Review no 34: Such Small Hands, Andrés Barba (Spain)

Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

EUROPE

This creepy little book by Andrés Barba (published in Spanish in 2008, and in translation in 2017) seemed like the perfect quick read for December, which calls out to me for a creepy story or three.

The cover art is pretty horrible. My daughter asked me to move the book off the table as it was creeping her out so much she couldn’t do her maths homework. Fair enough!

This is the sort of unsettling and disturbing read that is hard to shake off. The short, unadorned opening sentence is effective in piquing curiosity and luring you straight in, and the line is repeated throughout the book, like a chorus:

“Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital“.

Marina, strange and impassive, after recovering in hospital from the injuries arising from the car crash that killed her parents, is discharged with a new doll, also called Marina, to an orphanage. The doll is gifted to her by the medical staff, perhaps intended as some kind of transitional object for comfort, or a tool for processing trauma, and is central to the plot.

From Parts 2 of the book there is a switch to the third person plural, a “we” of the other girls at the orphanage. Marina is different. The physical scars from the horrific injuries she has survived literally mark her out as alien, while her talk of the normal, midde-class childhood she has so recently lost, with trips to Disneyland, provokes jealousy from her institutionalised peers.

“We’d been happy until Marina showed up with her past … we were plagued by a feeling of rage and surprise, and we wanted to gnaw away at her, little by little.”

Gothic motifs abound: a vulnerable female, an uncanny institution, dreams and fantasies; even a disturbing Freudian eroticism creeps in. The book is psychologically acute in evoking the swirling, inchoate hive mind of childhood, as the novella builds to its inevitable conclusion.

Review no 33: Artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), exhibition (Germany)

Free entry, until 12th January 2020 @ The British Museum, London

“As an artist I have the right to extract the emotional content from everything, to let it work on me and then give it outward form.”

EUROPE

I saw this touring exhibition of prints and etchings at the British Museum in London. I was impressed both by Kollwitz’s work as an early feminist, pursuing her artistic ambitions unreservedly while simultaneously raising her two young sons, and by her emotionally raw depictions of the strength of maternal feeling.

The Director of the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, where the exhibition kicked off, has written that: “She was an artist who pushed hard in the direction of equality for women in all walks of life … often placing an emphasis on what was distinct in women’s experience … She believed that art, while aspiring to aesthetic purity, could be a force for good in society.”

Although themes of death and maternal grief abound, there is also a more hopeful side to Kollwitz’s work. She was fascinated by labouring, working-class people, not purely owing to her strong social concerns, but their “speed and movement, the strength and grace of their bodies” (Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz, Frances Carey and Max Egremont).

Arbeiterfrau im Profil nach links (Working Woman in Profile facing left), 1903 Crayon and brush lithograph with scraper, printed on grey laid paper

Kollwitz was a keen advocate of workers’ rights and of gender equality at a time when that idea must have seemed more or less ridiculous. That she achieved such great success as a graphic artist when painting and sculpture were so much more highly esteemed is doubly notable. Kollwitz produced over 1,000 drawings, 275 prints and 43 sculptures.

Her interest in print-making seems partly to have been a response to the fact that, with two small children to accommodate, it took up less room than painting. Parenting is the sort of little detail that male artists seem to have been able to evade for centuries. However, as Frances Carey writes, for Kollwitz “motherhood was not the ‘enemy of promise’ but a vital aspect of her identity and growth, as were the personal stories and the broader implications of the social problems around her.”

Muter mit Kind auf dem Arm (Mother with a Child on her Arm), 1910 Etching, drypoint and sandpaper printed on copperplate, overworked with brown wash

Her print Frau mit totem Kind (Woman with Dead Child) was posed using her seven-year-old son Peter, seeming to uncannily presage Peter’s death in the First World War at the age of just 18. The work makes use of an unusual combination of techniques, employing etching and lithography.

Woman with Dead Child (1903) Etching with lithograpy

When war broke out, Kollwitz’s eldest son Hans enlisted, and his younger brother Peter longer to join him. As Peter was still underage he required his father’s signature in order to sign up; Kathe persuaded Peter’s father Karl to sign.

