Title: The Way Through the Woods: Of Mushrooms and Mourning
Author: LONG LITT WOON
“It felt as if someone had slammed me with a huge sledgehammer…. Just a
few hours ago we were a married couple …..Now Eiolf was at the Emergency Ward
at Ullevål Hospital. Dead and cold.”
This is a story about
a journey that started the day the author’s life fell apart. While in the depths
of a life-draining grief, she stumbles upon the wondrous world of mushrooms. In
the process, she befriends the Mushroom Pickers, a tribe with their own rites
of passage and unspoken rules. As she
sets out on a voyage of discovery into the realm of fungi, she ventures along a
parallel journey through an inner landscape of pain and sorrow.
As Long takes the
reader through this simultaneously funny and heartbreaking story, her unusual, personal
quest soon feels familiar; at its underlying core the story is one of common
human experience. We are introduced to mushrooms not only as food or poison,
but also their natural history and cultural significance. In the book, the
author unveils how the combination of mushrooms and grief triggers fundamental
changes in her life by creating new meaning and identity.
Told in a clear and
strong narrative voice, the author’s enthusiasm for mushrooms is particularly
charming and is also likely to be contagious.
Long Litt Woon (The surname is Long, born in 1958 in
Malaysia) is an Anthropologist and certified Mushroom Expert in Norway. In
her youth, she traveled to Norway as an exchange student. There she met and
married Eiolf Olsen, a Norwegian, and made Norway her home. Long Litt Woon
currently lives in Oslo.
Testimonial:
“This is one of the most surprising and original books I have read in a
long time – so much to learn and reflect about the human condition and about a
natural phenomenon.”
Knut Olav Åmås (Norwegian critic, commentator and writer)
