New Swedish Books, autumn 2020 1
33 Autumn 2020 I Return After many years in the b
ig city janakippo returns to her native village in northern Sweden. She’s bad-tempered and sullen, cultivating a straightforwardness that borders on being brutal and which leaves very little regard for anyone else. Beneath the rockhard carapace, however, lurks a sensitive and tender artist who’s had a difficult childhood. Sawmill-owner Karin Smirnoff won the hearts of Swedish readers with the two first novels in this loosely connected trilogy about the wounded ‘returner’. With a fast narrative tempo and an inimitable dialectal prose Smirnoff recounts, in this the concluding third part, how janakippo finally finds time to be an artist – after having saved her brother from death by alcohol and buried her mother in her very strict Laestadian Lutheran home village. But her rural community soon calls on her again and the novel transforms itself into a requiem for a Swedish countryside life that is being lost. Yukiko Duke’s choice Karin Smirnoff Selected works Jag for ner till bror 2018 Vi for upp med mor 2019 Selected awards Ilona Kohrtz stipendium/ Svenska Akademien 2020 Novel, 346 p. Karin Smirnoff Publisher Bokförlaget Polaris Rights Politiken Literary Agency Sofie Voller sofie.voller@jppol.dk Photo: Johan Gunséus