Swedish Contemporary Fiction 1
Linda Boström KnausgÅrd (b. 1972) Linda Boström K
nausgård debuted in 1998 with a volume of poetry entitled Make Me Comfortable for the Wound (‘Gör mig behaglig för såret’). That collection was well received, but it took well over a decade before she published her second book, the short-story collection Grand Mal (‘Grand Mal’, 2011). In between those two books she got married, had several children and read a great deal about herself in her husband Karl-Ove Knausgård’s six-volume magnum opus My Struggle (‘Min kamp’), the final instalment of which came out the same year as her short stories. Since then, she has regained control of her story and her life in one book after another. Not until her most recent novel, October Child (‘Oktoberbarn’, 2019), did she use her own full name and the names of her family members, but other titles that came out earlier in the decade – The Helios Disaster (‘Helioskatastrofen’, 2013) and Welcome to America (‘Välkommen till Amerika’, 2016) – were also based on autobiographical material. The narrator is always a girl or young woman who looks back on her childhood shaped by a parent’s mental illness, a sense of abandonment and fear that literally renders the child mute. Living so close to mental illness sharpens one’s sensibilities. Linda Boström Knausgård writes brief, dense books in a poetic style that creates palpable images and scenes. She listens to the silences between sentences and sees what is hidden from others. She is able to recreate traumatic childhood moments with painful precision. Reading her is to be drawn into a scene where every gesture is an attempt to gloss over a family tragedy. In October Child, her family’s legacy of bipolar disorder has caught up with Linda, the narrator. She is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for electroshock therapy. Her memory – perhaps an author’s most important tool – fades and falters. Between treatments she struggles to preserve scraps of the past, of her childhood, her marriage, the birth of her children and finally her divorce. It is a fragmented book, written with great sensitivity and perceptiveness. Even its form reflects the struggle to hold her life together when everything she once had has been lost. Ingrid Elam Rights sold to: 18 countries 7 October Child. 192 p. 2019, Modernista Rights: Copenhagen Literary Agency The narrator’s childhood, youth, marriage, motherhood, and divorce flicker by as she struggles to grasp them. The novel is at once a searing critique of psychiatric care and an increasingly desperate attempt to hold on to memories that are slipping away. A story full of anguish and vulnerability that calls out to be told. Welcome to America 96 p. 2017, Modernista Rights: Copenhagen Literary Agency Welcome to America is an exquisite portrait of a sensitive, strong-willed child in the throes of trauma, a family on the brink of implosion, and the love that threatens to tear them apart. The Helios Disaster 112 p. 2013, Modernista. Rights: Copenhagen Literary Agency This modern spin on the myth of Athena plunges us deep inside the mind of an unlikely twelveyear-old goddess confined to a small Swedish town. Swedish Contemporary Fiction Foto: Jasmin Storch