This just in— The Wax Child  did not make the cut for the International Booker Prize short list. Oh, oh, the wax child isn’t going to like that. The Wax Child  by Olga Ravn is a story set in historic time—early 17 th  century Denmark. However, there is no statement of this in the beginning of the text. Of course, due to a phenomenon we have previously noted, the reader who comes to this book no doubt has some preconceptions that may include the story’s historic setting. Indee

Last time, I proposed discussing the effect of utilizing an inanimate narrator in Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child . Here goes: This is not the first story to have an inanimate narrator. Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red features narration by the color red; a fig tree does the job in Elif Shafak's  The Island of Missing Trees . (‘Kay, a tree is alive, but you get the idea). Indeed, we could say that many novels feature an omniscient narrator with no identifying information provided abou

“No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time.” So says the unnamed, inanimate narrator of Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child . Who hears it then? Someone—more on this later. What we know about this narrator is that it was created by Christenze Crucknow, who carried this wax effigy beneath her right arm as if it was a real human infant in utero. Why, you ask, would someone do this, making an effigy and treating it in this manner?   “Wax effigies in witchcraft are fig