Just after Peter was killed, she produced the print entitled The Wait (Das Warten – not on display in this exhibition). After Peter’s death she came to focus more on sculpture, planning a memorial to her lost son. That memorial, The Grieving Parents, now stands in the Vladslo German Military Ceremony in Belgium (“I stood before the woman, looked at her -my own face – wept and stroked her cheeks”).

The devastating woodcut below, Die Eltern (The Parents) (1921-22) is on display as part of the exhibition:

Meanwhile, her woodcut series Kreig (War), completed in 1922, uses the powerful image of a circle of mothers defending their children:

Die Mutter (The Mothers) 1921-1922 Woodcut on Japan paper

Kollwitz’s life straddled both World Wars, and she tragically lost her grandson, also named Peter, to the Second World War in 1943. Kollwitz was no fan of the Nazis (and was at one point threatened with deportation to a concentration camp); with the loss of her son she had also become a resolute pacifist. Meanwhile, despite their own obsession with images of the mother and child, Egremont tells us that the Nazis “criticised her maternal figures for not being proud enough nurturers of future warriors”.

Self-portrait (1924):

Review no 32: The Chambermaid, film by Lila Avilés (Mexico)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

The Chambermaid (La Camarista), released in 2019, came up as a special offer, “film of the day” rental on the excellent Curzon home cinema app (a recent discovery), and I decided to give it a watch.

My original plan had been to watch Roma (2018) as my Mexican film. With its focus on the life of a housekeeper, Roma seems to cover similar territory as The Chambermaid, which follows the day to day travails and dreams of a young hotel maid, Eve (Evelia). However, Roma‘s slightly earlier release date means that The Chambermaid was perhaps a little overshadowed by the hype that surrounded Roma‘s distribution principally via Netflix (it was shown in only a tiny number of cinemas) and the subsequent Oscar buzz. In keeping with the tone of the film, it felt like time to root for the underdog. I was also drawn to The Chambermaid by the fact that it was directed (and co-written) by a woman, Lila Avilés, who now has the unsought honour of appearing as the first female director on this blog. In 2019 female directors remain a rarity.

The film’s action follows Eve (played with enigmatic restraint by Gabriela Cartol) as she works in a luxury hotel in Mexico City, populated primarily by international guests. Eve has been allocated the rooms on the 21st floor. She is doing well: the higher the floor level, the greater the prestige, but Eve aspires to working on the sumptuous 42nd floor, the luxury penthouse level.

Eve’s role is one of quiet understatement and we follow her largely as if watching a fly on the wall documentary. The film is shot as if a hidden camera is trained on Eve as she goes about her day, and we see what she sees, building up a strong sense of the monotony of her days, her invisibility to the patrons, and her tentative desires and ambitions.

The film takes place within the insulated blankness of the hotel. We can see panoramic views of the city from the hotel windows, but Eve is hermetically sealed within them, as if contained in one of the air-tight Tupperware tubs another staff member keeps trying to flog to her.

Eve is 24, with a four-year-old son who she seems to barely see. Instead she finds herself blankly rocking the baby son of a bored guest who seems sickeningly spoilt in comparison, and who slips Eve a bit of cash to watch the baby so that she can take some time to herself; later, she insincerely offers Eve a job with the family back in Argentina, then checks out without a goodbye.

Meanwhile, a boorish, overweight man acknowledges Eva only to demand more toiletries and loo rolls to add to his ludicrously over-stocked bathroom shelves, gazing vacantly at the TV screen as she busies herself around him, or intoning a self-important voiceover to his laptop over a nature documentary (“An equal number of males and females are born into the pack … it’s survival of the fittest”). Is he actually a voiceover guy, or just a bit … weird?

The Chambermaid is a slow film, tenderly shot, and not without humour, which casts a light on the realities of a side of human life that most tourists prefer to turn away from.

Review no 31: Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq)

Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

This is a strange book with an excellent title, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker international prize. (I often wonder what prompts a particular book to be translated into English, and thereby gain access to a wider readership, and I wonder if the use of a Western canonical reference, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, consciously or unconsciously helped the book to gain wider attention.)

