The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

Book Overview

In 1969, a young girl makes a trip from Coney Island to the swampy coastland on the rural outskirts of Helsinki, Finland. There, her death will immediately become part of local mythology, furnishing boys and girls with fodder for endless romantic imaginings. Everyone who lives near the swamp dreams about Eddie de Wire, the lost American girl. For both Sandra and Doris, two lonely, dreaming girls abandoned in different ways by their parents, this myth...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590513045
• ISBN13: 9781590513040
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Other Press (NY)
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.6" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A Challenging and Unforgettable Mythic Story

Outside Helsinki, in a marshy rural district, two young girls meet at a pivotal moment in their lives. It is the late 1960s, and Sandra Wärn and Doris Flickenberg have each suffered trauma. Together they use fantasy and play to begin to explore their families, sexuality and identities. Much of their energy goes into understanding the mystery of the American girl who had drowned in Bule Marsh. In Monika Fagerholm's brilliant novel, THE AMERICAN GIRL, translated from the Swedish, Sandra and Doris come to age in a time of rebellion, gender politics and social-cultural change. They are drawn to the strange life and tragic death of Eddie de Wire, who came from America to Finland, broke at least two hearts, alienated her own family and wrecked havoc on Doris's before her death in the marsh. With only a few secondhand quotes, some ephemera and the District's collective though mostly silent memory, the girls try to reconstruct her life and make meaning of her death. But Eddie's passing is not the only tragedy with which the girls must deal. Doris's abusive parents are in prison, and she now lives with her cousins in a family --- already on the brink --- that was practically destroyed by the American girl. Sandra's mother is gone, and she lives in a dark and creepy house with her father who keeps company with whores and hunters. From the kind-hearted stripper Bombshell Pinky Pink to Doris's angry cousin Rita Rat, from the drunken and damaged Bengt to Eddie's surviving sisters, Doris and Sandra, together and apart, move from relationship to relationship, game to game, story to story, as they each grow up and try to forge an identity that carries them past so much loss, abandonment, fear and violence. And it just may be that each girl has a well-guarded secret or two as well. "The District" as a setting --- so close to the "city by the sea" --- is one of paradox. Sandra and Doris live in a bucolic landscape, yet there is imminent danger as well. They are beholden to social rules, but there are few adults present or capable of enforcing them. The young people of the District are playactors, mapmakers, writers and designers, and keepers of secrets, but there is little hope that their dreams, often borne of disappointment, will come to fruition. The world Fagerholm creates is at once enchanted and terrible. Fagerholm's prose is dazzling and dizzying, and the story strange and beautiful. She plays with many of the conventions of post-modernism (a disdain for traditional sentence structure, plot progression and reliable narration), but these are transformed here into something magical, frightening, lyrical and wholly compelling. THE AMERICAN GIRL is far from an easy read: it moves quickly back and forth through time, is told from the point of view of many characters who often re-tell the same stories repeatedly with shifting perspective, and her writing style is choppy and repetitive. The commitment to this award-winning novel is rewarded, though, as Fagerho

Mythomania or Emptiness?

I forget what exactly piqued my interest in this novel and caused me to pluck it from amongst the other Vine selections. But I am now forever grateful for whatever it was that so impelled me. For I would say, without the slightest hesitation, that this is a work of literature. In fact, I would go further and say that readers who don't appreciate poetry and nuance will not like this book - will not even be able to finish it, as so many of the reviews here reveal. The style is modernist, multiple perspective flashback, Faulknerian more than anything - more or less a cross between The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying. But I'm doffing my pedant's hat right now to concentrate on the passages of what is, in sooth, a long, bewitching poem. I knew I was fading into another world when I read this description of Sandra as a young girl: "The little girl watched it all like a movie, and very consciously. It also was not the first time, and definitely not a new perspective, that of the outside observer. But suddenly, and this had never happened before, all of the comforting and self-righteousness in a customary on-the-side perspective was blown away. Suddenly it was actually the perspective itself that was the source of the discomfort and the anxiety growing inside her these last sunless sunny months before the landscape grew dark all at once and the snowstorm blew in over them." Monika Fagelhorn, like Robert Frost, is very much concerned with "inner weather", and the truly captivating, unsettling passages, the ones that haunt the reader, are the eerie ones that capture the collision of inner and outer, of liminal premonition: "But still, though you did not hear what the girls were saying to each other there where they were in their private shade off to the side in the garden, did not you discover, just by looking at them and their facial expressions, something muffled and alarming so to speak, something nevertheless a bit terrifying in the middle of all the light, summer, and fun? Something at least a bit ominous, which cast somewhat longer shadows in the bright day than what was normal?" This book has something all its own that very few books - aside from books of poetry and poetic prose - possess, a taste, another way of feeling things. Indeed, the greater part of the book consists of a vast reconnaissance of what to do with this taste: "When Doris was gone the words paled as well, the worlds they hid, all the nuances and associations, their own meanings. Normal was normal again, in a normal sense. Of course it facilitated communication with the outside world and the possibility of establishing an understanding, but it also took something away, something essential, a taste. And the big question that should have been answered was quite simply the one that had been pushed forward the whole time before the breakdown: Was it possible to exist at all without the taste? If you said yes right away then you were lying just as much as if y

