As someone whose life has been lightly dictated by her fitness watch for the past several years, the plight of Iðunn, the character at the heart of Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest, is chilling: when she wakes up in the morning, her watch tells her she’s walked over 40,000 steps—and she doesn’t remember a single one of them. Unfortunately for Iðunn, but fortunately for readers of this unsettling book, crushing that step goal is only the beginning.
For weeks now, Iðunn has been waking up more tired than when she goes to sleep, and the fitness watch was a purchase made as a semi-last resort after a friend tells her getting enough exercise will help her sleep better and have more energy. But the thousands of mystery steps aren’t the worst part. There’s the blood under her fingernails she’s pretty sure isn’t hers, and injuries she doesn’t remember getting. Locking herself in her room, in her apartment, does nothing. The sleeping pills she gets from the doctor aren’t working, and the only suggestion from the psychologist she sees next is to check herself into a hospital.
Meanwhile, her personal life continues to grate on her. Her ex-situationship, the very married Stefan, wants to resume where they left off, no matter what she says. A new man, Már, knew and was clearly captivated by Iðunn’s sister in college, before her death. Her parents, also still grieving, appear to confuse Iðunn with their assumptions of what her sister might be doing now had she lived. Iðunn herself is pretty sure she isn’t living the life she’d want if she weren’t now an only child. She knows her problem of too many steps makes her sound crazy, so she has to hide that, too. But is she hiding it out of shame, or out of fear of what her other, nighttime self is doing? And why are there so many cats disappearing from her neighborhood?
From reading the premise of The Night Guest, I assumed this would have notes of, at least, if not be a 21st-century take on, the Dancing Princesses fairy tale. This is not so. Rather, it’s an unsettling story about who we are when our own backs are turned. In an era of butt-dialing, sleep-texting, Ambien Tweets, and the unofficial but far-reaching Mysterious Leg-Bruise Club, it’s a relatable fear. It’s clearly one that transcends national borders—considering Knútsdóttir’s native Iceland—and translation—here, courtesy of Mary Robinette Kowal. Easily conveyed, too, is the claustrophobia of Iðunn’s anxiety-ridden baseline long before she became sleep deprived and waking up with someone else’s blood on her hands.
The Night Guest is brief and Iðunn a woman of few words (but a lot of anxieties, and deservedly so), and it uses that brevity to its advantage. There are a hundred chapters across less than 180 pages, and many of them are only a few sentences long, or less. Somehow, those are the chapters that pack the most punch and most tangibly convey Iðunn’s increasingly distressing situation. Consider chapter 42: “I wake up with seaweed in my hair and black sand between my toes.” Not far from that chapter, she decides she can’t face a clue, only to change her mind—in another single-sentence chapter—just pages later. But it was her recounting of the night’s injuries about a third of the way through that first made me gasp, that first really communicated how determined her other self is—and how much trouble her waking self is in.
That same brevity means The Night Guest doesn’t overstay its welcome. It does not, however, also linger on its ending, and I had to read the final chapters a few times for their meaning to fully sink in. (This is by far a short enough book that you can reread it immediately, if you really want to get that sweet, sweet context.) Still, Iðunn leads us there, one sure step at a time, even if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it at all.
Ring Reads 