Tag: Swedish translation

Kyra Kyralina

This was an international WhatsApp book club pick because Panait Istrati seems like an interesting guy, and Kyra Kyralina specifically occupies a niche as the first Romanian novel with a gay protagonist and the first novel in Istrati’s Adrian Zografi cycle. A landmark novel in many respects.

Landmarks aren’t necessarily a fun read, however, and it was a struggle to grasp what Istrati was trying to do. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts, but with a rather disjointed chronology and a lack of interiority. Despite the book’s inclusion in the Adrian Zografi cycle, here Adrian is only a side character. Kyra Kyralina is really the story of Stavro, né Dragomir, as told to Adrian on different occasions over the stretch of several years. The first section focuses on Stavro’s most recent past: the story of his unhappy marriage. The second section then goes all the way back to Stavro’s earliest childhood, and the third and final section fills in the gap between that childhood and the unhappy marriage. The first two sections are narrated rather close in time to each other, with only a few days in between. Adrian doesn’t hear the last section until several years later when he happens to meet Stavro in Egypt.

To put it chronologically: Stavro was born in Braila, Romania, and spent his earliest days with his mother and sister, the titular Kyra. They were wealthy largely due to his mother’s inheritance, though his father and older brother ran a very successful wagon business. The latter two eventually move to the other side of the city to be closer to the wagon workshop, but they periodically make visits to the other home. In their absence, Stavro’s mother and Kyra live the good life, dressing up and hosting parties full of dance and music, attended by young suitors. Young Stavro’s job is to keep a lookout for his father and brother, so the suitors have time to escape out a back window. During these visits home, and just about every day before relocating to the other side of the city, Stavro’s father beats his mother.

The turning point comes when Stavro’s mother decides to throw the party to end all parties, perhaps because she can sense that things are about to take a turn for the worse, or perhaps because she has some kind of death wish. Either way, it turns out as she expects and Stavro’s father beats her within an inch of her life, blinding her in one eye. Kyra is locked in a wardrobe and Stavro taken back to the other house by the workshop. He manages to escape and to rescue Kyra and his mother, and they flee Braila.

Stavro is around twelve years old at this point.

Stavro’s mother leaves him and his sister in the care of her brothers while she seeks medical treatment for her eye and disfigurement. That’s the last we see of her, and given her declaration that she was determined to kill herself if she ever lost her beauty or ability to enjoy life, it’s safe to assume that she takes her life at some point off screen.

Kyra, meanwhile, immediately spurs their uncles into avenging the violence enacted on the family, and the uncles agree. Their older brother is killed in the ambush, but their father escapes and Stavro and his sister are sent to a safehouse. It doesn’t take long for them (or for Kyra, at least) to get bored with their new life, and they are soon kidnapped. Their kidnapper sells Kyra to a harem (which is only mentioned in an aside), while Stavro remains with him as, it is heavily implied, a sex slave.

(So ends section two.)

He manages to escape after a few years and immediately sets about Istanbul looking for his mother and his sister, to no avail. It doesn’t take long for another creepy old man to abduct Stavro, luring him in with false promises of helping to find his family only to once again keep him as a sex slave. More years pass and Stavro once again manages to escape, get some papers (this is the point where he becomes Stavro rather than Dragomir), and then get robbed. One day he ends up in Damascus, and sees a cart pass with a woman who looks rather like Kyra. Stavro tries to get her attention, following the cart all the way to a villa. He’s denied entry, of course, and that’s where an elderly salep vendor finds him and takes him in. They spend many happy years together, even after Stavro serves a stint in prison and is exiled from the city, until the older man’s death.

(So ends section three.)

Stavro ends up in Bucharest, a sort of itinerant merchant and maybe still selling salep. He boards with a family for a while and becomes infatuated with their daughter, telling her stories of his travels. This escalates until they are engaged to be married, but tradition dictates that newlyweds are obligated to prove that the marriage has been consummated (by means of some bloodied sheets). Stavro cracks under the pressure to perform, and under the pressure of his own presumed homosexuality, and promptly faints and then falls ill. His wife is understanding and compassionate about it, and the community at first see him as an invalid, potentially the subject of a curse. But days, weeks, months go by without any sex, and their patience runs thin. Stavro is once again a prisoner of sorts. Neither he nor his wife are permitted to leave the house, and Stavro in particular has become persona non grata in their quarter of Bucharest. The couple makes plans to leave the city, since they’re still otherwise happy and fond of each other and can imagine a life together. Then, mere days before their escape, his brothers in law find an old traveling companion of Stavros, presumably also a lover, who immediately outs Stavro. (Every translation in the WhatsApp book club seemed to use an interrupted slur for a gay man in this reveal. In Swedish it was rendered as “b—”, presumably short for “bög.”) The escape plans come to nothing, Stavro is driven out of the house, and his bride drowns herself in the river.

