 21, 2021
Ark bookstore. Acabat a Cala Deià
March 30, 2022
Jeg var aldrig rigtig investeret i fortællingen.
July 8, 2024
This book is very Cool and Scandi and Disaffected and Contemporary, and has made me realise definitively that I am none of these things. I think that perhaps books about pathologically disinterested young people trying and failing at polyamory for all the wrong reasons are just not my thing. And that's fine. I'm 32. I'm slowly making my way down the mountain of cool, hip things.
Things that I think would have improved this book for me: more of a tangible depiction of Alice's longing for / obsession with Mathilde, so that her decision to fuck Alexander as a way to get close to Mathilde made more sense; more insight into how Simon actually felt about his girlfriend shagging someone else, because he seemed to oscillate between frustratingly passive to reluctantly passive every other sentence; maybe two or three fewer sentences about sopping wet vaginas; more character depth to Alexander, who basically existed in the narrative as a penis with legs, and therefore doesn't really embody the distance between Alice and Mathilde; more of a narrative climax, no pun intended, because essentially ending with an actualclimax didn't quite do it for me.
Things that I think would have improved this book for me: more of a tangible depiction of Alice's longing for / obsession with Mathilde, so that her decision to fuck Alexander as a way to get close to Mathilde made more sense; more insight into how Simon actually felt about his girlfriend shagging someone else, because he seemed to oscillate between frustratingly passive to reluctantly passive every other sentence; maybe two or three fewer sentences about sopping wet vaginas; more character depth to Alexander, who basically existed in the narrative as a penis with legs, and therefore doesn't really embody the distance between Alice and Mathilde; more of a narrative climax, no pun intended, because essentially ending with an actualclimax didn't quite do it for me.
July 3, 2022
“She leans back, breaking off the kiss, even though my lips try to hold onto hers.”
January 21, 2021
She loves someone else. “We’ll have each other. But I don’t say it because she leans forward and kisses me. I’ve missed her tongue and her smooth front teeth. She leans back, breaking off the kiss, even though my lips try to hold onto hers.” A good image of what goes on in this book. Everything but. I can’t say I really enjoyed this book although it is very well written, a picture of a frustrating obsession. I enjoyed the writing but perhaps it brought up difficult things for me.
August 12, 2020
Elastic: stretchy , snaps back, can go slack over time, semi durable.
Never has a book title been so apt. In Johanne Bille’s novel, the main protagonist’s love life does match the metaphor.
Alice has a good life. She’s with Simon, they live together with two other friends, and they love each other. That is until Mathilde enters her life. Then things start to take a different path.
To complicate matters Alice finds out that Mathilde and her husband Alex have an open relationship, thus Mathilde begins sleeping with Alex, something her husband does know about. However Alice is also infatuated with Mathilde. Simon does not have any idea about this and Alice’s life is stretched to it’s limits. More complications? the affair starts when Simon is on Hanoi for six months due to business AND are moving to new premises when he returns.
As Alice continues her relationships with Alex and Mathilde, she becomes distant with Simon. Will Alice snap? will her elastic love life give way? or will it continue stretching?
Writing about complex relationships is always difficult as it is easy to descend into melodrama. Luckily Johanne Bille does not do this with her characters. There’s a cool levelheadedness all throughout. Weirdly, despite, the flash fiction style of the book, Bille manages to convey Alice’s feelings of confusion, her fears and greed for all the love she can have.
By the end of the book the elastic metaphor occurs and it’s equally perverse , slightly funny and sad. In a way it’s a suitable description for the book as well. Elastic is a thought provoking read which gives a fresh take on a love triangle (or square since for people are involved)
Never has a book title been so apt. In Johanne Bille’s novel, the main protagonist’s love life does match the metaphor.
Alice has a good life. She’s with Simon, they live together with two other friends, and they love each other. That is until Mathilde enters her life. Then things start to take a different path.
To complicate matters Alice finds out that Mathilde and her husband Alex have an open relationship, thus Mathilde begins sleeping with Alex, something her husband does know about. However Alice is also infatuated with Mathilde. Simon does not have any idea about this and Alice’s life is stretched to it’s limits. More complications? the affair starts when Simon is on Hanoi for six months due to business AND are moving to new premises when he returns.
As Alice continues her relationships with Alex and Mathilde, she becomes distant with Simon. Will Alice snap? will her elastic love life give way? or will it continue stretching?
Writing about complex relationships is always difficult as it is easy to descend into melodrama. Luckily Johanne Bille does not do this with her characters. There’s a cool levelheadedness all throughout. Weirdly, despite, the flash fiction style of the book, Bille manages to convey Alice’s feelings of confusion, her fears and greed for all the love she can have.
By the end of the book the elastic metaphor occurs and it’s equally perverse , slightly funny and sad. In a way it’s a suitable description for the book as well. Elastic is a thought provoking read which gives a fresh take on a love triangle (or square since for people are involved)
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews