Still Waters

Camilla Noli’s novel about a cold, narcissistic personality is not pleasant reading. It is, of course, a tall order to write about a woman whose will to power is so all-consuming that she is prepared to kill her children to reassert her need for control. Narrated in the first person, it is quickly apparent that the speaker is hardly sane. Her anger exacerbated by her need for sleep, she burns with rage at the demands of her two small children. Her wilful young daughter, Cassie, a miniature version of herself in all but appearance, seems especially to provoke her resentment, even hatred. An over-achieving perfectionist nostalgic for the time when she was a highly successful advertising executive, the narrator’s growing outrage at everything that undermines her now shaky sense of self is pathological. Although she is sexually voracious, using sex as a source of power (vagina dentata?), we soon learn that hers is a personality incapable of love, of feeling compassion and maintaining friendships. Some explanation for this is offered in the account of her grief at the death of her father when she is on the verge of puberty and her subsequent blame and hatred of her mother.