Karolina Andersson is a newly-single 40-something art professor at the University of Stockholm. Much of her identity goes against the societal norm: she’s comfortable being single, fights against the bottled ideas her co-workers continue to teach, and believes in a higher power–even if that power is the art she loves to study.

We see academia, not as something to be revered, but for the reality of what it is: just another job. Through Karolina, we see whatever elitism civilians might believe exists in academia is stripped away. To this extent, feminism, too, is questioned: its definition, its place in academia, and the way feminism (or any ism) is understood by Karolina’s male co-workers and students.

It’s not just a study of academia we see through Karolina’s eyes, however. Relationships play a major aspect in Eventide. Karolina’s relationship with her parents, her past (a fling with a friend from her hometown), the future (through her relationship with her PhD advisee), and the double standards by women are held to. In work and outside of it, Karolina encounters men who are her age or older, single and in relationships, being given chances to have everything in life they could ever want.

Eventide is not an easy read if only because of how Bohman makes the reader question their own views on society, societal pressures, and feminism’s effect on these. Karolina is pre-occupied with breaking the traditional mold while still trying to navigate pressures programmed into her by biology. Children, preserving apperances–these are things that women are programmed to want either by their own body or from the way they’re brought up. No matter what, every day–every choice–is a battle to make normal what isn’t.

Thought-provoking and entertaining, Eventide is not your average summer read. Like its heroine, it stands out among its peers not only for its beauty, but for the way it challenges the status quo in literary fiction.

This is an honest, open and complex book and encompasses the daily thoughts the people have, through the main character, Professor Karoline Anderssen. This book shows that life is not always exciting, but that a woman can take charge, and do what she wants to make it exciting. It shows what happens when people question their life and the lifestyle they have been living. It is about impulse and complex relationships.

I liked the story and the book. It's not as easy as the summary suggests: most of it consists of the thoughts and meanderings and happenings around the lead character and her thoughts on the happenings. None of it is exciting or revelatory: but that is exactly the point: life is dull, a cycle and Andersson is adrift, lost in that dullness wanting to believe in something, something, anything that gives meaning to her life - personal or professional. That's the way I understood it. Art and artistic impression, critique and value is a character in itself since a lot of it is discussed too.. Early on, Karoline Andersson, Professor of Art, describes the University of Stockholm's Art building where she works as one of 'snootiness, fearfulness, coldness, regimentation; - she may as well be describing herself! Does she break free or remain stuck? Read and find out!


Some of the quotes/ passages I liked:

- “Karolina, Lennart intoned in his authoritative, unconsciously patriarchal manner, the history of art is a compost heap, particularly when it comes to women. The only thing we can is start digging. Sometimes we find something valuable, but unfortunately the rest of the time there’s nothing but dung.”

- He looked at her as if he had said something incredibly significant. She nodded.Certain flowers created their own seed bank, which was a fascinating thought. The seeds of Geranium lanuginosum can grow only after a forest fire; they lie dormant in the ground, and are activated by the beat when a blaze rages through the trees. It is not known how long they can wait, but viable seeds have been found in places where there hasn’t been a fire for several hundred years.

It was so well-organized that it was hard not to have faith in a god; she often felt that way when she thought about nature. Everything was calibrated to such a degree of perfection that it was almost impossible to believe that someone hadn’t planned it all, that it wasn’t the result of meticulous and extensive calculations.
But time was god. Those timescales so dizzyingly vast that she was incapable of understanding them: they had fine tuned nature into a single, immense and smoothly functioning system where everything had its place in a greater order, everything had a function, everything ate and was eaten, working together, forming a chain. This system had been shaped over an unimaginable period of time, tested during the course of millions of years. Anything that didn’t work went under, was kicked out. The day forest fires no longer happened, for some reason, Geranium lanuginosum would die out, as almost all species had done before it. Of the life that once exited on our planet, 99.9 percent is extinct. species tat were poorly adapted to the circumstances in which they lived were slowly wound down, went under, were forgotten.

Lock me away in the seed bank in Svalbard, she thought. And don’t let me out until I ca cope with living a normal life.

- Perhaps this was her forest fire, she thought. All through the fall, one long, low-intensity baptism of fire. But it wouldn’t break her, even if it had felt that way while it was going on. She would emerge from this ready for something new, just like Geranium lanuginosum.

