Details

This book has been winning awards ever since it was published in Sweden last year, and today it’s out in English.

I read the Finnish translation. My five-year plan to learn Swedish well enough to be “civilized” (not a juntti, Juha Hurme) has shifted to the list of things to do before I’m fifty. Not long to go, that. To be precise, a year and day.

If you’re hovering around your half-century, too, you will recognize a lot in Detjalerna/Yksityiskohdat/The Details. In the 1990s, if someone disappears, they are absolutely gone. You have to get on a train and a boat and a bus to find them. And talk to people. You could send a postcard – they might never get it. You might actually have to answer your landline. But by the time you phone back, they no longer need your help.

From those details, Ia Genberg paints four portraits of people from the past. Lovers, friends, flatmates, parents. I felt transported into a reality close to and very different from my own. And I was reminded of two Toves next door to her – Ditlevsen in Denmark and Jansson in Finland. HarperCollins, the English publisher, aligns her with Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk.

These four relationships show the teller from very different angles. How you piece those fragments together is up to you. Or less up to you than you’d like? This tiny book kept me thinking for a long while.

The Finnish edition took the Swedish cover. Ia Genberg’s Detjalerna became Yksityiskohdat, adding translator Jaana Nikula’s name. The English cover is the same in the UK, and has named Kia Josefsson as the translator. The US edition keeps The Details of faces – but fragmented, on a popping background. As it moves out into the wider world, the book looks brighter, more feverish. Inside, not everything is black and white. Read it!

About Kate Sotejeff-Wilson

Translator, editor, writer, reader