A wonderful book.

The American Girl is the first book in what will be a set of two. I can't wait to read the next one.The book begins with a girl named Eddie de Wire visiting Coney Island Beach in 1969. She records a song in one of those record yourself booths and wanders around then returns to Helsinki. She is next staying with a sister "the Baroness" who has a Glass House in a small village near Helsinki. The villagers are fascinated with Eddie and call her the American Girl. After she drowns in a pond in a marsh, she becomes a legend and incites many fantasies. Two young girls who are about 13 at the beginning of the story start to play "the Eddie Game". They sing the song she recorded called " Look what they've done to my song, Mom" and start to live in their own world of fantasy and magic.There are many events in the book, it is a long book. The book is amazing, it kept me fascinated for two days while we have been snowed in. Reading it put me in almost a dreamlike state. It is almost impossible to retell the book, I can only highly recommend it to anyone who likes reading a really, really good book. It stays with you after you have finished it.

it reads like an epic poem (modern)

I wasn't sure what I was getting into with this book but I am thankful everyday that I picked it up. It is very enjoyable but I would also classify it for more well read individuals. It's not a silly murder mystery by any means. The actual story doesn't take off until around page 60 but you get intrigued from chapter one. Every line flows beautifully through out, it's words are like linguistic paintings. It's truly a complete pleasure for all the senses. The only things I must forwarn is that if you have no level of personal depth than stay away from this very deep novel. Now you may presume that I am a snob, but i think my warning for the shallow is a great kindness so please only think me considerate, for my warning will spare you a lot of confusion and brow furrowing.

Brilliant, but DEFINITELY not for everyone!

Personally, I found "The American Girl," by Monika Fagerholm, to be an absolutely brilliant and mesmerizing work of contemporary literature. But be forewarned: this book is definitely not for everyone! With this review, I strive to reach out and communicate only with that small percentage of readers who would be sorely disappointed if they missed discovering this author and this work. At best, Fagerholm is capable of showing us a whole new way to use language in the service of literature. That is the strength of this book, and if that statement stirs your interest, then this book may be for you. Although the true gift of this book is the author's inventive use of language, I must agree with a number of reviews here that this American translation is flawed. In particular, the lyrics to popular American songs from the 60s and 70s play an important role in the book, but the translator translated the Swedish lyrics into English rather than doing the research necessary to discover the original English versions. As a result, much of the musical magic of those lyrics used within the contex of the story is abrasively lost on the American ear. If I were Monika Fagerholm, I'd sue the translator over these significant errors! But despite this specific type of error, the originality of Monika Fagerholm's prose style does shine through in this translation -- one might only guess if this work would have been even better with another translator. So what is this book about? Actually, it is best if you know very little about the plot. It might be easy to spoil the story with too much information...so beware of reviews that reveal too much about the storyline. All that I will say is that this is a dark, moody, twisted tale with potent mythical overtones. The reader is always kept off-balance and reality is a constant shifting, morphing, changing uncertainty. This book is about fantasy and game-playing, betrayal and loneliness, abuse and dysfunctional parenting, delusion and reality. It is a rich, subtle, nuanced gothic mystery. The prose has a unique architecture that compliments the mood and texture of the plot. One foreign reviewer has called this work a mixture of David Lynch and Joyce Carol Oates...and I believe that is a very apt description. I'd also add that although there is absolutely no comparison between the writing styles of these authors, I found the same type of breathtaking ORIGINALITY in the prose of "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy and "The Bone People" by Keri Hulme. Both authors were awarded the prestigious Booker Prizes for those works. This work by Monika Fagerholm has won a series of prestigious Swedish literary prizes and is getting rave professional reviews in its many translations throughout Europe. As I read this work, it literally pulled me inside, time disappeared, and the real world faded -- I found myself transported to another linguistic reality. When I got to the end, I was wholly satisfied because the mysteries had b