My Friend Natalia by Laura Lindstedt

Published in Finland in 2019; published in translation by W.W. Norton & Co./Liveright Publishing on March 23, 2021

My Friend Natalia is a novel of therapy, told from the perspective of an unnamed therapist whose gender is never explicitly identified (I’ll call the therapist “she” for the sake of convenience). Natalia is the therapist’s patient. Her name probably isn’t Natalia; she encouraged the therapist to tell her story so the therapist is apparently preserving confidentiality when she says “Let’s call her Natalia.” As the title suggests, the therapist comes close to crossing professional boundaries, although it’s not entirely clear that she really regards Natalia as a friend. She does, however, allow Natalia to masturbate on her office couch during one of the therapy sessions, which is a pretty friendly thing to do. Natalia makes clear that she has a sexual attraction to her therapist, but it isn’t unusual for Natalia to feel a sexual attraction to the people in her life.

Natalia is pursuing therapy to address her obsession with sex. It’s all she ever thinks about. Sex is interesting, so Natalia’s stories about her sex life are interesting. They aren’t particularly titillating, so My Friend Natalia doesn’t work as porn, notwithstanding two impressive sketches of a penis and vagina that Natalia creates for her therapist. Nor are they particularly enlightening, as I doubt that Natalia’s personal experiences can be generalized in a productive way. The therapist draws conclusions — “Natalia went through both men and words as a way of masking her own vulnerability” — that might be more insightful than Natalia’s stories of sexuality unbound.

The therapy sessions are based on story-telling exercises, in which Natalia must invent stories that incorporate key words provided by the therapist. Natalia is loquacious. Her stories cover the chosen words like spilled water, flowing along multiple paths, seemingly at random, one element giving birth to a tangent that flows seamlessly into another. Natalia begins a story with a pornographic comic that she encountered in her childhood, then veers into a lecture on Sartre’s view of women as holes, discusses cinematic technique, and relates memories of her father peeling potatoes before she explains how her discovery of a woman’s buried body turned out to be something quite different .She discusses feminism. She ponders whether it is better to be a head without a body or a body without a head (she chooses the latter because a head can’t masturbate).

Laura Lindstedt’s prose is graceful and imaginative. I enjoyed her description of an erection as “a plea for the waiting to end.” Still, I think it likely that the novel’s meaning eluded me. A fair amount of attention is paid to a work of art hanging on the therapist’s wall called “Ear-Mouth,” a work that once belonged to Natalia’s grandmother. It disturbs her to see it on the therapist’s wall. It disturbs the therapist that Natalia perches an alarm clock on her belly during the sessions, keeping her own track of time. What does any of that mean? I don’t have a clue. Some of the story’s moments are sufficiently bizarre that they amuse, but I imagine there is more to the story than amusement. The ending sort of trails away. As is generally true of talk therapy, no obvious self-awareness ensues, although Natalia claims to have changed. Perhaps my inability to give My Friend Natalia more than a middling recommendation is my fault, but I can only bring what I have to the table, and what I have is confusion.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS