Through the darkness swept the beam. Capturing – releasing: capturing – releasing. So deep the darkness when the light released its grip, like falling down through a well, darkness, no end; sleepers were struck by the light as if by a knife; again darkness, all the while they were on their way into darkness downward and downward, whirling, falling. Without pause the lighthouse beam swept across ever-new light-unstruck never-seen waves.
Queen, by Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929–2011) is an expansive exercise in grey: the landscape, the sea, the central characters all feature in shades of grey that run from the muted, milky white, to the sombre, murky black. But, amid all this greyness lies a tale of stark, mythic intensity that turns with its own tragic beauty. It is a love story, albeit a damaged one, in that the love that holds it together is both fierce and repressed, arising not with warmth but in agony, as if happiness is an unimagined possibility. And yet, as we read it we do hold out hope.
This luminous novel, vividly translated by Saskia Vogel, opens with the arrival of an odd-looking, child-like woman, a widow from America, who is bound for a farm in a village on the eastern coast of the county of Skåne in southern Sweden. It is November of 1930 and the Great Depression is spreading across the world. Exactly who this woman is, and how she is connected to the once-proud farm to which she has been sent, we will not know until later. But her arrival will prove pivotal for the two middle-aged siblings awaiting her appearance with curiosity and distrust.
The farm in question belongs to the Lindgren family. It had once been a large and prosperous venture but at the time this tale begins, at the close of the nineteenth century, it is slowly falling into disrepair, and its sprawling pastures are being sold off piece by piece. Johan Lindgren, who inherited the thriving farm from his father, finds himself ill-suited to the task of caring for it. He is a man who “did not much love people, they were too heavy, something about them was unsurmountable to him.” Instead he loved animals, especially horses. Lacking the energy to dedicate himself to the work of the farm, he spirals into a cycle of selling assets and acquiring debt. His wife, never a strong personality, weakens and fades into the background after a postpartum illness that never fully fades. Thus it falls to the eldest child, Judit, to carry the load, in the field and in the home. She is stern and responsible, while her brother Albert is shy and sluggish, and Viktor, the youngest, is restless and untamed.
From an early age, Judit is aware that she bears the responsibility of caring for everyone around her: “She never had much time to be a child, but neither did she value such things: her soul had been old and mature from the start.” She rises under the burden, standing straight, tall, unbreakable. She earns the name Queen young and carries the crown boldly, even as her kingdom shrinks and decays around her. But there is a harsh emotional cost, planted early, when at the age of twelve she becomes surrogate mother/sister to her youngest brother Viktor, with whom she instantly bonds. Trotzig vividly depicts the moment everything shifts for her Queen. Sitting on the ground holding the newborn baby, Judit suddenly sense a fissure open in her world. She weeps and weeps, then stops. Her expression closes over:
But deep within that which is locked up the weeping continues. The gray features harden, the gaze becomes clear, dark, tearless. Deep down the weeping continues. Stifled it bores itself ever deeper downward, vanishing undermost in the deadest layer of earth underneath hidden crumblings, through stone chips down in the desiccated rock-hard packed stratum of the ground. There the weeping could no longer be heard, it had vanished from sight and sound, far down in the invisible, in dead earth it whimpered and sobbed.
Viktor, the infant she adores and raises as if he were her own, is a challenge. Their father takes an immediate and unreasonable dislike to the child, unleashing regular beatings on the boy. At school he causes trouble, and as he grows up he becomes more uncontrollable and wild. He does his military service but returns a drinker and gambler. He impregnates a couple of local girls. Finally, when he decides to head to America to build a life for himself, Judit greets the news with a mix of sadness and relief.
Viktor arrives in New York City in 1920, at a time when opportunities abound and he makes his way from one job to another, a journey that ultimately takes him through the southern US. But when economic pressures begin to build he finds his way back to New York. He will never return to Sweden. Meanwhile, back home, Judit and Albert struggle to keep what’s left of the farm going. Well, more accurately, the Queen does. As the siblings age they are increasingly cut off from the rest of the local community, together viewed as an oddity. And then the stranger from America arrives.
Observed intimately and yet with a calculated distance—one longs to get beneath the surface, to understand what and how the characters are truly feeling if they even know themselves—the protagonists never speak directly. They belong, after all, to a place where silence reigns, where little is said, but rumours pass on the wind. The narrative sweeps across landscapes, rural and urban alike, with an existential heaviness, leaving a tapestry woven of soil, sand, and sea, of lives, limbs, and longings. Time is unforgiving. Years pass. Decades pass. Losses seem to mount. Yet, Trotzig continually reminds us to place our trust in language. Against a plot that is often sketched out with limited details, she intuitively knows when and how to amplify an emotional condition with intense vivid imagery. Life is not easy, but as her characters are pushed further into themselves and against one another, always at risk of becoming too hard or too weak and vulnerable, new cracks appear when one least expects and slowly, a little light seeps in.
In her Afterword, Norwegian writer Hanne Ørstavik tells how she came to know of Trotzig’s work and how it saw her through a difficult transitional period in her own writing, ultimately allowing her to write The Pastor. A brilliant novel of haunting landscape, with characters trying to come to terms with life and death in different ways, one can see the influence. It is exciting to know that Archipelago will be releasing at least three more of this enigmatic Swedish writer’s novels in the near future.
Queen by Birgitta Trotzig is translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, with an Afterword by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken, and published by Archipelago Books.
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