P.er Helga Flatland, normal families celebrate birthdays with children and grandchildren and maybe even place a trip for the occasion: what a joy, what an effort. The normal family that lives in Oslo and reunites the three children with their respective husbands, boyfriends and grandchildren, first on a plane and then around a beautiful table blessed by the sun of Rome, she too has a goal: to make her father’s 70th birthday party memorable. And it succeeds. Great as well. First the toast and then a good speech, as befits. Too bad it doesn’t last long. “We have decided to separate,” says the father, almost interrupting the mother.
Helga Flatland was born in 1984 in Telemark, Norway. Winner of many awards, A Modern Family is her most successful novel. (Press Office)
What will follow this announcement of two seventy-year-olds who give up in front of the angry disbelief of their children (who are adults!) Is the heart of a novel that updates the meaning of normality right from the title: “A modern family” (Fazi) is the latest book by Helga Flatland, writer born in 1984 defined the Norwegian Anne Tyler, here ready to investigate the vices and virtues of that eternal coming together, the only one destined to last a lifetime. Or maybe not.
The family: why write a novel about it?
Because it is still one of the most important institutions. I have always been drawn to how social, economic and cultural structures change and how they affect the way we think about the family.
When two parents separate, even if you are an adult child, you still get blown away. Liv and Ellen are the two sisters who tell the story here. One, the oldest, is a journalist and a mother. The other is doing everything to get pregnant. Then there is Håkon, the youngest who, of all, will react by rejecting the idea of a “normal couple” in the future.
There is a little bit of myself in all three but none of their reactions are mine. I write fiction and I do it to explore feelings and points of view that are even opposite to mine. That said, I believe that talking about normality in a human relationship is impossible. Every relationship is the result of something unique and dynamic between two people.
A modern family of Helga Flatland, Fazi, pp. 320, euro 18.
You don’t even know what it means to “try them all” to stay together, Liv thinks she would like her father to come out saying it was all a joke and they won’t break up. Is breaking up at 70 a sign of the modernity of the times?
Yes, the divorce between Torill and Sverre in the novel is the sign that we are facing a new generation of the third age. The seventy-year-olds of today are other people than their peers of twenty years ago. They have a higher life expectancy, they think about planning for the future rather than looking back.
And women are also often the first to rebuild their lives (with the tacit approval of their children as in the novel). Has feminism made its way?
I don’t think it would have been any different if it had been the father who had a new partner. And I wasn’t thinking about feminism when I wrote the book. I think this is also a sign that times have really changed.
Liv and Ellen, already struggling with tense love stories, will come to question the meaning of relationships, feelings. If anyone had to communicate something at that lunch, Ellen thinks, it must be she who dreams of telling everyone that she is pregnant. Other than announcing a divorce at that age! Is there selfishness behind the suffering and anger of children?
In any crisis, big or small, we tend to be selfish. It’s a way to survive and I think it’s the reason grown children react selfishly and childishly to their parents’ divorce. The foundations of their life are crumbling and they are trying to protect them.
Marriage creates many expectations: could this be why it is more exposed to the risk of the end?
No, I don’t see differences with cohabitation. And I don’t think it’s marriage that starts a family. What matters to me are relationships. Even those that struggle to evolve over time.
Betrayal and infertility are other signs of modernity. Or are the new “problems” added to those of the past?
Ellen, who experiences infertility, is surprised that her body at the age of 38 is just as inoperative as that of her great-great-grandmother at the same age. What does this mean: why has evolution not kept pace with culture if she feels (and behaves) younger than her grandmother felt? I don’t think there are more problems today than there were 50 years ago, they are different. And how we as a family adjust to them will continue to change forever and ever.
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