The narrating character in Therese Bohman’s “The Other Woman” hooks the reader with a captivating voice and a dramatic spin on a story we’ve all heard before.
As you can probably guess from the title, “The Other Woman” tells the story of an affair, but it delves into the concept from many different and unexpected angles.
The narrator works in a hospital cafeteria in a fishing town called Norrköping in Sweden. She’s a working girl with big dreams of becoming a writer. But in living a completely mediocre life, she finds herself with nothing to write about. She’s bored with her job. She’s bored with her coworkers. She’s bored with her goody-two-shoes of a best friend who always wants to go for coffee and chat about feminism.
And then she happens upon Carl Malmberg at work, a much older, seemingly happily married doctor. Her attraction to him is easy enough to understand. She’s lower class and he’s a shiny, ritzy-looking professional.
When the affair begins, her desire for the doctor goes from new and exciting to almost obsessive. She hangs on all of the things that he tells her. The voice is honest, almost to the point of being disturbing at times.
“I have never felt as desired as I do when I am with Carl, nothing has even come close to this,” she writes. “He can spend hours telling me what he likes about my body, the body I used to regard as little more than a vulgar container for my soul, it turns out he loves it, almost adores it.”
As expected, the novelty of the affair begins to wear off. The other woman begins to hope, although she won’t say it, that the doctor will leave his wife for her. She even finds her mind wondering to a world where his wife dies. She imagines how it would happen, how she could be there to comfort Carl.
In addition to the whole marriage thing, the difference in social status drives a wedge between the two. She imagines his life in his fancy house with his beautiful wife while she attends college parties and spends her work days scraping plates in a hospital cafeteria.
The story takes an extremely unexpected turn when a friend of the narrator’s turns out to be someone she would never expect. The twist drags the doctor and his glamorous life into what could be a very sticky situation, much stickier than the affair itself.
Bohman paints a vivid picture of what it’s like inside the mind of the bad guy, or “The Other Woman,” if you will. This captivating, character-driven tell-all provides the reader with a unique insight, from what the other woman wants out of the affair to how she justifies it to herself.
And her bashfully, charming leading lady keeps you hooked until the very last page.
“The Other Woman” was translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and will be available in the U.S. on Feb. 23 from Other Press.