Sandgren Collected Works: A Novel

A Novel: 'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble' (Telegraph)
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-799-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 736 Seiten

'HOW CAN ANYONE LEAVE SOMEONE THEY LOVE?'Martin Berg is falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the hellraising artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript is now languishing in a drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has vanished - leaving him to raise their children alone.Cecilia: an eccentric wife and absent mother, a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Rakel stumbles across a clue as to why her mother left, she sets out to fill the gaps in her family's story and discovers that some questions have no clear answers...

Lydia Sandren is the eldest of seven siblings brought up in the west of Sweden. She has studied music and philosophy and is a practising psychologist, living in Gothenburg. Collected Works is her bestselling debut novel; it won the highly prestigious August Prize in 2020.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sandgren, Lydia

Weitere Mitwirkende

Broomé, Agnes

Leseproben

1

his alarm jerked him awake. It was March and still pitch-black outside. Martin heaved himself up, turning his bedside lamp on and the alarm off. A text from his son, sent at 3.51 a.m., lit up the screen of his phone. Coming home. NB I decline to be celebrated.

Martin sighed. Elis had marked the eve of his birthday at the House of Jazz – which apparently was no longer a place for middle-aged couples looking to take a turn on the dance floor – and somewhere between the bar and home he’d evidently felt it necessary to remind his dad not to sing to him in the morning.

On his way to the bathroom, he knocked on his son’s door and was rewarded with a muffled grunt.

“Happy birthday,” Martin said.

He turned on the coffee machine. He fetched the newspapers from the hallway floor. He made toast and boiled an egg. Just as he was about to start on the arts section, his youngest appeared, walking straight over to the sink, filling a glass with water from the tap and downing it.

Elis had grown at least a foot in the past few years and it was becoming increasingly obvious he had his mother’s lanky, blonde physiognomy. Martin’s primary contribution to Elis’s genome was brown eyes and, according to Gustav, a tendency to sulk while pretending not to.

“Fun night?”

Elis nodded and downed another glass of water.

“Do you want your presents now or later?”

His son pondered that for a few moments, then his ribcage convulsed as he held back violent gagging. “Later,” he groaned and dashed off towards the bathroom.

Martin finished his coffee and went to get dressed. He studiously avoided the mirror on the wardrobe door. He was well aware how he looked. The hair on his chest was turning grey. His calves were scrawny, his knees knobbly. The fact that he worked out three times a week at Gothenburg’s most expensive gym seemed to make no difference. It was a futile attempt to keep the inevitable at bay. His body had betrayed him, pretending to carry on as usual when in reality it had given itself over to ageing. Little by little, while he wasn’t looking. In the olden days, he could start drinking at lunchtime, smoke incessantly, and then wake up the next morning to realise it was the day of the Gothenburg Race, which he’d only signed up to run for a laugh in the first place, find his running shoes and cross the finish line in under two hours. It had lulled him into thinking that was how the human body works. And then it had been taken away from him, bit by bit, without him noticing.

Black trousers, black jacket. Martin Berg dressed like a person receiving absolution for his sins.

*

As usual, he was the first to arrive at the offices of the publishing company. He liked the way the lights flickered to life, the way the day woke up and unfolded before him.

Stuck smack in the middle of his computer screen was a Post-it note. VENUE 25th ANNIVERSARY – IS FRILAGRET OK??? Written, judging by the neat, rounded letters, by Patricia, their intern. A memory of an email he hadn’t replied to stirred at the back of his mind. He moved the note to the edge of the screen, already home to an array of other notes reminding him about things he wouldn’t get to until they were urgent and completely unavoidable. It didn’t seem to matter how hard he worked: the number of things that had to get done now remained constant. Their twenty-fifth anniversary party was still three months away.

Martin leaned his forehead against his fingertips and listened to the humming of the hard drive booting up. Elis had a French test today. He’d probably done his studying while queueing to get into the House of Jazz.

