Darkroom
Mette Karlsvik
Original title: Mørkerom
Publisher: Samlaget, 2017
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 220 pages
Hundred billions of cells split, rest, split again. It happens everywhere, all the time, when space bodies collide, when people meet, and in the darkroom, when split filters create a single print. These are elements that come together in the story of the darkroom; the story of a father, his daughter and their family. In the darkroom, they make images from film. Images from adolescence, about times changing a family and society. And all the time human beings are being created and born. People coming to life as cells split. People dying as cells split malevolently. Mørkerom (Darkroom) is a story about belonging and about losing and missing that one glance that used to see you, and that fixed you to a film.
Through photography and memories, “Mette” tries to reconstruct the life of her father. From beginning to the day he died. With him, dies the sympathetic eyes that made her proud of whom she was, and that reminded her of the good in life. May she find back to herself through telling the story?
Darkroom is a novel about being seen and learning to see. It thematises memory, identity and family relations. The language is suitably sensitive, moulding out a story about beloved ones as mirrors in which one sees oneself, and about making art from darkness.