EVENTIDE by Therese Bohman. Other Press| April 2018| 191 pages | $15.95| ISBN: 978-159051-893-9

RATING: *****/5*

“She didn’t love Stockholm, and she probably never would. Every time someone said they loved Stockholm, she assumed they were lying. She regarded the city as a necessity, often an unpleasant one, but she also thought that everything it was accused of was probably true—snootiness, fearfulness, coldness, regimentation. She had never really felt at home here, but she had never really been unhappy either. Much the same could be said of her life as a whole.”

With an emphasis on culture and art, Eventide is a meditation on solitude, success and meaningfulness. Working in a male-dominated field, art history professor Karolina Andersson begins working as thesis advisor to a male student who claims to have discovered new works of art by a female artist in the early twentieth century. He’s attractive and intriguing to Karolina who recently ended a long relationship and finds herself wondering if she wasted her prime years with this man and if she’s even doing what will make her the most fulfilled. She’s plateaued in her career and doesn’t have as much interest in it as she had when she was younger. As a woman who also wasted many years in a bad relationship, who never married or had children and in her late 40s, I found myself completely commiserating with Karolina. Author Therese Bohman writes: “Her ability to emphasize quickly with other people was the quality that had most frequently led to her being hurt.” Or writes: “Maybe she actually was tragic, one step away from living in the gutter, wandering around the city in a woolly hat and shouting at people.” Or this: “She wanted to give her body to men who definitely didn’t deserve her mind.” The novel strongly traverses through academia and the art world while illuminating both the personal and professional life, desires and challenges for this woman. Society sometimes doesn’t know what to do with a woman of a certain age who failed to check off the boxes along the way. Bohman writes about educated, smart, disappointed single women over 40 so brilliantly that I’m a massive fan and will read anything she writes. I loved her novel The Other Woman and quickly devoured Eventide. I read it in a day in early January. Realistic, observant, dark and macabre in the best way, Eventide is a dazzling novel.