Swedish Contemporary Fiction 1
Karolina Ramqvist (b. 1976) Bread and Milk 332 p.
2022, Norstedts Rights: Ahlander Agency When Karolina finds herself a single mother to a young daughter, food becomes the way for her to show her love, but also to instil a complicated legacy. A gorgeous, meditative, and essayistic memoir about the way what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love. The Bear Woman 347 p. 2019, Norstedts Rights: Ahlander Agency In 1541, a young woman goes on one of the first French colonial expeditions to the New World but is abandoned on an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic. Centuries later, an author comes across the legend of her, the Bear Woman, and becomes obsessed. The White City 176 p. 2015, Norstedts Rights: Ahlander Agency A woman’s battle to pull herself up from the paralysing depths of despair and an arresting study of what it means to lose control – over your body, your life, and your fate. Loyalties shift in the blink of an eye and people are easily discarded in this taut and elegantly realised novel. Karolina Ramqvist was born a generation after feminism first made its mark on contemporary Swedish literature in the 1970s with women’s confessionals and manifestoes. Ramqvist continues the thread in her novels, in which young women listen absent-mindedly to their feminist mothers while giving themselves over to conspicuous consumption, clothes and pleasure. With critical empathy, she captures the zeitgeist of an ‘ironic’ generation whose parents had already gone through all the big words and political projects. It is for them to live the freedom their mothers fought for, but that lifestyle requires money. In Ramqvist’s novel The Girlfriend (‘Flickvännen’) from 2009, a young woman named Karin finds a gangster to pay her way. A few years later, in The White City (‘Den vita staden’, 2015), Karin has a child, the gangster has been shot, it is winter in Stockholm, and now the bailiffs are at the door to add up everything she has. Ramqvist writes her novels in the first person, but her narrators always have a dual stance. They describe reality as it is without moralising or even analysing, while they also observe themselves without explaining why they do what they do. Her young female narrators are targets for male lust but uncertain of their own value. They have grown up with grand tales of love and desire, struggle and freedom, but their days are filled with the mundane. Her latest novel, Bread and Milk (‘Bröd och mjölk’, 2022), is about a woman who seems to have a great deal in common with Ramqvist in terms of their relationship to food and the role of food in relationship to their body, to love and family and friends. In her previous novel The Bear Woman (‘Björnkvinnan’, 2019) the narrator was difficult to distinguish from Ramqvist herself, but the similarities concealed a complex relationship between fiction, reality and truth. The first-person narrator is a writer trying to write a book about a real 16th-century French woman who was stranded on an uninhabited island on a transatlantic voyage. The author wonders what we can know beyond the information passed down in (men’s) adventure tales. How have they distorted reality? Can it be reconstructed? Karolina Ramqvist uses her imagination and her own experience to describe what daily life might have been like on that island in a novel that is both an account of the mundane and an aesthetic statement of intent. Ingrid Elam Rights sold to: 13 countries Swedish Contemporary Fiction 14 Foto: Elvira Glänte