How many times do we read of the most barbaric murders and atrocities in the papers? It fills the media for a while until some kind of resolution is reached, arrest, conviction maybe and it soon becomes yesterday’s news. But how often do we ever go beneath the surface of the media stories to consider the life before death in any meaningful way?
‘ Inni is a rebellious teenager, a volatile young woman, a drug user, a sex worker, an unstable mother… She lives her life on the margins, but it is a life that is full, complex, filled with different shades of dark and light. Until it is brutally ended one summers day, on a lake shore at the heart of a distant, rainwashed forest.
But Inni’s story doesn’t end with her murder. We sit with her as she watches her children, parents and friends living on in the world without her, hoping, as time passes, that they will still remember her.’
I found this to be quite an extraordinary book. Very upsetting and harrowing on one level yet the quality of the poetic lyricism of the prose, so wonderfully translated by Deborah Bragan Turner, transcends the brutality of what has happened to Inni, the main character.
I suppose I can be forgiven for being reminded of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones which is the only other book I can currently think of that allows a deceased person to comment on what has happened to them. But whereas Sebold takes the innocence of a child Stridsberg’s character is not innocent but all too aware of the harshness of the world she’s inhabited, the nature of the life she’s lived, before her life is cruelly cut short.
Inni tells her story, without any pretension and without any real recrimination, and our hearts break for her as we learn of her loves and her losses and her downward spiral into addiction, prostitution and despair. A life lived on the edge, eventful, emotional and signposted toward tragedy. A sense of hopelessness pervades her secular life. She considers the effects of both her life and her death on her parents, her children and her lovers and we are allowed glimpses into how they are dealing with their situations. Whether this can be categorised as a merely a novel is questionable for it enters the realm of literature, art, call it what you will. There is something sublime about the narrative and the construction of the book. And the most emotionally encompassing paradox; Inni’s almost tender gentleness as she tells her bleak history. And how perfectly expressed is that curious universal concern so many of us have just wondering whether we will be remembered after we’ve departed this soil.
It’s not a comfortable read. And yet intertwined between the cruelty is beauty; the beauty of love, the beauty of life. This is one of those books that will probably never leave you.
My thanks to Katya Ellis at Quercus Books for a gifted proof.
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