The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Mathea Martinsen has never been good at dealing with other people. After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world-to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”
Bittersweet little novel following the elderly Mathea as she ponders the fullness of life and the impression a life can leave behind.
In The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am Skomsvold captures the sadness in being lonely in the sweetest way. The novel is tragicomic in the best way.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Kerri
A. Pierce
Kerri Pierce is a writer and translator living in Pittsford, New York. She has translated fiction and nonfiction from eight languages. Her short translations have appeared in the New Yorker and World Literature Today, among other places, and her novel translations have been finalists for the PEN Translation Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Pennsylvania State University.
Kerri Pierce is a writer and translator living in Pittsford, New York. She has translated fiction and nonfiction from eight languages. Her short translations have appeared in the New Yorker and World Literature Today, among other places, and her novel translations have been finalists for the PEN Translation Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Pennsylvania State University.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Bittersweet little novel following the elderly Mathea as she ponders the fullness of life and the impression a life can leave behind.
In The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am Skomsvold captures the sadness in being lonely in the sweetest way. The novel is tragicomic in the best way.