- How stupid for her to regard the fact that Anton had been allocated to her as some kind of justice, to think that it would put things right, restore the balance in her life, compensate for everything that had gone wrong. Life didn’t work out that way.

On the surface, this book seemed to be yet another middle-aged professor has relationship with student narrative, with the flipped gender script. But I'm glad I read to the end, because I felt like it was much more than that.

Karolina is an art professor, recently divorced, and living in a tiny apartment. She starts to question what she is doing with her life, and along the way there are some encounters that felt very real, even the conversation with the colleague down the hall who can barely give her the time of day because his ego takes up so much of the room. She enters into a fling with a PhD student with very little thought, just an impulse really, and then realizes why that might have happened (and it isn't as flattering as one would hope; if you were looking for a steamy professor-student romance this is not your book)....

I appreciated the exploration of where women truly are in society now. Has feminism freed us? Are we still tied to whether or not a man wants to have babies with us? What is feminism in art? Is it focusing on obscure female artists or is it something more? Can a female art professor have a focus other than that and what would that be? What is her value and how do others see her? Should she entertain the blue collar boy from her childhood and give up on the life she has created? Where would the meaning be found? Where is satisfaction?

Hmm, I feel I've given a lot away, but not how she discovers these questions, or how she answers them. It was a resonant read for me.

This story focuses on Karolina Andersson. She is a (recently) single woman in her forties. She is an art history professor at Stockholm University.

I got sucked into the story early on. It is almost like you are a voyeur on Karolina’s life. The author does a great job at keeping it on simmer in terms of the reader not being sure what exactly is going to happen next. There is a feeling of tension, in a good way, in the writing.

The book is about art and life. But mostly I think it’s about examining how a 40’s career woman with no children fits in to society. Karolina struggles with this in the book. There are a lot of should have/would have thoughts rolling around in her head. Would she have been happier as a housewife and mother living in her childhood town? What is going to fulfill her in a relationship? I think these are answered (“answered”) in a realistic way. I won’t spoil it and tell you how.

The other thing that the author does well is captures the mundane-ness of every day life. Go to work. Come home. Make dinner. Sleep. Repeat. That for me is what helps make Karolina’s existential crisis more real.

I want to say that if you like psychological drama then you will like this, but that’s not quite the right description of this book. If you are looking for something that is well written, asks interesting and important questions, then this is your read. Also, as a bonus you get to learn a lot about Stockholm.

I gave it a 4/5 star rating on Goodreads.

Full disclosure: I received this eARC from NetGalley for a fair and honest review. (Thanks NetGalley!)

What happens when you're a woman who chooses to focus on her career during her thirties, instead of doing what biology dictates - finding a mate and having babies?

If you're Karolina, professor of Art in a Stockholm university, you drink too much. You feel deep loneliness. You find yourself isolated from other women, who have lives you don't understand. You feel a desperation when a man gives you attention and you experience the walk of shame more times than you'd like to admit. You play second fiddle to your lover's wife and baby-mama.

Karolina has always been attractive to men, but at forty, she senses an impending doom. She's fascinated with periods in history just before their ruin, the 'halcyon days'. In many ways, this is how she sees herself, just about to become a ruined woman that no one will want. No longer physically attractive, no longer biologically ripe, she will soon have nothing to offer.

This thoughtful, melancholic story brings up many good questions about women's choices, how biology shapes them, and what defines a full, successful life. It is also a meditation on loneliness that should be relatable to many women.

I appreciated this novel for its many artistic references. I especially enjoyed discovering German symbolist Franz von Stuck, who is known for paintings of women with snakes. This image isn't unique in art history. There are other artists who have featured fallen Eve with her coiled seductor, newly ashamed at her nakedness. But von Stuck's women are bold, and show no shame for their sexuality. The phallic serpent may be coiled around her, but it's clear that she 'owns' it.

I can't help but think that women like Karolina who live lives differently from the 'norm' - wife, mother, monogamist - struggle to find such a defiant, brave face. But when they do, it's hard to look away.

