I wasn’t planning to read The Night Guest in one sitting. Reading any book all at once, even a relatively quick read like Hildur Knútsdóttir 192-page novella, isn’t really an option for me these days with a four-year-old. But there I found myself, one Sunday afternoon while the kiddo was out with her dad. I had grand ambitions to take a coveted nap—maybe even clean the house!—but I thought I would read a bit of the story first. Just a few chapters, mind you, I had that nap to get to.
By the time my family got home a couple of hours later, I hadn’t napped and the house was still a mess. I had, however, finished The Night Guest.
Knútsdóttir’s book pulls you in with its vexing mystery. Iðunn is always tired, and doesn’t know why. After fruitless doctor visits and innumerable Google searches, however, her fancy new pedometer watch reveals that she’s walking over forty thousand steps at night. She has no idea where she’s going and no idea what she’s doing, a situation that only gets more ominous when she wakes up with mysterious bruises, dirt under her nails, and smears of blood on her body that come from no wound of her own.
The plot has its tenterhooks in you by that point, helped along by very short chapters that are usually only a couple of pages long. Try to stop reading—I dare you—as events unfold through Iðunn’s perspective. And try to keep feelings of anxiety and dread at bay as her inexplicable exhaustion morphs into something more sinister.
Part of what makes The Night Guest so compelling is the bleak, all-too-familiar world around Iðunn: the co-worker who is “more interested in brands than people”; her circle of distant friends she can party with but not confide in; a mother who always makes chicken dinners for her even though she’s vegetarian; and the neighborhood Facebook group where one neighbor, for some odd reason, loves to scan the cats Iðunn adores to see if they’re microchipped.
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The Night Guest
Each of Iðunn’s interactions creates a miasma of anxiety and despair over her every waking moment. Even before the weight of her inexplicable exhaustion consumes her, it’s clear that she doesn’t have a grip on her life. She is adrift, passively accepting circumstances as they are or pushing any potential for something more meaningful away, even when doing so leaves her unmoored and without agency.
“Sometimes I imagine that if I say little enough, people will find me mysterious. That they’ll begin to imagine that I have this rich inner life,” Iðunn thinks at one point. She goes on later to say that this tactic works for men. For women, however, “people assume you’re stupid and have nothing remarkable to say. And in my case, that’s true.”
Except it’s not true, of course. And what Iðunn says immediately after explains in part why she’s the way that she is:
I’m scared shitless when I meet people who relentlessly pluck at the veil I sometimes imagine myself wrapped in, teasing it aside with each intrusive question on the heels of another, until there is nothing left but my naked self, which does not want to be pitied any more than Loki in chains.
This passage epitomizes how we have a front row seat to Iðunn’s interior monologue, and how Knútsdóttir’s prose, translated into English by Mary Robinette Kowal, is captivating. It also shows how The Night Guest, despite the compulsive page-turning it inspires, has nuance and layers. Iðunn is complex, tragic, and—in some ways—painfully relatable.
And as the pages keep turning, things keep spiraling for Iðunn. We get hints as to what’s happening when she falls asleep, including the fate of those poor cats who have disappeared from her neighborhood.
I’m not going to spoil the mystery, but Iðunn eventually comes face-to-face with the cause of all her troubles. The book then ends with an unsettling thud. Most (but not all) questions answered, yes, but not in a way that I found fully satisfying. (I may have yelled out loud, “That’s it?!” when I finished.)
Perhaps that’s the point. One chapter ends with Iðunn thinking, “nothing is worse than uncertainty. I know that myself.” But the next chapter, in its entirety, reads as follows:
“Except in some cases. In some cases, the certainty may be worse.”
The Night Guest’s abrupt end leaves us in a liminal space between knowing and not knowing. Whether that balance works is up for discussion. I didn’t love it, but I also didn’t regret giving up that rare chance at a nap that Sunday afternoon. And even though the final pages didn’t land for me, I’m eager for others to read so I can discuss it with them. What a great thing to get from a book: an ending worth talking and even arguing about, perhaps with your beloved cat safe and sound in your lap, or over some sushi and a shared bottle of wine with a group of friends.
The Night Guest is published by Nightfire.
