I like beginnings, she thinks. Sitting in the plane seat, the row to herself.
It’s late. The sun was still up when she presented her boarding pass at Gardermoen Airport. Perhaps I prefer prologues, she muses. Best of all I like the suggestion, the vague or less vague promise about what is to come. Then I just want it all – the promises of what is in store, the hope, the vision, the idea, and then I want it to stop before the continuation, and later the disappointment, sets in. I just want to start and start and start, she thinks, to sit on the plane to, always to sit on the plane to, always to travel to something new.
A young girl moves to Paris to study and write. While she is waiting for the beginning to continue, she meets him – an elegant and seemingly worldly boy with an Algerian background who has grown up in a suburb of Paris. He has well-meaning eyes, and may be able to provide her with a foundation and a sense of peace. The city sucks her in, but rejects her at the same time. Her bank account diminishes steadily, winter never ends, and in her apartment mice scramble and crawl. Her anguish and desperation increase, the silence grows between the lovers, and she starts dreaming of disappearing.
Crowding is a concise and intense novel about powerful yearning and an agonising love. With empathy and a distinctive lightness, Kathrine Nedrejord conjures up the growing desperation in a young girl’s mind.