Karolina Andersson is a Professor of Art in Stockholm. She is in her forties and recently ended a long relationship. Karolina moved into a small apartment and felt somewhat deflated about the state of her professional and personal life. Academic politics frustrate the professor, and she has little patience with a doctoral student who shows up, unannounced, after little communication, from a year in Berlin. Anton details his work, Karolina thinks it is a listless account of a little-known painter from the twentieth century. Anton breezes in and out, feeling a bit too overconfident of himself and his work. Karolina is not at all pleased with the young man.

Karolina is unhappy about having spent eleven years with a man who was not a soulmate. It took little effort to end the relationship, on both sides. Now, Karolina is wondering why she put so much effort into her career, preventing a route of a settled relationship with a man and a family. Karolina is not at all a stereotypical unattached female of the intellectual class; she uses alcohol and sex to numb the feelings of loneliness and disappointment. The sexual affairs are brief and most often not satisfying.

Karolina isn't required to teach but likes to present her introductory lecture to new students in the fall. The course is a survey of paintings of females from the earliest of times to the present. The slides she shows the students range from a woman as a passive thing of beauty to a hellacious monster sitting on a pile of tiny people that turn out to be male corpses. Karolina is on to something. I enjoyed the brilliance of Therese Bohman's writing in a slim volume covering the gender wars in a satisfying story.

This book is essentially about a lonely woman looking for a relationship or some sort of deep connection with someone especially after a break-up with her long term boyfriend. She finds herself drowning in her work, drinking over the weekend (or at nights), and looking at her friends' social media. Doesn't this sound relatable?

To be honest, I cannot relate to the protagonist, however I can see how it could be relatable for others. Despite her success, she still was inevitably plagued by loneliness. It seems as though she has yet to experience some kind of happiness (she had a dreary pov) except those times with the person whom she thought was her happy ending. I might be wrong because I got confused. Basically, this book is confusing and not relatable for me. I don't think I'm qualified to review this.

During her teaching career, she encounters a grad student whom in my opinion is a manic pixie dream boy. He kind of wakes Karolina's sexuality. He's smart, opinionated, good looking, and pretentious. He acts like he truly knows what he's doing and he only shows up whenever he felt like it. As if the first day of university wasn't the right time for him to show up. Anyway, he meets up with Karolina when he decides to pitch his thesis in person. I think he's (probably) Karolina's type of guy especially since he was not like any of her exes. I can't help but cringe during those scenes where she *sort of* checks him out. The age gap made me uncomfortable so I had to DNF this book at some point.

However, I can certainly see why Karolina acts that way. She is 40 years old and there really is no time to be cautious, alone, and guarded with her emotions. She's lonely and she can do whatever she wants. Karolina is unapologetic, and I believe this book also celebrates female sexuality. The most interesting parts in this book were the art history associated with the job of the protagonist.

I would still recommend this to specific people but it's not everyone.

She had, however, quickly grown accustomed to the pitying looks that said: “Women in their forties don’t dump their partner. You’ve really made a mess of things now.”

Karoline Andersson, art history professor at Stockholm University, has ended her 11 relationship with her partner, growing accustomed to living alone once again. In a period of ‘aimless confusion’, she meets a young post-graduate student Anton Strömberg whom brings to her attention a female artist Ebba Ellis, whose art was erotic, prolific and progressive for her time. Not only that, he claims to have letters and this could be a big break in the world of visual arts. Anton’s confidence is infectious, his youth alluring. Life once seemed to have a sort of purpose with her ex Karl, that soon became a sort of apathy. Now she is adjusting to loneliness and missing that which she shed. The time is ripe to forge ahead, to dig into her work. She’s always felt her best absorbed in her career, less ‘crowded’. There is competitiveness in her field, and she encounters the smug arrogance of one Lennart. Irritated that things require his interest and approval to be ‘worthy’ she is delighted when she has the upper hand with Anton.

Anton and Karoline’s interest in each other goes beyond the Ellis discoveries. Karoline feels illuminated by Anton’s attention, his youth awakens her, and the attraction between them is intoxicating. That he chose her, over all the younger women he could easily have, proves she isn’t immune to that flattery. If everything is a game, what is her position? Is she safe from deception, betrayal, humiliation? Trouble could follow being involved with someone so young.

