Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren
Aahh I’ve been thinking about whether I should buy myself a copy so that I can recommend it “properly” with a picture, but one of my favorite Swedish books has finally come out in an English translation, so here’s my official recommendation for all non-Swedish readers:
Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren (translated from Swedish by Agnes Broomé - original title Samlade Verk)
Picture and text copied from Penguin Random House’s website:
A compelling mystery and poignant bildungsroman for readers of Karl Ove Knausgård, Collected Works is a novel about love, power, and art—and what leads us to make the pivotal decisions that change the course of our lives. Martin Berg’s wife, Cecilia, disappeared years ago. His memories of their carefree college days seem ever out of reach, and the intellectual curiosities that once made him the object of her desire have given way to midlife uncertainty. The methodical and quiet life he’s made for himself and his adult children couldn’t be further from the one he dreamed of in his youth, when the manuscripts lying around his apartment were flush with promise and his ailing publishing house was still new. Perhaps nothing reminds Martin of these failures more than his friend Gustav Becker, a wildly successful painter who’s returned to Gothenburg on the eve of his career-defining retrospective. Gustav, meanwhile, is hurting too. His obsession with Cecilia’s inexplicable disappearance had made his art hagiographic, fixated on her image. When posters for Gustav’s retrospective plaster Cecilia’s face on major billboards across the city, Martin’s daughter Rakel learns a haunting fact that points toward her mother’s whereabouts. She and her brother chase this clue across time, memory, and Europe to discover why Cecilia abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person leave can ever be answered. Collected Works, a major hit in Sweden, sold over 100,000 copies in its first year in print, instantly making Lydia Sandgren a literary sensation. Winner of the 2020 August Prize for Fiction, the novel is set to publish in 17 territories.
This novel was one of my favorites from 2021 and I still find myself thinking of it. It’s about books and writing and art and friendship and the way we hold onto the past. A man tries to romanticize the art of writing, which in itself turns into satire. I recognize myself as a teenager or young adult so much in those pages, or maybe I only see a version of myself I wish I’d been.