His son’s grades were concerning in that they were neither outstanding nor awful. If they’d been awful, that would have at least been a fact neither one of them could deny. But Elis’s grades hovered around the meridian of mediocrity, because at some point Elis always got tired of whatever he was supposed to be doing. He put his pen down and proceeded to gaze out of the window instead of going over his answers one last time. Whenever he was asked to try a bit harder, he sighed and adopted a put-upon air – as though you were asking him to pull down the moon or tame a polar bear – and said: Yes, fine, I will. And Martin could hear his own voice climbing in pitch as he talked about the job market and getting a university degree, and god only knew what would happen to Komvux now that Björklund had been given free reign with his senseless ideas, and how important it was that Elis realised that this was important. The kind of thing he’d never had to badger Rakel about. Rakel had always had top grades across the board.

The front door slammed shut and brisk footsteps approached.

“Good morning!” Per hollered. He always sounded like he meant it. Martin must have failed to show enough enthusiasm, because a few minutes later his partner entered his office with two cups of coffee. Per Andrén was dressed in a maroon jacket, a pale-pink shirt, and a polka-dot tie, and he was an incorrigible morning person.

“Why so glum, friend? Look what arrived yesterday,” he said, handing over a book. “Doesn’t it look terrific?”

On a whim, they’d decided to publish a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diaries. The latest edition was far from sold out, but another publishing company had a big Swedish-language Wittgenstein biography coming out before the end of the year, which they hoped might generate a burst of interest in the Austrian philosopher. They’d hired a historian from Södertörn University to write a new introduction.

“Lovely,” Martin said. The hardback was heavy and handsome, with silk ribbon bookmarks and generous margins. He opened it and stroked the wood-free, slightly yellow paper, but avoided reading any part of the text, just as he had avoided giving it a final once-over before it was sent to print.

Per was beaming. “Amir did a great job with the old text block. You should tell him that.”

“I suspect you already have.”

“He wants to hear it from you.”

Martin let out a surprised chuckle. “You think?”

“The young people prefer to hear it from you. Anyway, get that coffee down you so you’re awake when the rest of the gang arrives.”

Once upon a time, Martin would have been concerned to learn that thirty years down the line he’d be spending more time with Per Andrén than with any other adult. They’d got to know each other in the bloom of their youth, when they made up the weaker half of a rock band. Martin had been convinced he was a skilled guitarist, and that conviction had for a long time obscured the fact that he did not have much in the way of musical talent. Per had had no such conviction to lean on. Bent so low over his bass only his hopelessly non-punk hairdo showed, he’d sweated, fumbled and floundered, sometimes looking up with an expression of deep bewilderment on his full-moon face. The skin on the fingers of his right hand had refused to develop any callouses and he’d been forever plagued by blisters. But he’d read every issue of culture magazine Kris several times from cover to cover, knew everything about new Swedish literature and came from three generations of entrepreneurs. The publishing company had been his idea. Left to his own devices, the thought would probably never have occurred to Martin.

Per and his wife frequently invited Martin over for dinner, in the past few years even more frequently than before. They passed off these dinners as informal, spontaneous get-togethers (“Want to come over for a bite on Saturday?”), but it was always a three-course affair with several guests, flickering candles, vaguely intellectual conversation, 25-year-old port from some tiny farm outside Porto to which the Andréns had dragged their surprisingly obliging children the summer before. Martin had long since caught on to the fact that they always made sure to invite a woman who was single and of a socially acceptable age. Martin preferred the term unmarried; he’d always felt single had a pathetic ring to it. It was a word that tried to cover desperation with forced cheerfulness. It was a status communicated between the lines: “My ex-husband and I used to…”, “It was back when I lived on Brännö with my ex-husband.”

He always called Cecilia Cecilia. What other choice did he have?

And Per always shot him a resigned look across the table.

The rest of the company’s employees arrived. First on the scene was Patricia, the intern, who started every day by wiping the dust off her computer screen and whose desk was so tidy it made you wonder if she ever did any work. But she had a knack for layout and proofing, never missed an inadvertent line break or incorrect punctuation mark, and whenever she ran into a problem, she tackled it with an Excel sheet. Martin had found her hard to figure out until she...