Every year there are a handful of books that remind us just how much wealth lies in all the literature yet untranslated into English. Queen, a 1964 novel by Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig, is one such novel. It is a work of mysticism and deep psychological insight, deftly translated into fluid and luminous English by Saskia Vogel.
Queen concerns a woman named Judit and her two brothers, Viktor and Albert, who reside in the rural Swedish town of Bäck. It is a book of landscapes, in which the distinction between the outer landscape of the earth and the inner landscape of the self are simultaneously obscured and clarified.
“But deep within that which is locked up the weeping continues. The gray features harden, the gaze becomes clear, dark, tearless. Deep down the weeping continues. Stifled it bores itself ever deeper downward, inward, vanishing undermost in the deadest layer of earth underneath hidden crumblings, through stone chips down in the desiccated rock-hard packed stratum of the ground. There the weeping could no longer be heard, it had vanished from sight and sound, far down in the invisible, in death earth it whimpered and sobbed.” (28).
Trotzig writes the family’s emotional reckonings as geological events: buried emotions harden, tears become stratified and desiccated. As in the work of Jon Fosse and Hanne Ørstavik, Trotzig embodies a distinctly Scandinavian spirituality in which god appears in the porousness between the world and the self. Though these works are guided by spirituality, one need not be religious to find meaning therein, as what is prescribed is not any dogma or decree. Presence and perception are all that are needed to reach a heightened state of being.
“He looked out over the whiteness, saw the pile of rocks and the spring, the black sea far beyond and at once he saw deep inside himself, deep down in himself there took shape connected images and figures like an obscure but clear map, he could see how everything was connected. And he threw himself to the ground: child of God.” (32).
The primary dramatic thrust of the narrative occurs when Viktor, who fills the role of child in Judit’s life, moves to America. After Viktor’s death, his widow is sent to live with Judit and Albert. The tension between the three individuals and their grief over Viktor serves to illuminate the human tragedy of consciousness and language, which holds us back from the purely animal state of perception and awareness, which demands form in addition to sense.
“For it felt in some way as if this is how everything should be—for all eternity. This was the correct state of things: it was simple. Warmth: the warmth of this other body. Silence, the aliveness via the other’s beating heart. It wasn’t more complicated than this, one needn’t look farther, this was how everything should be. But eternity was not here, not now. They had to start saying words to each other, hard to reach heavy words, time-tattered, coarsened by others’ fumbling, the stuttering, the searching around in the silence that should not be broken (like the searching of fingertips and lips across a still-obscure body, at the shorelines the pale living heart).” (85).
Trotzig’s name belongs alongside Clarice Lispector and Jon Fosse as writers whose work rises to the level of mysticism. Queen is novel with immense staying power, and with two more Trotzig translations on the way from Saskia Vogel and Archipelago, this canon’s horizons expand vastly.
“You want such big things, he mumbled, again on his way out. —but what will be our salvation is a meagre thing that crushes no one—crushes not a single one of us—” (63).
I love this book! I'm also writing something about it. You describe it beautifully.