The Nursery, Szilvia Molnar
The Nursery presents a de-romanticised version of newfound motherhood and the post-labour experience. In a sharply written stream of thought, we follow an unnamed narrator struggling to embrace her new identity, navigate her changing relationship with her body, and closely bond with her newborn. The baby girl is referred to as ‘Button’ throughout to keep her as an unnamed ‘other’ in the eyes of the reader – a choice that elevates the atmosphere of heightened tension Molnar creates between mother and daughter.
The new mother’s story is broken into bitesize chapters as she recounts the days directly after giving birth. She gives us all the visceral details of her experiences with her post-labour body and of grappling with dark thoughts, a fear of the outside world, and an emotional disconnect with her husband as he returns to work outside the protective womb of their flat. Peppered throughout is a subtle reckoning with gendered expectations of shared heterosexual parenthood, as she navigates the new terrain of her relationship and an unspoken reduction to a childbearing body.
The narrator is a translator and she playfully explores the language of motherhood in her native Swedish and in English, including lists of frenetic Google searches that allow us to access her frantic state of mind as the days pass. She relates the invisible work of the translator, who carefully nurtures a new version of a text into existence, to the attentive and intimate act of the mother with her newborn baby – a parallel I found fascinating. Her commentary that translation is all about individual representation that depends on the translator can be applied to the urgently refreshing way she personally portrays a time of life that is often overly gold-tinged in fictional retellings. That is, becoming a mother, while she’s still becoming a person.
The only presence that breaks our narrator’s loneliness is her elderly upstairs neighbour Peter who, accompanied by his oxygen tank and monosyllabic grumblings, begins visiting and keeping her company each day. Molnar ties together the start and end of life in an atmosphere of vulnerability and dependency on human connection.
Overall, this book shares an unforgettable and strikingly real portrayal of motherhood. Though I haven’t experienced this myself, I felt completely enveloped into the darkly captivating world Molnar creates.
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