Reading an excellent Norwegian novel from 1947, Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedraas. (It's part of the Modern Library Torchbearers series that focuses on female authors whose work deserves a wider audience.) Nedraas tells the story in the voice of a nameless man who meets an equally nameless woman one rainy night at a train station. They go to his home, where the woman recounts how her life was wrecked twenty years earlier by a love affair with her teacher. Nedraas had great psychological insight and an exceptional knack for character-building: the woman's every inflection, every gesture, contribute to a complex portrait of her sorrow and regret. There's also a keen awareness throughout of how the woman's impoverished working-class background (her father, like many in their small community, is a coal miner) entraps her, even as she seeks an exit through the pursuit of knowledge. I had never heard of this book until I stumbled across it on the Penguin Classics website, and boy, am I glad I did.