I participated in the massive protest march in London in 2003 against UK government “intervention” in Iraq, and reading this book highlights the fact that far from solving Iraq’s woes, that intervention unleashed a new kind of horror.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a complicated book with a diverse cast and many strands and sub-strands of plot, which combines a sort of mordant humour with gothic tropes, political intrigue, magical realism and myth.

I found the structure a bit baggy and the prose didn’t flow entirely smoothly, though whether this was down to the the writing, the translation or my own tilted expectations as a non-expert on Iraqi and Arabic fiction I don’t know!

Junk dealer Hadi, a drunk and a fantasist, cobbles together a creature, the Whatsitsname, from the parts of people killed in explosions in the Iraqi capital, in order to make a body that is complete “…so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.”

However, soon the errant spirit of a young bomb victim, whose own body has been vaporised by a suicide attack, seeks a corporeal home, and occupies the grisly patchwork corpse. Given “life”, the Whatitsname starts to roam the streets to avenge those who have lost their lives in conflict-riven Iraq.

“In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokesman for the US State Department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq.”

The book, although pacy, is somehow tensionless. Plenty happens, but I felt that the plot was almost beside the point. The overarching allegory of the Whatitsname as a symbol of the absurdity and cruel ridiculousness of conflict, or even the amoral chaos of post-“Operation Shock and Awe” Baghdad itself, is what lies at the heart of the novel. Indeed the monster, as he becomes ever more indiscriminate in his prey, muses:

“There are no innocents who are completely innocent, and no criminals who are completely criminal … every criminal he had killed was also a victim.”

As his original body parts begin to decompose, the Whatitsname is compelled to replace them, using the limbs of his victims and even followers who readily martyr themselves to the cause.

“Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds – ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes – I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, he thinks.”

Passages such as these were both interesting and powerful, although the overall effect was of a lack of affect, as the characters were little more than ciphers. As a result I didn’t find the novel particularly emotional engaging, despite the grisly horror of the characters’ circumstances. However, the novel works as an intense and thought-provoking response to the real world rampant devastation wrought on Iraq, both from outside and from within.

“Baghdad, a city he no longer recognized … the city had abandoned him, becoming a place of murder and gratuitous violence.”

Review no 30: Irmgard Keun (1905-82), The Artificial Silk Girl (Germany)

EUROPE

Translated from the German by Kathie van Ankum

The Artificial Silk Girl follows the adventures of a sexually adventurous, rather mercenary young woman, Doris, living in Berlin before the Second World War. The novel was first published as Das kunstseidene Mädchen in 1932, and was published in English a year later (though my translation dates from 2001). My book club chose it as one of our two reads for the autumn (the other being Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments), after a friend of a friend recommended it.

I’m interested in Weimar Berlin, so the book immediately appealed to me. And I thought it would be great to get a feel for the famed decadence of the era from a female perspective. Indeed, the Introduction to the book suggests that it was inspired in part as a response to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

There have been lots of reviews suggesting that the book remains modern in its outlook many years after its first publication, with comparisons drawn with contemporary writers such as Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell. The books is notably very open in its descriptions of Doris’s entanglements with men and drunken nights out. And passages such as this do highlight issues that remain relevant today, such as patriarchal judgements on female sexuality:

“If a young woman from money marries an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for hours and has this pious look on her face, she’s called a German mother and decent woman. If a young woman without money sleeps with a man with no money because he has smooth skin and she likes him, she’s a whore and a bitch.”

However, I didn’t love the novel. I found Doris vapid and annoying and utterly devoid of interiority. The book could still have worked for me, except that I found the prose disjointed and incoherent. The punctuation is eccentric, and the accounts of Doris’s plotless, episodic ups and downs were consequently strangely difficult to follow. While the book’s unstructured breathlessness is no doubt supposed to evoke Doris’s giddiness and effusiveness, I simply found it irritating. It reminded me a bit of Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s amazing memoir The Copenhagen Trilogy, but that is far, far more engaging and I recommend it unreservedly!

Banned by the Nazis, Keun’s work was rediscovered in the ’70s. She went into exile in the mid-1930s, although she managed to return to Germany under a pseudonym after false reports of her suicide were published; her life was sadly blighted by alcohol addiction.

