“Memory never stops,” wrote literature’s finest memory-keeper, Annie Ernaux. Although writer and journalist Ia Genberg pivots from Ernaux’s style of memoir writing and turns to the comforts of fiction, remembering is vital to her International Booker-shortlisted novel, The Details, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson.
Under bouts of fever and the nostalgia of a 25-year-old inscription on a gifted book, Genberg creates a character — an unnamed woman who is also a writer – afflicted with the same feverish nostalgia; and so, begins the act of remembering. Memories — of old lovers, broken relationships, incomplete affairs, friends who disappeared, and parents who were people first — visit her as her life moves on and away from those she remembers; fondly or not, one is not sure.
Distanced by time, memories of the narrator’s past relationships come back to her with clarity as she embraces the grief of having lost them. Her relationship with Johanna, an ex-lover whose public life makes it harder for the narrator to forget their unfair, unequal relationship; Niki, the eccentric housemate, living with whom was an endless hunt for misplaced remotes and phone-cords; an exotic affair with musician Alejandro that ends as abruptly as it began — it was the “length of a breath”. And finally, the story of Birgitte emerges, not as her mother but as a woman outside of motherhood, forgiven at last.
A nameless joy
“We live so many lives within our lives — smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up — and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame… my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details,” she writes. Details that are the building blocks of memory.
Genberg’s narrator thrives on these details — the little ways that make a person’s character — with a finesse which usually eludes memory. She clings to them — Johanna’s coldness, “the frost”; Niki who was “brilliant when she was in the right mood”; Alejandro who was afraid of “the terrorism of the everyday”, and Birgitte’s “absence of personality”. The only details Genberg does not offer are her narrator’s, perhaps to reclaim the idea that a person is defined by those around her/ him. Their details are the details of her life.
In some sense, the novel is a reflection of Sweden of the 60s, the 80s, and at the turn of the millennium, when mobile phones were a novelty and words like “unhinged”, “messy” and “anxious” were all people had to describe (and understand) mental illnesses. As the translator, Kira Josefsson, calls it, it is a “quiet book” but filled with details that we absorb in life but do not acknowledge; not as well as Genberg, at least.
The reviewer is a freelance feature writer. Instagram @read.dream.repeat
