A Postcard for Annie

From the winner of the Lifetime Award from the Danish Arts Foundation and the 2017 Critics’ Choice Award, Ida Jessen’s traces the tangled emotional lives of women facing moral dilemmas. A young woman witnesses a terrible accident with unexpected consequences, a mother sits with her unconscious son in a hospital room, a pair of sisters remember their mother’s hands braiding their hair. In seaside tourist villages and in snowy cities, turbulence destabilizes composed lives, whether through outright violence between strangers or habitual domination between loved ones. Jessen fills each story with bracing passages that teem with the living world, only to become concentrated in the unfixed, vacillating matter of a human psyche caught between silence and speech, paralysis and action.