Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson

I have just joined a "Borrow and Read" circle at my local bookshop. You pay 40€ and you can borrow and read 55 books. Most of them are newly published books within fiction and crime novels. Since I seldom read very new books, I am happy to have this possibility instead of buying them. The concept is; you borrow one book at the time, you can keep it as long as you like, the last book you borrow you can keep. Not a bad deal.

The first book I choose was Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson. A new writer to me, and it seems it is her first novel. It is a 'letter novel' and the correspondence takes place between a Danish man working at a museum in Denmark, and an English woman living on a farm in East Anglia.

It starts with a preface to a book about the Tollund Man, written by a professor Glob. At the time he dedicated the book to a group of school girls who were interested in the find. Fifty years later Tina Hopgood writes a letter to him. She is looking back to the time when she was young and had all her life in front of her. As usual in this age, she starts questioning her life and what became of it. The professor is dead since many years, but the curator at the museum, Anders Larsen, replies to her letter.

This is the beginning of a wonderful friendship (as I think they say at the end of Casablanca) between the two. They venture into a correspondence where they are able to air their most private thoughts about life and what became of it. The more they write, the more they get to know each other. Both of them, due to their life circumstances, have nobody around them they can speak to in such an open way.

The encouragement they give each other, makes it possible for each of them to look at their lives, their behaviours, their interaction with other people and also come to terms with life. Their correspondence is a life line for both of them, and when the letters stop coming from Tina, Anders becomes devastated.

An absolutely, wonderful and beautifully written novel about two characters that develop in front of your eyes. Their thoughts about life, are thoughts that we all face when we become older and look back on what has been. Did it turn out the way we expected? Would it have been different if we had made other choices? For better? Or worse? It is very low tone, but perfectly describes life and the decisions we have to make along the way.

All is set at the backdrop of the Tollund Man, which is a mummified corpse from the 4th century, found in Jutland in the 1950s. What can we know from just examining his body, which is very well preserved? How did he live? Was he happy? What was his life like? The correspondence between Tina and Anders covers all aspects of life and their curiosity in how this man lived, forms the entrance to their extraordinary friendship. It also shows that we do have different options in life, and just because we entered one path, there might be another one we can turn in to.

While reading I was wondering how it would all end. It is so easy to make a very banal ending, but it was really perfect. The ending is really so important for their correspondence and their relationship and Youngson manages to keep it on track until the very end. Highly recommendable read.