(So ends section one.)

The framing device is Stavro’s invitation to Adrian to come help him and another man, Mikhail (I think) sell watered-down citric acid as lemonade in another distant town. Adrian has encountered Stavro somewhere out in town, and we get our first impression of the man: a tragic figure, a bit of a buffoon but intentionally so, someone who is hiding something. His scheme requires some kind of go-between and he thinks Adrian is right for the job. On their first night on the road, the three men spend the night in a hayloft and Stavro makes an attempt to seduce, or at least fondle, Adrian. Adrian is a bit naive, while the worldly Mikhail knows immediately what Stavro is trying to do and berates him for it. By way of apology, Stavro then begins his tale of woe, as if to explain why he has become such a creature so burdened with vice. (“Vice” is the specific word used in the Swedish translation, at least, and is used again and again by Stavro to describe himself and by others to describe him.)

Stavro is a tragic figure. Any joy, any pleasure, any human connection he’s ever had is almost immediately tainted with tragedy. That much is clear. But it’s hard to situate Stavro in a narrative. We don’t see a progression from naive to embittered, or ignorant to more worldly. The inside-out chronology means that the book ends in the middle of Stavro’s life, a very deliberate narrative choice that immediately invites speculation. Why does this episode have such an ultimate ring of finality to it?

Putting aside the larger question of the disjointed timeline, it’s hard to like Stavro. It’s hard to like any of the people we’re supposed to feel sorry for. Yes, Stavro’s father is a petty, violent tyrant, but his mother and sister come across as party girls with no interest in taking care of themselves. Of course I’m reading Kyra Kyralina through a different lens than the original audience, in a different social context, but the way that Stavro’s mother insists that she is a creature made to enjoy luxury, love, pleasure, and that she cannot be other than what she is hits a sour note for me. I managed to find an English translation of exactly the passage I’m thinking of:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow.

From the blog seraillon, who seemed to like Kyra Kyralina a lot more than I did.

Other places describe the story as a picaresque, but it’s hard to read consistently getting kidnapped and imprisoned by different abusers as a picaresque, since much of the time Stavro is confined and not meeting that many people or having that many adventures. Stavro himself isn’t particularly interesting, either. Things happen to him, but we only get surface level emotions in response.

There is also a question of version and translation: Istrati wrote the original in French, but then rewrote it and completely reworked it in Romanian. The Swedish translation, judging by the translator (Barbro Andersson), was from the Romanian version rather than the French. One wonders how much was different between the two versions.

Stargate. En julberättelse

The same Swedish book club that picked Dead Souls, Stacken, Svälten, and Orbital this year opted for Ingvild H. Rishøi’s Stargate. En julberättelse (Eng: Brightly Shining) for June, at the suggestion of the newest member. Behind as I am in my annual reading quota, it was nice to have something short—even if reading a Christmas story in June feels a bit…odd.

It’s getting on to Christmas, and sisters Ronja and Melissa are trying to make do, since their alcoholic father is having another rough patch. He manages to get a job selling Christmas trees, but after a few good days he blows it and is back to his bad habits. Melissa steps up and offers to take over the job, working in the mornings and evenings after school but for less pay. One afternoon Ronja, desperate to be anywhere but home, turns up at the tree lot and Melissa’s coworker Tommy gets the idea to use Ronja to sell wreaths and other decorations. Shoppers can’t resist a cute kid, he reasons, and offers to split his commission from the wreath sales with the sisters. This goes well until it doesn’t—the owner of the business isn’t thrilled about child labor going on behind his back—and Ronja is left to her own devices. Things spin out pretty badly from there into an ambiguous ending that takes a sharp turn into fuzzy magical realism.