Although to me the novel seemed resolutely apolitical, her bafflement at anti-Semitism is evident:

“The industrialist dropped me already. And it’s all because of politics. Politics poisons human relationships. I spit on it. The emcee was a Jew, the one the bike was a Jew, the one who was dancing was a Jew…

So he asks me if I’m Jewish too. My God, I’m not – but I’m thinking: if that’s what he likes, I’ll do him the favour – and I say: “Of course – my father just sprained his ankle at the synagogue last week.”

So he says, he should have known, with my curly hair. Of course it’s permed, and naturally straight like a match. So he gets all icy; turns out he’s a nationalist with a race, and race is an issue – and he got all hostile – it’s all very difficult. So I did exactly the wrong thing. But I didn’t feel like taking it back. After all a man should know in advance whether he likes a woman or not. So stupid! … you are exactly the way you were before, but one word has supposedly changed you.”

Review no 29: Jide Odukoya – “Turn it Up: On Paradoxes” exhibition (Nigeria)

AFRICA

till 21st June 2020 @ Horniman Museum, London

The art world remains hugely Eurocentric, and even living in London it can be really tricky to find shows of work by artists and photographers from outside Europe.

The wonderful, slightly eccentric Horniman Museum in south London is currently hosting a small exhibition of work by Nigerian photographer Jide Odukoya. Based in Lagos, he is a street and documentary photographer, challenging the poverty porn of Western photographers by showcasing the glamour and flamboyance of traditional Nigerian wedding ceremonies.

Nevertheless, ‘Turn it Up: On Paradoxes’ also makes clear the dissonance between the opulent wedding celebrations and the everyday poverty that is a part of Lagos life for many.

“Carriage” (2019):

The Horniman reminds us that the phrase “Turn it Up” is “modern vernacular for lavish fun”. Many of these photographs are joyful, and full of family pride, happiness and intimacy. Safe to say, Odukoya is a few times more talented than the photographer who took the photos at my own wedding!

However, the photo series also shines a spotlight on the global reach of a tendency towards rampant, aspirational consumerism, as popularised by celebrity culture, which has come to characterise 21st century life in many places.

Entry to the exhibition is free, and there’s plenty of other stuff to see at the museum, including its iconic overstuffed walrus.

“How to Love” (2019):

Review no 28: Non-fiction (Doubles Vies), film by Olivier Assayas (France)

FRANCE : EUROPE

This is no doubt a bit of a niche French film, focusing as it does on publishing insiders wrangling with the reinvention of the industry for the 21st century; it was originally intended to be released with the dire title E-book. I, inexplicably to most, find this kind of subject area quite appealing, having worked for countless years in a publishing industry that has been readjusting painfully to the introduction of digital products, e-books and the usurping power of the internet.

I found the movie comically, stereotypically French, containing as it does bed-hopping, gratuitous tit shots, bad jokes and plenty of pseudy pseudo-intellectualising. Everyone is shagging someone else’s partner, of course.

The characters say things like “tweets are a modern day haiku” and “people say art is corrupt, thus worthless, so it should be free”. Unfortunately, the endless arguments about the inevitable death of books, the rise of e-readers and the redundancy of libraries (noooo!) felt rather old, since they’ve been dragging on for decades.

Juliette Binoche was great, because she’s Juliette Binoche (I particularly love her for her cameo in the excellent French comedy drama series Call My Agent/Dix Pour Cent). Other key roles are played by Vincent Macaigne, as scruffy writer Leonard, who turns out barely fictionalised accounts of his love life, and Guillaume Canet as Binoche’s husband, suave publisher Alain. (I was interested to learn that Canet is not only an actor, but a real-life showjumper too, which seems unnecessarily impressive and bit Rupert Campbell-Black.)

This film won’t be everybody’s cup of café, but it kept me entertained for an evening. The jokes weren’t funny though.

Review no 27: Han Kang, Human Acts (South Korea)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

When it came to choosing a female South Korean writer, there was really no choice to be made. Han Kang is a previous winner of the Man Booker International Prize, and two of her novels recently made it onto the top 5 of a list of the best 100 works by female writers in translation.

