It is appropriate that I follow a book by a translator with a book in translation. Queen by Birgitta Trotzig was published in Swedish in 1964 and has just been published in a translation by Saskia Vogel by Faber & Faber, who sent me a review copy. I am always interested in reading more Scandinavian literary fiction, and its description as a ‘haunting Swedish family saga’ won me over.
It’s very different from most novels I read. There is almost no dialogue in the whole book – I thought there would be none at all, but there are four or five exchanges throughout the book. Instead, it is all narrative, and often for page-long paragraphs. It is a poetic, atmospheric depiction of a melancholy family in a rural community. Judit is also known as ‘Queen’, which is a part of her personality that often wars with the more sombre, even hopeless, part of her that is ‘Judit’. She has a taciturn brother, Albert, and a much younger brother, Viktor. At length, Trotzig depicts the dysfunction of this family unit, who scarcely communicate or connect with each other. This is a paragraph about the relationship between Judit and Viktor:
And she sensed how she was being left alone. As young as he was he had made himself unreachable, slick and smooth like a sea-glazed stone, no longer to be grasped. Gray sky, black nettles, chicken scratch, the cat upon the rat, down among the meadows the gray expanse of sea – what did she have to do with this whole world? Alone were they, each and every one unto themself, like cast stones scattered in the empty water-dawn.
It’s beautiful writing, but I have to admit to feeling a bit oppressed by the amount of beautiful writing in this book. Obviously it was a choice to keep the characters’ voices from us, but the lack of dialogue did make the family seem cold and remote from the reader, as well as each other.
In the final 40 pages, a new character arrives – she is foretold by the blurb, but I shan’t spoil it – and it could have been transformative. And yet she, too, is curiously distant from us all. Even a sudden burst of plot couldn’t change that.
So I’m not sure I’m necessarily the right reader for Queen. I could tell it was beautiful, but I couldn’t connect with it. Perhaps that was the point… and yet it felt like a book I couldn’t really get to grips with.