Putting aside the Christmas-in-June element, overall Stargate was an ambiguous reading experience for me. Up until the ending, I was torn between enjoying Rishøi’s writing (in the Swedish translation by Maria Lundquist) and resenting what I felt was emotional manipulation. Unearned sentimentality immediately sets off my alarm bells when it comes to books and movies, and at times it felt like Rishøi was laying it on with a trowel.

The ending, however, is a choice that deserves its own commentary. While Ronja is certainly a daydreamer, the rest of the book is almost hyperrealistic. The title of the book even comes from Star Gate, an actual dive bar in Oslo where the father drinks himself senseless. Abandoning that kind of stark realism in the home stretch for the total opposite gives the reader a bit of mood whiplash, and it also makes me wonder if Rishøi opted for that because she felt like she had written herself into a corner. Namely: if she’s going to end with Ronja’s death, how is she going to actually write it?

Whether Ronja dies is, I suppose, up for some debate. The fuzziness from the magical realism filter provides solid plausible deniability, after all. Maybe Ronja and Melissa are walking home! Maybe they’re really walking through the woods! Maybe it’s Ronja’s fever dream while Melissa is carrying her home! But given how closely Stargate resembles “The Little Match Girl,” I’m skeptical. My take on the ending is that Ronja dies. It’s a weird choice for a Christmas story, but then “The Little Match Girl” takes place on New Year’s Eve so there’s a parallel there.

I found a few reviews of the English translation (Shining Brightly), and more than one of them gave the book demerits for profanity, specifically for using the Lord’s name in vain. Did this get marketed in English as the kind of Christmas story that would appeal to devout Christians? Unclear to me.

Förvandlingen

I’m in a philosophy book and discussion club, which is responsible for a small chunk of the nonfiction I manage to get through during the year. Once in a while, however, the group votes for a novel instead of a strict philosophical treatise. That’s how I finally got around to reading Brave New World, for example. Fiction won again in the most recent poll and the book for June was Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, known in Swedish as Förvandlingen and in English as The Metamorphosis.

I’d read it in high school, but since forgotten most of it. Since Kafka was a prominent figure in 1913, it seemed like a good time for me to return to the text regardless. I opted for a Swedish translation, even though my memory of the English is obviously quite dim.

There is a strong tradition in Swedish of translated German literature, so unsurprisingly there are multiple Swedish translations of Förvandlingen. The first one I got ahold of was the older one by Caleb J. Anderson and Karl Vennberg, originally published by Forum but now in a new edition from Modernista. I also managed to dig up the newer one from Hans Blomqvist and Erik Ågren at Bakhåll, complete with an afterword. I’m in the process of polling Swedes in my life about which one they prefer and why, and so far I have to say that there’s no clear winner.

That’s probably the most interesting thing to say about The Metamoporphosis. We all know the story and the famous opening line, what more need be said?

Here’s one nugget from high school that has stayed with me ever since, maybe because it’s only become even more relevant to me as an adult: if you take away the magical event of the first sentence, The Metamorphosis becomes one of the most realistic books ever written, an unflinching portrayal of how families respond to disability or illness.

I don’t know which critic or which writer it was. If memory serves, and it was indeed my twelfth grade English teacher who relayed it to me, then it has to predate 2004. Otherwise, I cobbled together my actual English class and an actual, later quote into a false memory. Regardless of where I first heard it, that quote has been kicking around in my head for years and I finally got to put it to the test, as it were, by coming back to The Metamorphosis over twenty years later. Bang on, I would say.

När Hitler stal den skära kaninen

In the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I asked my Jewish friends which Holocaust novels and movies they would recommend. The topic has a tendency to get mined for sentimentality and melodrama by lazy hacks, after all. One of the books that came up was Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a title that I recognized from elementary school reading lists but that I had never read myself.

A few years later, I noticed a Swedish translation (När Hitler stal den skära kaninen) by Ingegerd Leczinsky on the book swap shelf at the local arts center and decided this was my moment. It took another year or so, and then in my year of reading history I decided I should finally make good on my previous inquiries.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an award-winning classic of children’s literature so any review in 2026 is redundant. Given the state of things in the world—in the US, mainly—it’s probably worth revisiting these classics. It’s also worth understanding the ripple effects of the camps: what it was like for the families who left as refugees, people who would have otherwise never had a reason to leave the only country they’d ever known, people who had to get by with intermittent updates about the friends and family who had stayed behind, people who had to live with the uncertainty of whether it would ever be possible to return or if they would ever want to.

