The Details

(by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson)

Each of the four sections of this novel is a memory piece, the story of the narrator’s relationship with someone who was once in her life but isn’t anymore (two lovers, a friend, her now-dead mother). Based on the story’s timeline, it’s clear that the virus the narrator has at the start is COVID, but this isn’t exactly a pandemic novel: mostly, the narrator is remembering the 1990s. I especially loved the first section of the book, where the narrator pulls The New York Trilogy from her bookshelf (because she first read it when she was feverish from malaria in 1996 and therefore wants to read it again while feverish now) and is prompted to think about her ex, Johanna, because the book was a gift from her and has a note from her in it. This section is very readerly and very writerly: the narrator talks about how she and Johanna “introduced each other to authors and themes, to eras and regions and singular works, older books and contemporary books and books of different genres,” and about how Johanna would read her drafts and offer suggestions, how Johanna got the narrator’s writing in a way that others didn’t. The next section jumps back in time to talk about Niki, a classmate the narrator became friends with (and eventually roommates with), and how their friendship eventually ended. Then comes the section about the narrator’s brief but significant relationship with a man named Alejandro, and finally we learn about the narrator’s mother, Birgitte. The first two sections were stronger for me than the other two, but even so, I read this book over the course of a weekend and didn’t want to put it down.

Some favorite sentences:
– “Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.”
– “To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.”
– “An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes.”

Also: this description of Paul Auster’s writing prompted me to pull my own copy of The New York Trilogy (which I haven’t read yet) from my bookshelf: “hermetic but nimble, both simple and twisted, at once paranoid and crystalline, and with an open sky between every word.”