Seven women find themselves trapped in a kind of limbo. Really between life and death. The first part of the book describes their unearthly encounter. The second, recaps part of their life history, whether rape, gaining a new heart, experiencing a different form of Jewishness, starvation, being frozen in the snow, etc. the third part relates their descent into the abyss -- is it nothingness? the narrator changes through the story and not really parallel. Not an easy book to read, but reflects the unease on death much of the Western world feel. ( )

Oneiron has an interesting premise, and I was eager to launch into this book. The rambling prose, however, bogged me down, and I've been stuck halfway through. I figured I'd finally turn in a review. I'm going to give it another try, based on others' enjoyment of the book, and I'll update this when I make it to the end!

Some books leave me speechless at the end. I mean this quite literally. I’m not making a metaphorical “there are no words” comment about the quality of what I have just read. I am instead trying to report a physical phenomenon, a feeling in my throat and lungs that comes only rarely, just after a last sentence is read, and a book is closed, when I’m left with a dazzling void of complicated feeling that renders me mute. After a while the words come back, and my feelings about the book begin to shape themselves into language.

So here is this novel, Oneiron*. In it seven dead women find themselves together in a placeless place, a white void with only the clothes on their backs. At some point they notice they aren’t breathing. Not long after, they realize they are dead. They share their stories. They help one another. They bear witness to the one another’s final moments.These seven women are remarkable only in the way that every human being is remarkable. The stories of their final moments before death are haphazard and sometimes violent and always meaningless. They have nothing in common, not even a common language. But even so these women make themselves into a caring community, in this strange afterlife, where nothing is ever explained, either to these seven characters, or to the reader. As in real life, the characters, and through them the reader, need to take it on faith that their experiences have purpose.

Oneiron is one of those books that stunned me into silence at the end, and when words did come back, they were from I. Corinthians:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Oneiron is not a religious book. God has no place in the afterlife Lindstedt creates. I’m not a religious person. Yet somehow this novel embraces a life philosophy that reminded me of Paul’s teaching. The novel suggests that caring for others–even in the flawed ways these strangers reach out and care for one another after death–is the most vital motivating impulse that gives meaning to our lives.

For a novel in which everyone is dead, this is a remarkably life-affirming novel.

*from Greek ὄνειρον, oneiron, “dream” ( )

How to describe this book? Odd? Maybe. It is the imaginative story of seven unique women who are caught in a space somewhere between death and the final destination, wherever that may be. It is obvious all seven women have passed away but they themselves are not fully cognizant of that fact. They aren't even sure they know where they are except to say they are in a white room devoid of detail. Each woman has a thoroughly detailed personality and an elaborate past to match. More time is spent telling the reader where they have been instead of moving them forward to where they are going. It gets heavy at times. Certain scenes are graphic.

Disclaimer: I normally only chose two different types of books from LibraryThing for the Early Review Program: nonfiction and debut novels. For some reason, the premise of Oneiron (pronounced o.ne:.ron from the Greek, meaning dream) fascinated me: seven women meet in an undefined space only seconds after their deaths. They are in the space between life and afterlife. The don't understand this in-between world. ( )

In this odd, experimental novel from Finland, seven women find themselves together in a featureless white void, presumably after having died.

It's well-written, certainly as far as the prose goes, in a way that's a credit not just to the author, but also to the translator. And the characters are well realized, although some of them get a lot more attention that others. Really, it's mostly about Shlomith, an anorexic performance artist who starves herself and goes on stage naked to deliver lectures about Judaism, with the others' stories sort of dipped in and out of whenever we emerge from hers. She's not particularly enjoyable to read about, or at least she wasn't for me, but she is certainly well realized.

The structure and overall shape of the novel, though... Well, like I said, it's experimental. It wanders, abruptly changes voice or point of view or format, slips into long lectures, and skips back and forth in time. All of which is potentially interesting, and I found at least some parts of it involving, in their own odd ways, but I have to say that, as an experiment, it wasn't, for me, an entirely successful one. It brings up lots of topics, and touches on lots of themes -- feminism, religion, death -- but never really brings them together into anything that feels like a coherent whole, and never really got to me in any kind of deep way. There are things that I appreciate about it, but it just never quite snagged into my brain the way it feels like it's meant to, and I confess that I sometimes had trouble motivating myself to pick it up again after I'd put it down.

Rating: It's hard to rate something like this, but I'll call it 3.5/5. It probably deserves that much just for the prose quality. ( )