Review of Queen by Birgitta Trotzig Birgitta Trotzig's…
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Review of Queen by Birgitta Trotzig
Birgitta Trotzig's *Queen* tells the story of an unusual family living on a slowly decaying farm in the south of Sweden. I won't delve into the plot in more depth here; instead, I will focus on Trotzig's style.
On the back cover is a blurb from Eva Ström: "Reading Birgitta Trotzig is like walking into a dark cathedral. At first it's just dark, but after a while the eyes adjust, and you begin to make out the colors."
I agree, except I'd qualify this as follows: At first it's just dark, but after a while the eyes adjust, and you begin to make out the colors. **But then the cathedral continues to dim and brighten, causing your eyes to continually adjust and re-adjust.**
Reading Trotzig is at times like reading Faulkner. In my view this Faulkner-like power is not the result of imitation but arises organically from Trotzig's writing itself. Yet she never sustains this style for long stretches. Her style is too varied to be comfortably placed in the camp of Faulkner imitators. At times it is poetic, awkward (more on this later), laconic, even verbose. It's hard to ever feel fully on solid ground: you must continually adjust and re-adjust.
As for the awkwardness, much of this seems intentional, and it works. Her characters are often awkward and maladjusted, and this seems to seep into Trotzig's writing itself.
However, recent Archipelago Books publications have been prone to typos and errors, often in small ways but not always. In their recent edition of *A Parish Chronicle* (which I loved) there are some egregious errors with speech missing the closing quotation marks and parts that are clearly the narrator's voice, not a character's, being included in a character's speech. Perhaps the text of Queen is as Trotzig intended, but a few phrases were so awkward I wondered whether these reflected similar editorial oversights.
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, which is the first English translation of Trotzig's work. I hope Archipelago Books has plans to publish more of her work in the future. I look forward to discovering if her other novels have a similar style to *Queen*, or whether Trotzig explores entirely different stylistic registers.
#entertainment
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Birgitta Trotzig's *Queen* tells the story of an unusual family living on a slowly decaying farm in the south of Sweden. I won't delve into the plot in more depth here; instead, I will focus on Trotzig's style.
On the back cover is a blurb from Eva Ström: "Reading Birgitta Trotzig is like walking into a dark cathedral. At first it's just dark, but after a while the eyes adjust, and you begin to make out the colors."
I agree, except I'd qualify this as follows: At first it's just dark, but after a while the eyes adjust, and you begin to make out the colors. **But then the cathedral continues to dim and brighten, causing your eyes to continually adjust and re-adjust.**
Reading Trotzig is at times like reading Faulkner. In my view this Faulkner-like power is not the result of imitation but arises organically from Trotzig's writing itself. Yet she never sustains this style for long stretches. Her style is too varied to be comfortably placed in the camp of Faulkner imitators. At times it is poetic, awkward (more on this later), laconic, even verbose. It's hard to ever feel fully on solid ground: you must continually adjust and re-adjust.
As for the awkwardness, much of this seems intentional, and it works. Her characters are often awkward and maladjusted, and this seems to seep into Trotzig's writing itself.
However, recent Archipelago Books publications have been prone to typos and errors, often in small ways but not always. In their recent edition of *A Parish Chronicle* (which I loved) there are some egregious errors with speech missing the closing quotation marks and parts that are clearly the narrator's voice, not a character's, being included in a character's speech. Perhaps the text of Queen is as Trotzig intended, but a few phrases were so awkward I wondered whether these reflected similar editorial oversights.
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, which is the first English translation of Trotzig's work. I hope Archipelago Books has plans to publish more of her work in the future. I look forward to discovering if her other novels have a similar style to *Queen*, or whether Trotzig explores entirely different stylistic registers.
#entertainment
source
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