From the PR: “When Liv, Ellen and Håkon, along with their partners and children, arrive in Rome to celebrate their father’s seventieth birthday, a quiet earthquake occurs: their parents have decided to divorce.

Shocked and disbelieving, the siblings try to come to terms with their parents’ decision as it echoes through the homes they have built for
themselves, and forces them to reconstruct the shared narrative of their childhood and family history.

A bittersweet novel of regret, relationships and rare psychological insights, A Modern Family encourages us to look at the people closest to
us a little more carefully, and ultimately reveals that it’s never too late for change…”

This post is late. A lesson in writing down passwords before you change computers, not a reflection on my enjoyment of this novel.

A literary exploration of family and personal relationships in a style and narrative that brings to mind Jonathan Franzen’s mighty The Corrections, with a unique and charming Norwegian flavour, Helga Flatland’s A Modern Family is a real accomplishment of a novel.

Unassuming and quietly powerful, Flatand’s prose is very much of the to-be-savoured type, a real delight. Take the opening paragraph as an example: “The Alpine peaks resemble shark’s teeth, jutting upwards through the dense layer of cloud that enshrouds Central Europe as if the creature’s jaws are eternally prepared to clamp down. The mountaintops force the wind in various directions, pulling at the plane from all angles, and we’re so small here, all in a row, the backs of heads in front of me shuddering in unison.”

Praise too should go to Rosie Hedger for her translation work here and capturing the poetry in Flatland’s prose.

There’s a real power in this poetry, though, as A Modern Family tackles some heavy subject matter – our own sense of identity in a relationship, the importance of family and connection, the nature and importance of commitment  and how we cope when our perspective of the world is changed by means outside of our own control.

On a personal level, I was nearing the end of my teens when my parents divorced and, even when viewed some two decades on,  I found a real sense of truth in Liv’s narratives as she struggles to find her place in a world where the reliable and fixed is no longer – has everything to this point been a lie?

As the eldest of my siblings, I also very much appreciated the split-narrative approach employed by Helga Flatland – extremely effective in highlighting both the complexities of family relationships and just how easy it is to get lost in your own point of view own a matter given how one event can be seen and felt in several different ways. And, of course, the warm humour that runs throughout.

Yet I’m pretty sure that you don’t need to have any personal frame of reference to appreciate A Modern Family – Helga Flatland’s novel is a compelling and nuanced peek into modern family life and drama that manages to focus on some important questions without ever feeling like it’s trying to push an agenda. A snapshot that could be of any family – much like Ibsen’s doll house, the clue is very much in the indefinite article – this novel serves as a peak at a modern family tackling some universal dilemmas and is most definitely worth a read or two.

My thanks, and apologies for lateness, to Karen at Orenda for my copy of A Modern Family and to Anne Cater for asking me to take part in this BlogTour.