THE WAX CHILD by Olga Ravn

Translated by Martin Aitken

I saw Goody Proctor with the Devil. A line that still rings in my head, years after having first read it in high school. A declaration of bad faith and an invitation to believe in false gods. Or boogiemen. Well, boogiewomen. There is an underlying certainty in Miller’s play, as there is in so many of the fictional reimagining of historical witch trials, that the accusations are false. There are no such things as witches. Just strong or strange women, receptacles of collective fear, dunked and burned by a patriarchy that cannot abide them.

Olga Ravn, in her first work of fiction since The Employees (one of my favourite books of the last few years), deliciously toys with this assumption in the most ingenious way. You see, the narrator of The Wax Child is a doll made from sticks and rags and beeswax by the accused woman. And those at the centre of the accusations do dabble in rituals, though it’s hard to tell if it’s anything more than harmless play. Robbed of the usual moral smugness, the reader is left to ponder much stickier questions of power and violence in a storm of narrative hexes. And damn, that’s exhilarating.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (Tr. Martin Aitken)
New Directions, 2025
172 pages