Abortion with a Knitting Needle – a Norwegian cult novel by Torborg Nedreaas from 1947

Reading this early feminist classic from 1947 could be even more gripping were it not for its rather clumsy plot: In a Norwegian port city, a man recounts his nighttime encounter with a woman who goes straight home with him and tells the complete stranger her life story. She talks in a cascade for an entire night and half a day, talking about her existential struggles as the daughter of a mining family, her heartbreak, and, in graphic detail, her unwanted pregnancies. Afterward, she disappears from the apartment of the astounded listener and actual narrator, who has been searching for her in vain "for thirteen days."

The works of Torborg Nedreaas (1906–1987) are part of the Norwegian canon of political-literary feminism, which is characterized by the struggle between class and gender, particularly through the cult novel "Nothing Grows in the Moonlight," which has also been made into a film and translated into many languages. It was first published in German in 1972, significantly in the GDR, and is now available in a new translation by Gabriele Haefs, who conveys the plight of proletarian women with effective dryness, but admittedly cannot alter the simplistic narrative situation of the original.

The novel's vehicle gets going slowly with its schematic narrative within the narrative, and the fact that it even invokes Boccaccio as a model doesn't help matters. But after a somewhat tedious first half, the book finally picks up speed and creates an elemental pull from the adversities of a woman's life, caught between financial hardship and love. The now 38-year-old nameless woman recounts how she struggled to escape the mining milieu where the men die of "black lung" and the women "from exhaustion or abdominal diseases."

But she, too, will never fully escape this vale of tears. As a young girl, she falls hopelessly in love with her teacher, a perfectly good man who quickly becomes a nasty bourgeois when he learns of her pregnancy. He doubts his paternity but gives her money for an illegal abortion. However, her bitter love for him isn't so easily erased; it's not as simple as "scraping out the uterus." She doesn't let go, woos him again, and becomes pregnant again before he finally leaves her and marries a good bourgeois daughter.

The desperate young woman temporarily settles for a dreary traveling salesman, then befriends another eccentric, the local alcoholic communist and organist, "a bitter champion of the wretched of this earth." She also occasionally has contact with her family; her little brother is now "a joyless, hard laborer of fourteen years"; her sister has also "lost a fetus." From then on, her life revolves primarily around the unhappiness in her womb, which harbors "a little tyrant."

The last quarter of the novel "Nothing Grows in the Moonlight" is a real spectacle. The narrative rhythm is dictated by the woman's reflection on her raging fear of new pregnancies and of mistreating her own body. "Having to do violence to myself. Or take my own life." Finally, she goes about her business in her own way, "the murder weapon, a knitting needle," with which she must find "the right spot" and, after "more, more, more pressing, find a new spot," this time too, "certainly not the right one." It goes on like this for several pages – and no rickety narrative framework or class-struggle sappiness can ruin the impact and shock of this story.

Almost eighty years ago, the novel must have been particularly shocking, but even today it still makes us think about the injustice of biology or creation, about the poor distribution of certain responsibilities within the human race.

Torborg Nedreaas: Nothing Grows in the Moonlight. Novel. Translated from the Norwegian by Gabriele Haefs. Luchterhand-Verlag, Munich 2025. 304 pp., Fr. 33.90.