Despite these plaudits, I didn’t enjoy Human Acts. It’s not the sort of book that’s designed to be enjoyed, though it is, I think, important. It uses fiction to take an unflinching look at the events of, and fall out from, the violent suppression of the Gwangju uprising in 1980 (about which I till now knew nothing). The recounting of the horrific events of that time, the slaughter of innocents, the torture, is relentless. It challenges us to look away, and I really, really wanted to look away and never pick up the book again.

At the heart of the book is the life and death of a young boy, Dong-Ho.

“Looking at that boy’s life … what is this thing we call a soul? Just some non-existent idea? Or something that might as well not exist? Or no, is it like a kind of glass? Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”

I sympathise hugely with the plight of the real-life victims of the Gwangju uprising, and the families that they left behind.

However, I found that the novel’s laboured, circuitous prose created a distance between the reader and the characters, and so the read was strangely emotionless. Perhaps the characters are supposed to stand, at times, for the collective experience and the collective suffering, but for me it didn’t quite work.

I’ve read other books with very difficult subject matter, and found them less difficult to read, but with this novel I felt like I was wading through a thick, viscous liquid for days. It’s a short book (just over 200 pages), but I could only face 10 pages or so at a time.

Having just reading about Margaret Atwood’s well-realised fictional dystopia Gilead in The Testaments, it was sobering to recognise echoes of that novel in the accounts here of terrible, real events of 1980 in Gwangju: the indiscriminate deaths, the requisition of public spaces for bodies and prisoners, the clandestine, damning record-keeping.

Human Acts is worthy and polemical, the sort of book a prize committee couldn’t not give an award to, but it’s a punishing read.

Unexpectedly, it was in the very personal Epilogue to the book that the characters and events of the novel finally seemed fully realised. We learn that Han Kang was born in Gwangju and haunted by the violence there. As an adult, she made contact with the family of the school boy Dong-Ho, upon whom the character in the book is based, who lost his life there in 1980. The book seeks to pay tribute to his life and death – and to the lives and death of all those others who were murdered in the Gwangju uprising – while examining the nature of violence and brutality.

I won’t be racing off to read more writing by Han Kang, but I’m pleased to have become acquainted with her work.

Review no 26: Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland (Togo)

AFRICA

Translated from the French by James Kirkup

I googled Togolese writers, and the first name to pop up was that of Tété-Michel Kpomassie. The intriguing title of this book, published in 1981, meant it just begged to be picked up. Togo and Greenland seem opposite extremes, but author Tété-Michel Kpomassie was determined to make the journey to Greenland from his home in Togo after seeing a book about the frozen territory. He set off as a teenager in 1959, just before he was to be indoctrinated into a snake cult.

Perhaps now is a good time to admit that as a small child I was obsessed with huskies. I would attach my stuffed Highland Terrier toy to a length of wool and hold his reins in my hands as I perched in an armchair, willing him to whizz across the carpet, while I yelled “Mush! Mush!” The point of this anecdote being, I guess, that I can understand the fascination that the teenage Kpomassie felt for the lives of the people who used to be known as Eskimos (now more accurately known as Inuit).

Kpomassie made his way slowly north, over several years, educating himself via correspondence course, and taking short-term jobs. Kpomassie’s optimism, exuberance and charisma jump off the page, and it is striking how people everywhere proved themselves willing to put him up in their homes after a moment’s acquaintance.

Greenland is massive, stretching 2.166 million km², but is currently home to only around 56,000 people. On his arrival, Kpomassie became something of a local celebrity, being welcomed into the various communities among which he stayed (and into the beds of several women!). He travelled north through the territory, experiencing brutal living conditions, in what became a sort of ethnographic study.

Still gripping the two uprights, my companion brought the sled to a graceful halt beside me, while I wobbled to my feet and dusted snow from my clothes. He didn’t even ask if I was hurt.

“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “How can a man fall off a sled? It’s not possible, yet you, you managed to do it. I saw you rolling down like a seal’s bladder, and I couldn’t believe my eyes!”

Kpomassie demonstrated a preternatural ability to pick up languages, seeming to converse with ease wherever he went, and relays many colourful, sometimes funny, adventures, as well as a few genuinely disturbing encounters.

