THE ANTARCTIC OF LOVE

Author: Sara Stridsberg
Year: 2018
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

”Did I really think that he was going to kill me? Yes, perhaps I did, but I didn’t think it would be the end. All this time, I thought I would return as someone else, and that I’d be forgiven. Forgiven for what? I don’t know, just forgiven. For being born. For existing in this world. For being killed and for returning. Lost. Liberated. ”

The voice we hear comes from the beyond. The narrator, a prostitute and heroin addict, is dead – murdered. Her head has been sunk into a contaminated cesspit where the acids quickly consume her face as if to ultimately seal her namelessness, while her body is now dissected and disposed of in two suitcases in separate locations in Stockholm. Her body is partitioned in death as it was mutilated by hundreds or even thousands of men in life. Her face obliterated just as she was defaced in life by men who were interested only in her body, rendering her face, her thoughts, and her feelings irrelevant. A life not worth living thus ends in a death not worth dying.

In her latest novel, “Kärlekens Antarktis” (“The Antarctica of Love”), Sara Stridsberg tells a story from the perspective of the weakest and most exposed individual in her weakest and most exposed moment. The narrator knows that she is dead and she has complete memory of her moment of death. Her tale is her life passing in front of her eyes in the moment of her death. Only contrary to the common rendition of this recurring trope, it is not flashing by. Instead, it is grinding slowly and with crushing force, dwelling on every detail, every feature, and every grain and every particle. The moment of her death starts before she is born and continues in perpetuity after she is dead. Bit by bit, her life is disclosed to us: her childhood, her failed parents, her destructive relationships and marriage, the fate of the son and daughter she gave birth to, while regularly returning to the moment of her assassination. It is as if her entire life was condensed in that moment.

Verily, this is a taxing read. Stridsberg’s prose is graphic and expressive, and she does not shy away from the most grotesque details. The reader is dragged through every harrowing second of the narrator’s torturous demise. The same way the murderer did not spare her, so does she not spare us from going through the agony of her experience, if only in our imagination. The writing is powerful and direct and hits you in your gut like a donkey’s kick. True, some imperfections remain. The rhythm could be improved here and there and on a couple of occasions I was ejected from the immersion by an unexpectedly lazy choice of words. Yet, all in all, it is a well-crafted novel.

Given the plot and the characters, it is impossible not to think about a high profile murder that was perpetrated in Stockholm in 1984 where the body of a young woman, also a prostitute and a drug addict, was found cut into pieces and hidden away in different locations. Two physicians were later prosecuted and found not guilty to the murder although it could be established that they had dismembered the woman’s body after her death. I was eight years old when this story made the headlines. Stridsberg was twelve. Brutality made a debut in my life, if only from a distance. Maybe in hers, too. The reality of the violence from which this story is born had been uncloaked.   

I can only speculate about what the author aims to achieve with “Kärlekens Antarktis”, especially since this is the first book from her that I have read and therefore am unable to put it in a broader context. In the afterword, Stridsberg denies that her book is about any specific person or event. Maybe this is accurate. For in the final words of the novel, the narrator addresses her daughter.

“The tales about how the universe continues to expand, make it somewhat easier for me to let go now. The thought that we are all part of the same endless motion. I am thinking: whatever happens to us, only one second of eternity has passed.”

It seems that in Stridsberg’s mind, the line between individuals is blurred and so the divide between the writer and the fruit of her imagination can be, too. The moment Stridsberg reaches out to her they become the same. Her erudite and poetic voice becomes the voice of the simple and unschooled dead woman thus enabling her to speak despite her throat being cut and her mouth filled with dirt and acid. The literary language cannot belong to the victim but certainly to the writer who together with the victim becomes the narrator. They both speak and they are both cut into pieces and stored in suitcases.  

“The space which we, the dead, once occupied in the world is filled with the living faster than one would think.”

* All quotes are translated by me from the Swedish original and are not necessarily identical to the official English translation of this novel.