#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews COLLECTED WORKS by Lydia Sandgren

The plot of Collected Works is quick to tell – Cecilia Wikner, a thirty-three-year-old academic, mother of two young children, Rakel and Elis, wife of Martin Berg, leaves her family and disappears. The telling of this story, however, at over seven hundred pages, is long. As a reader you plunge in and hope it will hold up. It does! The summer of 2023 will surely remain in my memory as the summer I spent reading Lydia Sandgren’s epic and brilliant debut novel.

What ambition for a first-time novelist to attempt a novel this long, based on a relatively simple story, and on characters who, you have to admit, aren’t especially likeable. And what an extraordinary achievement. An achievement also for the gifted translator, Agnes Broomé. Published in Swedish in 2020, a rapid bestseller at home, winner of the August Strindberg Prize, and launched on the English-speaking world in 2023, it has been compared with the novels of Jonathan Franzen and Karl Ove Knausgaard, although, apart from also being long and compulsive reads, this is refreshingly different. The author Lydia Sandgren is a psychologist by profession, a student of philosophy, fascinated by literature, translation, the writing process itself, visual art, the intellectual life and the foibles and delusions of human beings. Suffused with ideas and observations, her novel is carried along by full-blooded human beings, described in meticulous detail across several decades but with the lightest of touches and plenty of humour.

The novel begins ‘today’, fifteen years after Cecilia’s disappearance. Martin Berg – the novel’s true protagonist – is lying on the floor at home in Gothenburg surrounded by notebooks and piles of paper, his own ‘collected works’, the attempted stories, poems, plays and unfinished novel he has collected over his writing life. He is nearly fifty years old, a publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction, mostly in translation. He has wanted to become an author since he was young, later studying philosophy, always writing and ambitious but without the drive or talent to succeed – although he’s the last person to realise that. (He’s a publisher and editor – the irony!) Feeling dissatisfied, mildly depressed and unsettled defines Martin’s existence. He has learned to live without Cecilia, as have his children, now aged twenty-four and eighteen, however great their sense of loss. Rakel, the elder, is herself today a student of psychology, and a burgeoning translator from German, like her mother – who had made a name for herself translating Wittgenstein into Swedish. Cecilia Wikner had been admired as a great intellect, multi-lingual, a translator and an historian. Why would she disappear? The mystery of Cecilia’s departure begins to preoccupy the adult Rakel increasingly when her father asks her to read and write a report on a German novel, with a view to possibly publishing it. The novel seems to tell her mother’s story. At this point the narrative is propelled forward (stylistically just in time to save it from becoming baggy and unfocused) as Rakel investigates the mystery of this elusive, enigmatic woman. Who is Cecilia?

Only about two-thirds of the way through the novel is Cecilia’s actual disappearance described, simply and quickly: ‘One Saturday morning in April, the Berg family woke up to find Cecilia missing.’ She left a note, but Rakel’s father claims not to be able to find it anymore – it was such a long time ago, after all. Rakel tries to remember her mother, but it’s hard:

‘Human memory is unreliable, that was one thing all subfields of psychology agreed on. An individual’s life story was a morass of fragmented recollections, other people’s narratives, unconscious incitements to direct one’s attention this or that way. Experiences and events were forgotten, invented, merged and warped.’

Lengthy flashbacks ‘of fragmented recollections, other people’s narratives’ occupy the novel as we meet schoolboy Martin in the 1970s and his first encounter with his lifelong friend Gustav Becker, a talented artist and destined to become famous as an adult. At university in Gothenburg Martin meets Cecilia, who is studying intellectual history. Martin, Gustav and Cecilia read, write, travel, debate and drink to oblivion together – inseparable friends, even after Cecilia and Martin marry. We learn everything about them, then, now, before, after. We know the contents of their fridges – mundane details litter the novel. Why then do we not know how and why Cecilia left? We search for clues, but this is obviously not a detective story, no Scandi noir; it’s a story of very real lives in which something inexplicable happens. Cecilia is the only character we do not meet in the present, fixed at thirty-three years old, although dominating the novel through her ever-present absence and the paintings of Gustav Becker, today an internationally renowned painter, who had painted her obsessively.

The life of the mind, intellectual pursuits versus the responsibilities of children and home life, the choices women make, the pressures of fame and celebrity, the disappointments and minor victories of everyday life: no stone is left unturned, no word wasted. There is a tyranny in reading a long book – it occupies your days and nights, you long for it to end, but when it does you feel bereft and empty. Collected Works will take hold of your life as it did mine. It is a joy to read. If this is Lydia Sandgren’s first novel I can only wonder what she will write next.

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

COLLECTED WORKS

by Lydia Sandgren

Translated from Swedish by Agnes Broomé

Published by Pushkin Press (2023)

September 2023 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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