My only gripe is specific to this particular hardback edition from Berghs: Kerr also provided her own illustrations for the book, and her art often (though not always) appears on the covers. But my edition (pictured above) has an extremely grimdark and dramatic oil painting aesthetic that doesn’t at all match Kerr’s simpler, lighter pen-and-ink illustrations inside. Other publishers are also guilty of this choice, though, so it’s hardly controversial. But it’s certainly a choice to feature Anna, Judith’s stand-in, holding the pink rabbit that never left Germany with her.

1913: Århundradets sommar

Sometimes I wonder if specific book friends should get their own tag, for my own ease of reference if nothing else. So much of my reading can be traced back to recommendations and influences from people I like!

1913: Århundradets sommar, originally published in German as 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts and known in English as 1913: The Year Before the Storm, is simply the account of a single year in Europe from the perspective of numerous writers and artists (as well as a couple notable politicians). The same book friend for whose sake I made a third and final attempt to read To the Lighthouse and to whom I had gifted The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, who lives next door to the author of Årsboken and who had also recommended Njals Saga, pressed a slightly beat-up paperback copy of 1913 into my hands back in January or February. I started immediately, stopped when I realized I simply had too much else going on at the time (trying to get through Svälten and Kusinerna for assorted book clubs on top of Peak Work Season), and picked it up again on a long weekend in London.

An aside about the weekend jaunt to London: I scheduled a dinner at a Korean restaurant in London, the irresistibly named Koba, as a reward for surviving the first part of Kammarkollegiet’s authorization test for translators. (I passed that part, by the way!) I also have a friend in London who lets me stay at his place when I turn up there, the same friend who recommended Miljosvennar and who gifted me a few of his science fiction favorites (including Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco) after he cleaned out his bookshelf, who is one of the few people in my life to get a birthday present from me every year without fail only because I have a strong sense of Books He Should Read. It seems to be a fairly unerring sense as well, since he actually reads them and during one visit to Stockholm even remarked that I always manage to find interesting books he would have never known about or picked for himself. The same friend was also knocked the heck out from a gnarly viral infection, so his natural urge to play host and show off Hackney Wick was severely dampened by the sad state of his physical constitution. After a solo morning museum visit and walk through the park, I spent the entire afternoon of my last day there in bed reading while my host picked away at a programming task.

“I’m sorry you’re cooped up in here,” he said after an hour or two of companionable silence.

“No! No. This is exactly the kind of vacation I wanted. It’s fine.”

That is how I managed to read the bulk of 1913 over a single weekend. That’s exactly the kind of attention it deserves, because it’s full of names and events that keep recurring or developing; you don’t want to take a two week break and come to find you lost track of what Franz Kafka or Carl Schmidt was up to. Illies turns what could have been dry reportage into insightful, dare I say sensitive narrative. Presumably some poetic license is taken (did so-and-so really see so-and-so walking down the street as he gazed out his window?) but Illies has pages and pages of personal diaries and letters to draw from, so he can get quite close to his subjects. His background as an art historian probably means much of the subject matter was stuff he already had at hand, so to speak. Fair play also to Illies for giving as much consideration as possible to the notable women of the era, including their own perspectives and diary entries instead of just offhanded mentions about muses or mistresses or so on. Much like Svälten, Illies turns history into a narrative and the whole thing becomes deeply enjoyable reading despite the whirlwind of names and places.

The Swedish translation was done by Karin Andrae, who does not seem to have her own web presence anywhere that I can find. Here’s one selection from her translation catalogue over at Världslitteratur.se. She’s not listed at ÖversättareCentrum.se. There’s an article (and interview?) by Emilia Söelujnd behind the paywall of at least three regional newspaper clones: Tranås Tidning, Falköpings Tidning, Vetlanda-Posten, and probably more.

