There is an old-fashioned feeling, deep and nuanced. There is also a new, our contemporary, which is much thinner, transparent and fleeting. Bortdöende is feelings with varied names like guilt, grief, and melancholy, the left is just simple emotions that are possible to weigh and measure: shame, anger, fear, joy.
evidence-Based emotions.
There are, among much else, what the aging of the main character Sara in the author, and SvD-columnist Lotta Lundberg’s new novel with grim contempt, thinking of when she a few decades into the future looking back on his life and thinking of how hated and misunderstood she had been in his country for the life choices she once made.
Choices whose complexity no one in the new, transparent time longer have the ability to fathom.
to say that ”The first woman” to be an old-fashioned novel. Narrated in the first person, but no navel-gazing autofiktion without a carefully hopskruvad story with a ideas of mathematics who want to say something deep and thoughtful about our time and place in the world.
We follow Sara on her törnbeströdda way from a self-sacrificing, fierce military service in the nation’s service in the 1990s over a period of time as underpaid freelance Berlinreporter for an increasingly förflackad the Swedish media industry, and up to the great betrayal when she finally allows herself to be recruited as the glamorous presenter of a Russian propagandakanal. A grandiose celebrity in national disrepute – so is her full name also Sara Lander, a something painfully obvious wink to its predecessor, Zarah, with almost the same last name.
The young Sara want to prove themselves, to be The first woman who passed the Tolkskolans stringent requirements, she chews the Russian words for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and to learn to piss standing up in order to not be worse than the boys. Her struggle against herself and the ones closest to the inhumane requirements is a straight story about a self-tormenting mind that evokes a strong (old-fashioned) commitment: you want to go in and help her to either succeed or, perhaps better, put down.
twenty years later, in Berlin, something has happened. Sara is now a part of modern journalistprekariat that delivers small indifferent pieces to a series of more or less robotic hemmaredaktioner. If she perhaps dreamed of becoming a ”correspondent” it is no longer the classic pressdygder that knowledge and overview which is in demand, but klickgenererande opinions about different sensations.
A development, understand the man, which is completely in line with the time that also just become a founder. And at the new ihåligheten gone in her own country. There is no longer anything left to put their life on the line for, and why can’t a young stridis as well be a middle-aged fellow.
But in his zeal to paint up this passage of misery and lack of seriousness is losing Lotta Lundberg, unfortunately, its exciting protagonist. It just so alive Sara feel it in the Berlin’s most anonymous. The only thing that occupies her thoughts, as well as korrespondenternas, as well as exilryssarnas, is this ongoing förflackning, more specifically, go all around and talk as if they were looking profound formulations to a kulturkritisk column in a conservative Swedish newspaper.
the parties, and in bed – a tiring stream of thoughts in a balancing act between prudence and sapience that not always end happily: ”We will not die of the darkness, he explains, we are going to die of too much light, overexposed”.
the Novel’s image of the artist maturing in an increasingly fractured Europe is only too credible, but the story itself has rapidly lost its initial energy. As readers, we never really experience the inner transformation that makes the burning of the Sarah to the bitter Zarah, you may guess a little at a distance, through all the grim words of wisdom.
a Pity on a good story. But it’s a bit old-fashioned.
