Swedish Contemporary Fiction 1
Lina Wolff (b. 1973) Lina Wolff creates her very
own sort of literary art within Swedish contemporary writing. She spends most of her time abroad, mainly in Italy and Spain, and her writing is as far from autofiction as it can be. True, one of the main characters in her novel Carnality (‘Köttets tid’, 2019) is a 45-year-old Swedish woman who is doing the ‘writing’, but it is impossible to read Wolff’s novels as autobiographical works. They are clearly works of imagination with tightly structured plots and an invisible narrator who keeps the reader on tenterhooks. In terms of literary style, Wolff seems to draw The Devil’s Grip 262 p. 2022, Albert Bonniers Rights: Salomonsson Agency A woman arrives in Florence, where everything seems strange and overwhelming. Terra cotta roofs, church spires, all the couples in love. The man she has met. This is a story about them, about their bodies and senses. About her grip on him, and his ever tighter grip on her. Carnality 262 p. 2019, Albert Bonniers Rights: Salomonsson Agency A Swedish writer travels to Madrid in search of inspiration. She finds it in a stranger, a man in a bar with an unusual tale to tell. What follows is a yarn of fantastical proportions and even wilder elements: a shadowy internet show with its own morality clause. The Polyglot Lovers, 291 p. 2016, Albert Bonniers Rights: Salomonsson Agency Ellinor is from a small town in southern Sweden. Max Lamas dreams of a polyglot lover. And then there is Lucrezia, in Italy, made to witness her grandmother’s final downfall in a deserted palace. A manuscript wanders in and out of their lives and hands, binding them together. Swedish Contemporary Fiction more inspiration from Spanish-language writers like Gabriel García Márquez (whose works she has translated into Swedish) than the terse realism that is so common in Scandinavian prose. Her language is capable of being simple and straightforward, depending on the narrator, but it is also filled with multi-layered symbolism. Wolff sets up sensuous relationship dramas in her novels with women as the driving force, while the men are needy or merely unpleasant hangers-on, sometimes aggressive and violent. They are all trapped in their inadequate bodies, longing for something: forgiveness, meaning, love, being needed. Or simply a living soul. The material – plots and characters – appears exotic, taken from an imaginary world populated by innocents and assailants, while the ideas are firmly anchored in the real world. Wolff addresses the work of another writer of ideas, the French author Michel Houellebecq, in her novel The Polyglot Lovers (‘De polyglotta älskarna’, 2016). Lina Wolff interrogates gender roles and moral stances, and she takes care to maintain a certain mysteriousness in her characters’ psychological make-up, so that they cannot be fully explained or understood. One is motivated by the desire to be better, one by revenge; most are motivated by both, without actually being aware of it themselves. This complexity creates a strong tension in her novels: Why does that person do that? What is actually going on? Who has the most reasonable attitude to life? Ingrid Elam Rights sold to: 20 countries 22 Foto: Gustav Bergman