Imagine having such a reputation in translation that you don’t need to be worried about marketing yourself or having A Presence. The dream…

Kusinerna

I first heard of Aurora Venturini’s Kusinerna (Spanish: Las primas) in a review in an issue of Karavan a few years ago. I remember sitting in Konserthuset during intermission and reading about a pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair. Then I forgot about it until my international WhatsApp book club picked Las primas—more specifically than that, I forgot about it until I came to a chapter in Kusinerna with a…pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair.

Ah hah!

Kusinerna is a story about an impoverished family told through the perspective of the daughter Yuna, who claims that all the women in her family are “freaks” in some way or other, including herself. The nature of her own disability is unclear except that it’s tied to a difficulty with language, which gives rise to a distinct literary style and occasional breaks in the fourth wall. Her sister Benita is the one in the wheelchair, and seems to be seriously handicapped both physically and mentally. One of their cousins on their mother’s side, Petra, has dwarfism while the other cousin, Carina, has six toes on each foot. There we have our titular cousins.

Yuna and Petra are the only two who are capable of living more or less independently in the world. Yuna shows an early knack for drawing and art that more than makes up for her struggles with language, and as the book progresses she is easily able to support her family. Petra, on the other hand, quickly turns to sex work to earn money.

Lots of other reviews talk about the book’s portrayal of misogyny, patriarchy, abuse, and any other number of awful things. Very true, this is all in there! There is definitely a lot that happens in the book, and most of it has to do with suffering and abuse. But getting too into the weeds where plot is concerned would spoil quite a bit and somehow feel overly reductive. It doesn’t seem like Venturini is trying to shock anyone with the events of the story; they’re more the foundation of some seriously acerbic dark comedy. Lorna Scott Fox’s review at the Times Literary Supplement calls Cousins “breezy and brutal,” a perfect description. When you use Yuna’s distinctive, almost manic narrative voice (run-on sentences abound, for example, because she finds punctuation tiresome and complicated) to relate some of the worst things that can happen to a person, it transcends misery porn and becomes that most vaunted of all things: Social Commentary.

The comparison that springs to mind for me is Paul Pen’s El brillo de las luciérnagas (English: The Light of the Fireflies). It’s not a fair comparison, maybe, since the only thing they have in common is Spanish and brutality towards women. But without a narrator like Yuna, the brutality never really elevates and it just stays at a deeply unpleasant level of misery and torture porn for the entire time. Brutal yes, breezy not so much. While I blazed through Cousins at lightning speed, Fireflies is one of the rare books that I have consciously, deliberately chosen to not finish. This is where spoilers come in handy, and I’m glad GoodReads users delivered so I could decide to spend my time reading something else instead.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Venturini was also just a really cool and interesting and talented person! Nothing else to add there, just felt I should make that clear.

The Swedish translation by Hanna Nordenhök was also a delight to read, and a credit to her craft considering how many puns and plays on words there must have been to translate. More than a lot of our other WhatsApp book club choices, Cousins led to a lot of discussion about puns and translations: for one original Spanish joke about snacks and pickaxes early in the book, in English it was rendered about bird beaks and pecking, in Swedish about rodents and gnawing, and in German about sofas and canapés.

The best possible book club pick!

Njals Saga

This was a recommendation from my The Heart is a Lonely Hunter book friend.

“It’s fantastic. Reading it now and it’s all about lobbying and politics and getting as many people on your side as possible. You realize that nothing ever changes. You can see so much of modern Sweden in there, too. You read this and you’ll understand us Nordic people better than we understand ourselves.”

Maybe I do now, and maybe I don’t. For being something like seven hundred years old, plenty of things still seem modern. The lobbying and politicking, sure, but also the dialogue (at least, as translated into Swedish from Icelandic by Lars Lönnroth). Reading Njals Saga is a completely different beast from reading The Iliad or The Odyssey. People in Njals Saga are just constantly roasting each other with devastating one-liners, starting as early as Hrutr’s comment about his niece Hallgerd to her boasting father: “I do not know how thieves’ eyes came into the family.”

More personally for me and my flavor of bad brain, the structure of Njals saga also makes it an easier read than other classics. The Swedish translation is prose, not poetry, and divided into relatively short episodes—I assume this reflects the original. Yes, it also happens to be 500 pages long, but it’s not a difficult 500 pages. Other epics of this style are usually poetry and usually translated as such, and somehow that’s enough to make my eyes glaze over. Even though I’m otherwise a huge mythology nerd! Impossible to explain. A public domain English translation is available at the Icelandic Saga Database, so you can browse yourself and see what you think.

