‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone.
Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the historian and translator Cecilia Berg, disappears without trace, leaving her publisher father Martin to bring up her and her brother Elis in a Gothenberg suburb. Fast-forward 15 years, and Martin is still living alone, visited by his children and haunted by Cecilia’s ghost. Despite the success of the publishing company begun with his teenage buddy Andrén, he sifts the wreckage of his own attempts at literature –‘the beginnings of short stories, essays, novel synopses and several attempts at plays’. Martin’s meditation sends us back to his years as a painfully earnest philosophy undergraduate, wooing Cecilia with his patchy understanding of Wittgenstein and carousing with his artist friend Gustav Becker. It is Gustav, of course, who becomes the successful artist, while Martin remains in his shadow.
Split between the narrative perspectives of Rakel and Martin, the novel follows Martin, Gustav and Cecilia into adulthood and parenthood before Cecilia’s disappearance ends life as they know it. While Martin wallows in middle-aged torpor, Rakel studies psychology, providing the occasional reader’s reports for her father’s company. It’s here she discovers a character in a German novel remarkably like Cecilia. Her breakthrough gives the story some much needed propulsion, as the mysteries surrounding Cecilia’s disappearance multiply. Did she run away to have an affair with the German novelist? Or perhaps with Gustav? Or did she simply do a Nora, and close the door on marriage and family with a resounding thud? Sandgren’s talent at organising these past and present intrigues keeps us guessing to the end.
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