QUEEN

A trio of Swedish siblings navigates a bleak childhood on a farm.

Trotzig’s classic 1964 novella tells the story of three siblings born to a father with “something gravely violent yet absent about him” and a mother for whom the world seems simply to loom too large. Judit, the oldest child, “lay in darkness and sensed that there was no way out,” Trotzig writes. Judit raises her two younger siblings on the desolate Swedish farm their father has been running into the ground—there’s Albert, who doesn’t speak, and is mercilessly teased at school; and Viktor, who for reasons none of them can quite articulate, simply by existing, arouses their father’s temper and his fists. Judit is nicknamed “Queen” behind her back—and sometimes to her face—by other villagers who need a name for the unprecedentedly proud, headstrong young woman. But while Judit raises Viktor almost as if he’s her own son, he begins to get into more and more trouble as he grows up, eventually setting sail for the United States. Still, the storyline doesn’t seem to be Trotzig’s point here; if anything, she’s more of a prose poet, with densely lyrical passages packed tightly onto each page. Many corners of the book crackle with a kind of electric intensity in Vogel’s translation. But at other moments, the pacing sags, the prose seems to lose the intensity of its own lyricism, and the reader starts to long for some more straightforward syntax—or, at the very least, punctuation.

Taut with intensity, this novella only manages to lose momentum once or twice—and not for long.