Queen

Brigitta Trotzig is a Swedish writer who published novels in her homeland for almost fifty years – the first in 1951, the last in 2000. Now, fifteen years after her death, we can finally read her work in English. Queen, translated by Saskia Vogel, and appearing in the UK in the excellent Faber Editions series (and from Archipelago Press in the US), was originally published in 1964 as part of Life and Death: Three Stories, though at 140 pages it probably exceeds a novella. Life and death certainly feature equally in Queen, set in an earlier, unforgiving landscape beginning in 1930 but largely looking backwards from there. The novel opens with the arrival of “a widow from America” at Judit’s (Queen’s) farm in Sweden:

“…something had happened to her there. And now she could remember but little – items, stains, fragments.”

The character’s inarticulacy highlights Trotzig’s challenge in writing a novel about people who do not think in narrative or reflect. As Sarah Moss outlines in her introduction:

“There is no privileged access to inner monologues or internally articulated but unspoken need and desire because Judit and her family live in instinct and repression…”

Indeed, we are told on the opening page “Children here learn that silence is golden and it is indeed so, nothing can ever be said anyway.” Trotzig overcomes this problem with a rich, descriptive omniscient narration which slows the pace of the novel to the rhythms of the land. Judit greets the widow’s arrival with suspicion, but this event is nearer the end of the story than the beginning. The novel then retreats to the previous century, a time of famine, when the farm’s gates are bolted against the “faltering shadow-and-rag creatures” in search of food. Judit’s father, Joahnn, then a child, sees a woman with a child:

“Her face was white. Her hunger was dark. Death was dark. The snow was white.”

There is something slightly supernatural in her appearance, admittedly seen through the eyes of a child, and when her plea for help is ignored, we are invited to think the farm’s troubles begin. Johann as an adult will allow all-comers to enter and eat, even when there is little for the family, and he is portrayed as a simple man, much like his son, Albert. It is the daughter, Judit, who must take on the responsibility of the farm, and of raising her younger brother, Viktor, especially after her mother’s death:

“The boy Viktor had been placed in her arms. And with the he was hers. And she was his.”

As Viktor grows, however, he is even less help than Albert (as with much else, this is revealed early in the novel) – “he’d been named as father of several children in the area” – and eventually he runs away. Judit, however, refuses to criticise him (“not a word of censure against the runaway brother ever passed their lips”) and Trotzig uses the sight of one of his bastard children in a shop to demonstrate that Judit still longs for him.

It is Viktor who goes to New York in what is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the best written sections of the book:

“A mighty sea of people, of faces, welled forth, welled forth, they welled up out of howling caves, out of ash-black buildings, going up and down the roaring, rattling stairs.”

The fierce, natural landscape of Viktor’s youth imprints itself on the city. Trotzig, having detailed the rural poverty of Sweden, now delineates the urban poor – it is the 1920s and the height of the Great Depression. In one particularly fine passage, Viktor hears rumours of work and finds himself in an immense crowd:

“In a few moments the place was aboil, faces appeared and vanished as if on the crests and troughs if waves; in the distance the row of whirling batons was like a surf brake – the first blood-washed faces rocked out into the sea of people like debris from a shipwreck.”

The entire section is terrifying, and Viktor only survives thanks to a Polish woman, who takes him back to her room and nurses him back to health. If this decision seems unlikely, it stems from the instinctive rather than the rational in ruthless world where solitary survival is unlikely.

Queen is a remarkable novel: the reader is may not relate to the characters, but they are so powerfully drawn that they linger long after the final page is turned. Trotzig’s ability to articulate the experience of a different time and place (this was a historical novel for her as well) is astonishing. Hopefully more of her work will follow.