Filosofins tröst

Somehow I earned a BA in philosophy without ever reading Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Now I am ignorant no more!

A free copy of the English translation by H. R. James is available through Project Gutenberg, but I opted for a newer Swedish translation by Bertil Cavallin (1987) that was available from the Stockholm University library. To start I kept the Gutenberg copy open on my phone while reading the Swedish, just as a handy reference if something was unclear, but quickly gave up on that. Scrolling through my phone screen is never an easy or intuitive process, and the James translation is over 200 years old: not a combination that makes for easy cross-checking.

As far as philosophical classics go, Filosofins tröst is a short and accessible one. Maybe staring down your execution—in one of the most literal cases of a “deadline” known to history—makes you forgo the piddling little details of endlessly classifying objects, refining a logic system, or pondering the constituent elements of the world and instead keeps your focus on the big questions: how can evil exist? why are the wicked so often successful and the good so often punished? is there free will?

The answers Boethius poses through the mouth of Philosophy, here personified by a woman clad in heavily symbolic garb, aren’t the most convincing if you’re not already sympathetic to Christian apologetics. For me the interest was more in tracing philosophical and theological influences in the chain of thinkers before and after Boethius. Plato’s forms and what seems a very Stoic approach to Fortune are very apparent throughout; meanwhile the entirety of Book V puts forward an argument for free will that John Milton seems to echo in Book III of Paradise Lost: “if I foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault…”

This Swedish edition from Bokförlaget Faethon comes with commentary and a foreword by the translator as well as a new afterword from Johan Sehlberg. Much of that content was helpful for situating Boethius in a larger context, with notes from Cavallin ranging from clarifying historical contexts and references or elucidating metrical forms to drawing comparisons with later thinkers (mostly my homeboy Kant). If that Swedish commentary is inaccessible to you, I also found The History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps) podcast to be a big help as well. Episode 118 discusses Boethius generally, while episode 119 is an interview with John Marenbon to dig further into some of the arguments in The Consolation.

Austerlitz

Everyone in my book club was so utterly charmed by Aaliya from An Unnecessary Woman, and impressed with the breadth and depth of her literary references, that we decided to pick one of her favorites as a book club read for later. I was privately gunning for Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet but in the end we went with Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

I’m glad that this was the book we picked for June, and not earlier in the year when my brain would have been fried from work, because Sebald demands a lot from the reader. One book club member joked that they thought it would be an easier read because of the wide margins and all of the photos sprinkled throughout. Hah!

In addition to the near-complete lack of paragraph breaks, the narrative itself is deeply nested. We don’t follow the titular Jacques Austerlitz through his life in real time; the story unfolds as he tells it, over the course of several years at happenstance meetings, to the book’s anonymous narrator. The narrator, meanwhile, reveals so little about himself that he vanishes almost entirely into the scenery. The sentences are also dense and complicated, and while I can’t speak to the German original (or the English translation), in the Swedish that complexity takes the form of long asides in dependent clauses or adjectival phrases that almost feel like an entire extra sentence smuggled in the middle of the first one you were reading. I had to go back and re-read sentences on nearly every page because those clauses and asides aren’t always (usually aren’t) offset with commas and reading turned into a game of “find the conjugated verb.” You either need a sharp memory or a lot of uninterrupted reading time to make it through Austerlitz without losing your train of thought.

Beyond just the grammatic and syntactic overwhelm, Austerlitz is also full to the brim with historical anecdotes, references, and other asides that I hesitate to call “trivia” because a lot of them pertain directly to the Holocaust. Architecture! Nazi propaganda! Moths! Train stations! You come away with the sense that your head has not only been crammed full of Austerlitz’s biography but also random facts. Consensus among the book club was that Aaliya might just be much smarter and more elevated than us mere mortals. I might revisit An Unnecessary Woman (in ebook format for that search function!) to see exactly what Aaliya thought of it.

