Review: Sara Stridsberg «Hunter in Huskvarna»

Short stories

Publisher:

Aschehoug

Translator:

Monica Aasprong

Release year:

2021

«Unstable memoirs and psychotic labyrinths in powerful prose.»

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In her recent collection of short stories “Hunter in Huskvarna”, Sara Stridsberg moves in landscapes she has been to before, in psychiatric borderlands, in the heavy institutions, in the misty labyrinths of the human mind. She takes the reader on an intense exploration of marginalization, exclusion and the individual’s urge to break out – punishment and isolation – as she has done on several occasions in previous works, such as in «Dream Faculty», «Beckomberga – ode to my family» and «The art of falling ».

Some of the short stories appear almost as memoirs, depictions of growing up from Swedish environments, as the title short story added to the industrial city of Huskvarna. Here the narrator’s gaze is directed at the community of the workers, the masses coming out of the factory gate, the ranks of the strong believers. She herself is a child of the “atheists”, quite outside, but the connection to Hunter, who is the only boy in the class who does not fold his hands in the obligatory prayer, shows a way out to another exclusion. Where are he and the dogs?

Several short stories have been added to America, to Detroit and Texas, to prisons and despair. In “Lone Star State”, we follow a sibling couple who travel to their distant father, an oil magnate in Houston and his luxurious home. The father stays with four young men from Rimini, Italy, “The Dogs”, who lie and drag themselves by the pool. Who are they? Sister Hazel is murdered by a furious mad woman who is later sentenced to death, and the surviving brother Robin begins to visit her in prison. They develop a silent, strong relationship while waiting for the death sentence to be carried out.

Sara Stridsberg is insanely good

Burlesque highlight

A burlesque highlight is the longest short story, “The Family”, which paints an indirect inverted picture of the Swedish Academy – the club, the gang that awards the Nobel Prize in literature. Sara Stridsberg was a member there for a record short period from December 2016 to May 2018. Then she went out in connection with the bitter conflicts around the “cultural profile” ravages.

None of this is mentioned, this is about the “family” rituals and stiffened forms, their endless toasting and mutual flattery, all the transforming power the menagerie has on the one who is to enter. All this is done in such an enjoyable way that it all appears to be just so foolish and self-righteous that it only becomes small. Not difficult to understand that Sara Stridsberg – Sara Stridsberg herself! Had to get out of the Academy’s clammy complacency.

Dark paths and abrupt leaps

Stridsberg is an excellent word artist. She creates unstable narrative positions, puts the material in constant alternation between everyday memory prose – straight-forward statements around memories of places and people that an I-person has seen and known and left – and dreamlike, running, almost hallucinatory delusions in more demanding prose. It is never made clear whether the memories are thought or lived, whether they have to do with the I-person, you-people or the third person’s lived past. Or if they are suggestions for possible building blocks in a fictional life course.

The short stories vary between the immediately tangible and the evasively fleeting – both in the sentence structure and in the stories themselves. This way we never know where we are going, nor where we are going, what kind of dark paths she takes us on, what abrupt leaps lurk on every single side – but we are not intimidated. To that end, the author is so convincingly confident as a guide in all his infernal circles. And this security lies in the linguistic mastery, the bold form she presents on paper, unpretentious and grandiose – well done also in Norwegian, thanks to Stridsberg’s regular translator Monica Aasprong.

The Nobel scandal in Sweden: Four members are allowed to leave the Swedish Academy

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