Norma

July 31, 2017
At the center of Oksanen’s ambitious contemporary fantasy novel is the strange hair of a woman named Norma. It grows peculiarly quickly and sometimes uncontrollably, moves in ways that reflect Norma’s emotions, and grants her far-ranging abilities to detect other people’s physical and mental states. Norma’s mother, Anita, spent her life guarding Norma from the world; the two of them have apartments in the same building in Helsinki and are each other’s sole confidants. When Anita dies in an apparent suicide, Norma needs to understand her death and begins investigating it even as she is suddenly overwhelmed by the weight of everything her mother kept away from her. Oksanen (When the Doves Disappeared) creates intricate characters and imagery, and the hair plays well as a multifaceted metaphor for various forms of the patriarchal exploitation of female bodies. However, the characters are insufficiently three-dimensional for the conceit to read as more than a metaphor, albeit a well-chosen one.

July 1, 2017
Award-winning Finnish-Estonian novelist Oksanen (When the Doves Disappeared, 2015, etc.) tackles the global exploitation of women and the entwined secrets of two families in this story of a woman with magical hair.Intensely private Norma Ross has just lost her mother and closest confidante in an apparent suicide. A stranger named Max Lambert accosts her at the funeral and tells her they have "unpleasant business" to take care of. As Norma attempts to uncover the truth behind her mother's death, she finds herself threatened by powerful factions within the Lambert clan, all vying for control of a global hair salon operation with sidelines into darker business ventures. Norma's miraculous hair is both blessing and curse, making her incredibly sensitive to smells and giving her the ability to detect lies and communicate with a dead ancestor whose own magical hair committed a double murder. Smoked in a pipe, Norma's hair also serves as a drug that drives at least one character crazy. Inside the Lambert family, alliances form and shift, no one is safe, and everyone wants to discover the source of the hair Norma's mother had been selling before she died. As the entangled plots wind tighter, surrogacy and baby farming are added to the clan's nefarious activities: "Girls and children were so cheap in Nigeria, and the hair business created a perfect front." Oksanen raises some important points. As one character puts it, women "still don't take home the profits even though we provide all the material and all the labor for the beauty industry. Century after century we've given our faces, our hair, our wombs, our breasts, and still the money ends up in men's pockets." But too many characters feel underdeveloped, and the writing is often weak: "Their kind dwelled endlessly on a tragedy until all the blood and marrow had been sucked out of it, gnawing at possible underlying factors with the same devotion as dieters who try to lose weight with gimmicks like slow chewing." In spite of promising material, the question of who will emerge victorious loses its urgency along the way, and the ending, though surprising, fails to satisfy.

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August 1, 2017
Oksanen's (When the Doves Disappeared, 2015) third novel to be translated into English takes place in contemporary Finland, where thirtysomething Norma is grieving over the death of her mother, Anita, who committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. Anita was fiercely protective of her daughter, guarding the strange secret that Norma's hair not only grows at an alarming rate but can also sense danger. After her mother's funeral, Norma discovers that Anita was involved with the shady family of her best friend, Helena, who has long been confined to a mental institution. Helena's ex-husband, Max Lambert, tells Norma that Anita owed him money and Helena's daughter, Marion, who owned the salon where Anita worked, was plotting something with Anita before her death. As Norma tries to figure out what Lambert and Marion want from her, she starts to uncover family secrets about her ancestor Eva, who had hair with powers similar to Norma's. Oksanen's unusual and inventive novel uses hair as a metaphor for women's power, deftly exploring the ways it can be harnessed or exploited.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2017

Winner of big awards like the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize and the Prix Femina, Finnish-Estonian author Oksanen is known here for the sharply affecting Purge and When the Doves Disappeared. She follows suit with a new novel set in contemporary Helsinki, where Anita Naakka has leapt in front of a speeding train. Her daughter, Norma, has supernatural hair that picks up the moods of those around her, and at the funeral, her hair lets her know that her mother may not have killed herself. Fantasy, mystery, exquisite writing, a young woman's coming to terms--what's not to like?

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