This is a story about a woman who never had children, isn’t married and whose entire life has been about work over creating a family. A life of poorly chosen affairs with different types of men and feeling adrift, tired of games in career and her personal life. There is a distance, though, that Karoline feels with men and in many ways the reader too experiences in trying to understand why Karoline is so crushed by life. In her feelings of forced shame, for being unattached, one wonders why it has to be an issue for the rest of the world at all? Karoline opens her eyes, and ‘life goes on.’

It isn’t a novel to make you feel uplifted, and the young hate relating to women like her because they may well fear going through men and life on auto-pilot, aging out, being fooled, disappointed. Who wants to stew in that when you’re fresh with the blush of youth? As to the rest of us, a little more chewed on by the world, Karoline can seem somewhat familiar.

Publication Date: April 10. 2018

Other Press
By bookstalkerblogi

A lovely wisp of a novel, Eventide was a quick and enjoyable read. I really liked Karolina, and all of the art history explainers. A beautiful story about accepting life in middle age, after a separation. Also a wonderful twist at the end!

character study. A bit dark, a bit maudlin. Set in Sweden, a sad story about a lonely woman professor. A bit cringeworthy at times.

Kristina Andersson is an art professor at Stockholm University. She has recently broken up with her long time boyfriend and in her forties is questioning her life choices. While we readers are mainly inside her head, there is a plot involving a PhD student she is supervising. University politics and the dynamics of human relationships along with some art history are the major themes which I thoroughly enjoyed.

A very realistic novel about Karolina Andersson, who finds herself suddenly single and childless in her early forties. She's an art professor at a university in Stockholm, a job she enjoys greatly.

This was a very compelling novel about trying to find a purpose to one's life.

Its realism left me a tad sad, but I appreciated Threrese Bohman's writing and ability to portray a very complex character.

This book wasn't what I expected. I thought I was going to find something touching and intimate. A feminine novel about what it meant to be a women in the circumstances as stated in the book description. But sadly it turned out I found the main character very whiny and pretentious. Reading this and not being a pro about Swedish art history made me want to skip lots and lots of parts. I just couldn't fully understand what was completely implied in the dialogues. Also I thought the character habit of judging what someone would be sexually with arbitrary facts was insufferable.
I think I just might not have been the right public for this one.

Another one for my international reading catalog. Sweden this time. A story of an art professor in her 40s who becomes unmoored following a dissolution of an eleven year long relationship. She starts reevaluating her life, priorities, choices, etc. particularly as far as romantic attachments go. She goes from one unsuitable love affair to another, she drinks too much, she wallows. That's about it. There is an actual plot there involving a very attractive graduate student with a very attractive research project, but mainly this is a character study. The protagonist is in every scene and the readers are inside her brain exclusively, single POV sort of thing. For what it is it's good, especially if you're in a mood for something deliberately maudlin, but for such an exclusive character engagement the character doesn't really engage that much. She's sorry for herself and you'll probably be sorry for her, but it's all very much a one note performance, albeit well played or as the case may be here well written. For me the most interesting aspects of this novel were the research subjects, mostly art, with some bizarre experiments thrown in. Ended up looking up some of the art and artists, so learned something new, which is always great. And the book isn't that long either, read in one day. Thanks Netgalley.

The lives of women are full of ambivalent choices: career or family, love or security, confident risk or self-preservation? Eventide explores these dilemmas as faced by Karolina Andersson, a professor of art recently separated from a long-term relationship and now on her own in a small apartment, wondering if her entire life, both professionally and personally, has been a waste.

Karolina is attracted to many different men, most recently her postgraduate student who exudes an irresistible confidence and may have discovered a link between artists previously unknown in the art world. This discovery is tempts Karolina into a dangerous relationship, and leads her to choose either devastation or liberation. Eventide is not plot-driven, but is rather a thoughtful character study of a woman who feels powerless and at the same time is craftily manipulative of others. It is intelligent and empowering.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Other Press for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Thanks to #NetGalley for the ARC of Eventide. For me, this was a mixed bag. It's refreshing to find a realistic protagonist whose life is far from perfect, and Bohman captures her well. I got a little tired of Karolina's poor choices, however, and found her rather desparate attempt to define herself through men annoying. Ending up skimming through the last part, hoping to see some type of growth in her character, but was disappointed by the ending.

I just couldn't get in to this. It seemed to move very slowly. I didn't finish it.