Translated from Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

I find short story collections hard to review because I dislike churning out plotlines to give context. There’d be a lot of that here because the plots in the eleven stories are so disparate. For once then I’ll let the publisher’s blurb serve as an intro.

From Maclehose Press

A young woman becomes obsessed with her psychoanalyst’s daughter. A police officer’s mistress clandestinely cares for his dying wife. A boy goes missing from the Swedish town of Huskvarna after he was last seen walking with a wolf. From the inside of a dead whale’s belly, to an industrial town emptied out after its factory’s closure, to a Texan prison where a young man visits his sister’s murderer on death row, Stridsberg approaches both the strange and the mundane with a fairy-tale sensibility that lights our world anew.

Time runs through this collection like water, variously ebbing, flowing and rippling beneath the shimmering surface of Stridsberg’s prose. These genre-spanning stories are held together by a sense of longing: for escape from the narrow margins of a prescribed life, for a past which promises an undiscovered future, for a place or a person that feels like home.

My Review

Full marks to the cover designer. The lone wolf in a snowbound icy landscape captures the emotional chill that pervades a lot of these stories. Whether that emanates from protagonists such as the eponymous Hunter, a loner who one day brusquely asks a friend “what are you doing with me?”, and who eventually walks off into the distance accompanied only by a wolf, or by the emotional desolation that overtakes when a loved one is lost. Why else would a brother take to visiting his sister’s murderer?

Stridsberg tells her stories very precisely and yet I often felt as though I was reading at a distance. Given that some of the stories are surreal (is it really possible to walk through the corpse of a dead whale?) and some of her characters came across as not quite fully engaged in their own narratives, there is something mercurial in the prose.

Emotional dysfunction is prevalent, dysfunction by my definition, that is. Because some attitudes and behaviours are alien to me. As is the fact that they go unchallenged. There’s a threesome: one women and twin brothers. They don’t share her but she flits at various intervals between the two, even after having a child by one of them. It has to end in tragedy to feel normal. It does, but even then there’s a twist … There’s the childhood of three sisters, interrupted by the death of the youngest, The narrator always refers to their guardian as “the man who took care of us” Mothers only appear in their dreams. No idea of the family’s backstory, or if this man is their biological father or not. Either way he is just a role “the man who took care of us” There’s no evidence of any emotional attachment or gratitude towards this man. Adulthood and the two surviving sisters move away and lose contact. “As far as we knew, the man who had looked after us for a whole lifetime was still at the lighthouse, playing the piano, the little monkey at his side. We would dig his grave one day and deal with his effects”. Of all the strangenesses in these tales, the matter-of-fact indifference of that statement chills me the most.

Flicking back through the collections quickly for purposes of review, I am struck by many deaths and many characters feeling lost in their current situations. The narrator of Three Sisters talks about mirages, a good analogy for the collection itself. Because with all this detachment and distance, these stories aren’t grounded on the page. Rather they hover in the ether.