The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am

By Kjersti A. Skomsvold. Translated from the Norwegian by Kerri A. Pierce. Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. 147pp. $17.95.

Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a brief yet riveting glimpse into the life of a lonely and fearful old woman named Mathea Martinsen.

Nobody notices Mathea; in fact, nobody has ever noticed Mathea. She doesn’t leave her apartment much, and she didn’t really talk to anybody except for her husband, Epsilon, who is now dead. As she puts it, “It’s possible that my next-door neighbors, June and his mother, know I exist,” but “even if they do, they won’t miss me when I’m gone.” Wanting to be noticed, but scared of everyone, Mathea comes close to interaction but shies away at the last second. She reads flyers on the bulletin board but has to stop halfway down to flee back to the safety of her apartment. Incapable of opening jam jars, she nonetheless buys jam in the hope of asking the cashier to open it for her, but never can work up the courage. As she reads the obituaries in the morning, she thinks, “an obituary would be proof of my existence,” but fears death as much as she fears life.

Skomsvold does a great job of maintaining Mathea’s unique and quirky voice throughout the novel, a voice which is as funny as it is anxious, alternating between lyricism, comedy, and statements which hint at the darker undercurrent at the center of the tale. At times, Mathea is grating, and she does not change much over the course of the story. Likewise, there is not much of a plot to The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am. The “one extraordinary thing” that Mathea can “brag” about is that she “was struck by lightning once” but then again “it was the lightning that struck me, after all, and not the other way around.” Mathea is not the most reliable narrator, and at times the story is hard to follow. Luckily, the book is short, and any reader fascinated by the absurdity of human experience will not find it difficult to push past any confusion.

The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a haunting meditation on the life of the woman you pass on the street without looking at closely.