The locals’ diet sounds truly disgusting, as they survived on seal blubber and, in places, raw dog meat, while Kpomassie had warm clothing stitched for him out of dog fur and seal skin. (I don’t whether these traditions have persisted into the 21st century, or to what extent climate change has affected current ways of life.)

Raw fish exposed to glacial air is firm, even hard, and doesn’t smell. It is wholesome and pleasant to eat, even when crunchy with ice crystals. However, I would never eat raw fish in my own country, for in the hot climate it goes soft and limp and start to smell within two hours … As for seal blubber, that native delicacy, is is simply nauseating for a foreigner and resembles tallow. Lightly dried and yellowed by the sun, then “hung” as the Greenlanders like it, it smells rancid. And when frozen, frankly it even tastes like candle wax.

The film rights to Kpomassie’s engaging and enlightening adventures were bought some time ago. Development work commenced on a film adaptation of the memoir, but it seems that work must have slowed or stalled – though I did come across this teaser trailer from 2016:

Hanne Ørstavik, Love (Norway)

EUROPE

Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

The short novel Love (Kjærlighet) was published in Norway in 1997, but only appeared in English translation in 2018, when it was published by the marvellous Archipelago Press. Martin Aitken won the 2019 PEN American translation prize for his work on the book, which has been voted as the 6th best book to be published in Norway.

To my knowledge, this is only the second Norwegian book I’ve ever read, so I’m not in a position to judge whether it deserves that 6th place, but Hanne Ørstavik’s Love is very cleverly and tightly plotted, and a pretty compulsive read.

The book focuses on one evening in the the lives of a single mother, Vibeke, and her young son, Jon, on the day before Jon’s 9th birthday. They have recently moved to a small, rural town, where Vibeke has taken the role of arts and culture officer. The reader is pulled inside their consciousnesses from the start, and enmeshed in their thoughts.

Jon, a bit neglected, a bit lonely, longs for a toy train set for his birthday, complete with snow plough. He imagines his mother may have picked up on his hints, and dreams of the cake she will prepare for him. However, their pre-occupations are running on entirely different tracks.

Vibeke is a fantasist, vain, longing for romance, and obsessed with external appearances, whether they be physical looks or domestic interiors. She reads fanatically, as a form of escapism, wishing away her son, so that she can focus on her books:

“She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on. She could have done without the TV too. I never watch it, she tells herself, but Jon would have minded.”

It is rapidly evident that Vibeke is a pretty terrible mother, due to her self-absorption. (I’m fairly certain that I’m a much better one, but I could relate to her longing for more reading time!)

Vibeke daydreams about a brown-eyed colleague at work, maybe he likes her?

“In the Q & A session he made a comment about being interested in extending interdepartmental collaborations”.

Dream sequences underline the fact that neither Jon nor Vibeke has their expectations grounded in reality.

From the second chapter, tension begins to build. Jon sets out after dark to sell raffle tickets, entering the home of an old man, who leads him down to a dark cellar, where we expect the worst is about to happen.

“At the bottom they go through a little passage, a mat of artificial grass covering the floor. The place smells rank and strange. Jon thinks it smells of soil. The man stops at a door at the end. He turns towards Jon, his hand on the handle.”

But, as we’re used to seeing in a film, the next paragraph cuts back to Vibeke, leaving the reader briefly disorientated:

“She takes off her clothes while she runs her bath. There’s no bubble bath left in the bottle. She takes a cotton bud from a box on the shelf and removes her nail polish with some remover…”

On this occasion the tension is resolved, harmlessly. The novel is full of such moments, as the narrative switches rapidly from one perspective to the other. With its sense of impending menace and horrible inevitability the book reminded me of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, another disarming, slim book. Every encounter is loaded with dread, through the knowing use of familiar tropes.

The outside world, the snow, the ice, the drifts, are all beautifully evoked, although the text is not poetic. Instead, it is stark, open and to the point. The novella concludes like one of Hans Christan Andersen’s darker fairy tales. Love is a strange, ironic title for a book that serves to highlight the ways in which we may so completely fail to understand or fully acknowledge those that are closest and most precious to us.