The publisher’s marketing department must have had some anxiety about whether a 773-page book titled Collected Works would be misunderstood as a catch-up volume about some dusty canonical figure. In fact, it’s a startlingly impressive debut from Swedish writer Lydia Sandgren, with the sort of range and depth of an on-form Jonathan Franzen or Donna Tartt novel.
The inciting incident is the decision by Cecilia Wickner – a beautiful, intelligent, marathon-running, good-at-everything translator – to abandon her husband and young family without explanation. Flipping back and forth over a 30-year period, we follow her husband, Martin, first as a struggling young writer in Paris, then through to his successful, though unfulfilling, career in publishing. Martin is a sort of everyman, or more specifically, an every-middle-aged-man: he has a certain endowment of charm, talent and social skill but is all too aware of his own mediocrity.
Martin’s younger years are spent drifting – his writing lacks artistic clarity and he is too easily distracted by social temptations. In contrast, Martin’s friend, Gustav, has true dedication, completing the full cycle from starving painter to disillusioned art celebrity.
Though Cecilia’s disappearance is ostensibly the driving force, her absence is never acutely felt in the novel: her storyline is prominent throughout the early years, to which we later get to add the deep impressions she left on others. As a character, though, she is a little flat. Implausibly gifted but low-energy, her superiority in conversation lacks spontaneity, as though someone had shared the answers to the quiz with her beforehand.
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The narrative is enjoyably digressive, and there are several sections where it all but winks at the reader about its own plotlessness: “It’s a hard balance to strike, between the sublime and the banal,” remarks Gustav about the paintings of Hammershøi; “Getting away with banality requires great talent,” responds Martin.
On one level, these are familiar narratives about familiar types of middle-class lives, but what makes the book so captivating, so immersive and so satisfying, is the way the writing – in Agnes Broomé's free-flowing translation – swims around inside those lives. As a reader, I was propelled forward by my own nosiness. This is a book that any people-watcher will love to lose themselves in.
