I was excited to see this novel after being fascinated by Finnish-Estonian Oksanen's earlier novels Purge and When the Doves Disappeared. In Norma the author ventures into the slightly supernatural, one of those odd stories where things are just a tick off the norm. Norma's mother, Anita, has just been killed by jumping onto the tracks at a Helsinki subway station, but Norma knows she was not suicidal - she'd just returned from a great vacation to Thailand and was full of plans. Norma's hair, which grows several feet per day and can sense others' moods and health, signals that something menacing is happening. When Anita's former business associates show up and begin asking strange questions, Norma launches a quest for the truth about her mother's death.
Norma is part-mystery, part meditation on the ways in which women's bodies are used: hair, eggs, and uteruses are all commodities to be exploited by networks as vicious as drug cartels. As a novel it doesn't quite work - there is a flatness to the narrative, and the suspense just isn't there - but Oksanen is an unusual thinker and I was still intrigued throughout.
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