Insulated
Nominated for the Tarjei Vesaas debut award 2019
A stunning debut novel of diabetes and defiance, and a story about refusing to become and identify with a diagnose.
English sample available
Insulated is a moving and plain-spoken novel about living with a chronic disease that affects all the aspects of life we usually take for granted and never think about. It explores what it feels like to be ill, what it means when the body attacks itself and how illness has always been viewed judgementally with moral overtones.
‘Diabetes is a feeling of squandering ones desires. It is the disease of greed. It is lack of restraint. The disease strikes those who are governed only by their feelings, those who lack common sense and self-control. The blood sugar level affects how you feel. Hypoglycaemia (‘a hypo’) can make you feel very odd. Diabetes is the punishment for displaying your feelings, wearing them on your sleeve, lack of restraint. The punishment for a big appetite for food and a big appetite for life. The shame of having too many feelings, too many desires.
Diabetes is a vulgar disease.
If tuberculosis is a love poem, diabetes is porno.
If minimalism is fear of ones body, diabetes is maximalism.
Diabetes is flesh. Diabetes is food and urine. It is blood and pee.
It is sugar in blood and urine.
It is shame.’
Insulated is a novel about diabetes, a novel about growing up, about being young and struggling to accept oneself.
Here's a debutant who has an important message to convey (...) In its best sequences, this text is about the longing, the pain, the depression, self-critizism, nausea, crying, the mind, shame (etc.) that diabetes represents, with a powerful fervency and intensity that is also reflected in her language
Aftenbladet, Norway 5/6
INSULATED is a book about living with diabetes, but it also beautifully reflects the relationship between self-sufficiency and self-determination.
Morgenbladet, Norway
This is a language-driven novel. Eskeland´s debut is brilliantly written. The «now» form in the book creates proximity and her style is scarce, almost laconic.
Klassekampen, Norway
Strongly recommended (...) She is able to convey sentiments like shame, anxiety, a feeling of inferiority in a clear and unsentimental way, easy for the reader to recognize in. This is a debut, I am looking forward to reading what she will publish in the future. Even though a very personal story this was a pageturner!
Tines blogg, Norway
A powerful portrait of living with a cronical disease, through adolescence and as a young adult.
Jury, Tarjei Vesaas debut award
The novel also explores, in an open and intellectual manner, the disgraceful aspects of a so-called lifestyle disease, which to a greater extent than many other disorders can be self-inflicted, and which imposes a kind of moral guiding on the sick's way of life, entails an extra responsibility that can be heavy carry. INSULATED gives insight into a life situation that is more rarely illuminated in the literature, depicted with both great intellect and physicality.
A page-turner! (...) INSULATED is a debut novel that places itself at the forefront in the field of important pathographies. But regardless of that INSULATED is an excellent novel.
Aftenposten, Norway