Alice in Suburbia
Inger Bråtveit
Original title: Alice A4
Publisher: Forlaget Oktober, 2015
Pages: 237 pages
Alice in Suburbia shows through language and content that falling in love has its own, absurd logic and that the ways of love are inscrutable. Bråtveit writes with intensity about gender, class, power and rage.
Alice lives in a block of flats in a suburb with her mother and sister. She yearns to escape from her roots, which she feels are holding her back from all her longings. She meets someone she believes can take her to another world, and together they drive the Autobahn in search for Wonderland.
Alice in Suburbia unfolds in a creative, mythological and illogical dialogue with Lewis Caroll’s children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865.) In Bråtveit’s novel, Alice is a young girl on the threshold of adulthood. Alice hopes and believes she found her first, great love, only to lose it and find herself again. As Alice grows older, she fights, with fierce determination, to free herself from this love. Only to find herself, once again, imprisoned within her illusion of liberation.