Writing the Northwest

ELITA: An Engrossing First Novel Brings Nordic Noir to the Pacific Northwest

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Where the light hits it, the water blanches waxy and pale gray, but in the shadow of the boat it is deep jade green in shallow spots and midnight blue in deeper ones. The breeze kicks up the clean, briny smell of it, and Bernadette finds herself breathing full breaths, something in her head already unkinking out here away from the city. (p. 44)

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Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrums engrossing and beautifully written new novel, Elita, opens in 1951 with the frightening discovery of a seemingly wild girl on the rugged outskirts of a prison island in Puget Sound. But Lunstrum doesn’t deliver the tense scene—in which the girl bares her teeth and fights to keep two prison workers from tying her up—in the you-are-there way most authors might.

Instead, she puts us in a dark library room where her main character, Bernadette Baston, a university lecturer in child psychology, is listening to a tape of the workers describing what happened.

Lunstrum’s approach tells us immediately that this is a story of mystery more than certainty, perception more than truth, contemplation more than action.

With a specialty in language acquisition, Bernadette has been hired to teach the seemingly mute child to speak, but she is more interested in furthering her own research by merely observing the girl’s development. This puts her at odds with the child welfare case manager who hired her, Nora Reach, who has her own agenda.

As others weigh in with self-serving ideas on what should be done with the girl—the warden at the prison where she’s being kept, the prison’s doctor, the police detective assigned to the case—we begin to wonder if anyone really cares about the child herself.

Whatever her feelings or motives, Bernadette begins to search for the truth about the girl’s origins. Her probing leads her to a nearby island inhabited by an insular Scandinavian immigrant community whose furtive ways suggest a larger, darker story than Bernadette is prepared for.

Atalanta. Marble, 1703-1705. Copy of Ma 52, a Roman copy after a Hellenistic original, in the Louvre (image from Wikipedia)

But the mystery of the wild child—dubbed Atalanta after a girl in Greek mythology “left by her father to die in the woods because she was not born a son”—is only one of two main stories Lunstrum has to tell. The other is about Bernadette herself, whose life is tenuous in every way. Not only is her connection to the Atalanta case based on a misconception, but her position at the state university in Seattle is temporary rather than permanent, and her vision of herself as the sole loving parent for her four-year-old daughter, Willie, becomes threatened when her absent husband suddenly returns.

What develops is an intertwined exploration of the place and agency of girls and women in the male-dominated post-war world—and, by extension, our world today. Every direction Bernadette turns, she faces barriers caused by an assumption of male privilege and a perception of women as weaker in every way, including emotionally.

Lunstrum seems particularly interested in the ways motherhood defines and shapes a woman’s outlook and interactions, not only with children but also with the patriarchal matrix someone like Bernadette is forced to navigate.

Late in the book, Lunstrum writes about Bernadette: “She’s always liked the idea that language is the house in which one dwells, and the windows of that house are the glass through which one sees the outside world. Now she sees that motherhood, too, is a kind of language.”

Along with the stories it tells, Elita investigates the efficacy of language, the supposed verities of identity formation, and the impacts of living in a remote region like the Northwest.

Photo by Nick Bolton on Unsplash

The novel’s jacket copy describes Elita as “Nordic Noir, imported to the moody shores of the Pacific Northwest and the eerie social landscape of 1950s America.” According to Wikipedia, “Nordic noir…is typically set in bleak landscapes. This results in a dark and morally complex mood, in which a tension is depicted between the apparently still and bland social surface and the patterns of murder, misogyny, rape, and racism the genre depicts as lying underneath.”

While Elita doesn’t descend as far into that underbelly as other books in the genre (such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), it definitely explores the stultifying and sometimes dangerous experiences of capable women living in the shadows of entitled men.

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Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of three short story collections, one of which, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Elita is her first novel. She lives with her family near Seattle.

Elita will be published on January 15, 2025, by Northwestern University Press/Triquarterly Books and launched with an author event at The Edmonds Bookshop at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 16.

To pre-order a copy of Elita, click here. For more about the book, the author, and Lunstrum’s appearance schedule, go to kirstensundberglunstrum.com.

Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining WritingtheNorthwest.com.


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