To get to the narrative itself, Austerlitz is a fictional account of a man named Jacques Austerlitz, who was sent off on one of the Kindertransport trains and grew up in Wales under the care of a minister and his wife. I used “fictional account” up there, but Sebald made it clear that he was inspired by the real-life case of Susi Bechhofer. Like Susi, Austerlitz’s adoptive parents do their best to erase memories of his previous life, including but not limited to changing his name. (Also like Susi, Austerlitz doesn’t learn about his double identity until he goes to sit an exam and the teacher instructs him to give his name as “Jacques Austerlitz” rather than “Dafydd Elias.”) Between a childhood devoid of warmth or affection and the suppressed trauma of being completely ripped away from his previous identity, Austerlitz struggles as an adult. While he excels academically and manages to become an art historian and teacher, he is never able to complete the book on architecture he had set out to write and eventually suffers a serious mental breakdown. After he returns to Prague as an adult and learns more about his parents, Austerlitz becomes a more integrated version of himself. Or so it seems. Is he better now? Is he not? What’s going to happen with him? Who knows! A more conventional story would have ended at Austerlitz’s funeral, or the narrator learning of Austerlitz’s death after the fact, but instead the two part ways and the narrator is left thumbing through Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom, which he received as a gift from Austerlitz.

Austerlitz is one of those books where even though I didn’t have fun (as such) reading it, I still…enjoyed? appreciated?…reading it. The whole thing is a technical marvel; despite the grammatic and syntactical complexity I mentioned before, you still have a sense of flow and the overall whole of the story (even if you can’t remember what was going on at the beginning of the sentence). There’s also an element of personal satisfaction in finishing a book like this akin to the odd occasion when I manage to run a 10K: it’s a good sign that my body (or in this case, my brain) is still capable of rising to such a challenge. At this point credit goes to Ulrika Wallenström‘s Swedish translation. I can only infer what the German might be like from the Swedish, after all. Never mind all of the names, official translations, and technical terms to check. Austerlitz might not have officially finished his book on architecture and history, but much of that preparatory research material permeates the story. No mean translation feat, this one.

Den blinda ugglan

Sadeq Hedayat’s Den blinda ugglan (The Blind Owl, or Boof-e Kur in Persian) came to my attention through a member of my monthly philosophy reading group. Not because it had anything to do with philosophy, but because we were chatting about Swedish book clubs. I’d never heard of the book or the author before, and the description sounded intriguing:

The Blind Owl is described as a text without peer, with influences from Kafka and Poe as well as from Persian mythology and folk tales. A man recounts his life history to his own shadow. The confusion of losing his mystical lover has driven him to the edge of death or madness. Time and space have disintegrated and the same motifs, the same people constantly reappear in new forms.

The book can be read as a horror story, a surreal depiction of a nightmare or perhaps as an opium-laced game with distorted reflections. André Breton called the book one of the few true masterpieces.

The most frustrating thing for me now is finding out after the fact that it’s full of references to Persian mythology. That’s a huge field to dive into just for the sake of a short book, and yet without that knowledge it feels like the story loses a lot of its impact.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure what I read, but it cracked my idea of what a novel can be wide open. What we have, nominally, are the journalistic confessions of an ailing, unnamed narrator addressed to the shadows on his wall. Is he dying? Is he depressed? Both? Something else? In the first portion of the novella (no chapter breaks, only a handful of section breaks) he mourns the death of an otherworldly woman with whom he feels mystically connected. In the second we get distorted glimpses of a slightly less surreal life, with a domineering (though affectionate) mother-in-law and a promiscuous wife who withholds sex from the narrator. Are they the same people? Is this the same tale told twice, or is one just the opium-induced hallucination of the other? Is any of this even happening at all? Another review compared it to Steppenwolf but for my money, Den blinda ugglan is much, much weirder.

I happened to watch Mulholland Drive while I was reading this, so maybe that’s why the comparison is ready at hand for me to make, but the even so the two are similar. Putting aside the shared surface-level surrealism, they’re both bifurcated, with two distinct narratives that might or might not be connected, presented by two unreliable narrators who might or might not be the same person. Events in both parts are paradoxical or explicitly contradictory, though they are united by the names and images and phrases that recur in both parts. Romantic jealousy is also a key part of the narrative, whether literal or as a metaphor for a more spiritual struggle.

There’s my nutshell summary, I guess: What if Mulholland Drive were a novella written by an Iranian author living in Paris during the 1930s?