Claudia, an expansive novel by Saskatchewan’s Britt Holmström, spans generations and continents. With the lightest of literary hands, Holmström manages to explore the currents of violence that shape women’s lives, and she does it without a hint of didacticism.
Each and every word rings true, elucidating the detailed and textured experiences of a seemingly ordinary woman.
We follow Claudia from young girl to matriarch as she traces the formative events of her life in Sweden, Canada, Spain and Latvia. Decades are spent fulfilling her role as a doctor’s wife who is devoted to children, dinner parties and lunch with other ladies.
As she says of herself, “God knows there is not much to me; I need every bit, no matter how bourgeois, how cosseted, how removed….” And yet the simplicity of Claudia’s voice, her honesty and her evolving self-awareness add up to a rich, often profound journey—one that in Holmström’s hands reveals resonant and unsettling truths.
Cosmetic surgery leaves Claudia blessed—or cursed—with a heightened sense of smell, enabling her to “sniff out the difference between false and genuine sincerity.” Try as she might, her efforts to retreat into ease, beauty and traditional notions of successful womanhood are thwarted by her own visceral intelligence.
More significantly, her life is underscored by intersections with violence against women, and it is these senseless acts that drive the trajectory of her story. In this way, what seems like a quiet novel is in fact devastating in its capacity to understate all-too-often unspoken realities. The contrast between a well-ordered existence and the pervasiveness of gendered hatred enables the character Claudia and the eponymous novel to sneak up on you and get under your skin.
Claudia tells us: “There are days when I want to holler for justice, but I know better than to expect the impossible.” But the moving and unexpected ending to this powerful novel is transformative, a satisfying and profound resting place after a darn good read.
Shawna Dempsey is a Winnipeg-based performance artist and curator.
