The Antarctic of love (Nordic), the new novel by the Swedish Sara Stridsberg (Solna, 1972), begins with a murder in a forest. It could be the beginning of one of the Nordic crime novels that have conquered the globe in recent decades. But in La Antártida del amor it is the victim Kristina herself, Inni, who speaks up. The one that begins the book narrating her death in a cold and humid direct. She remembers her, detached, from the heights. She watches as a man strangles her in the woods, tears her into seven parts, and packs her remains in two suitcases. Inni will remember that moment over and over again in her narration. Because what follows is not a police investigation into a sadist but a dead woman’s look at her past – trauma, drugs, prostitution, lost children – and even the future.
A murdered woman who, says the author in Madrid, “feels a curse on her.” “And while no one is cursed outside of fairy tales, I can recognize that feeling in my own family. Will I be like my father? Will I be him? Will I find another way? ”, she points out. The protagonist of her does not quite make it and she finds one of those predators that always smell, she says, “of the wounded animal, the one that is already bleeding.” “I guess it’s our job here on Earth to take care of each other, to protect people like Inni who can’t protect themselves. If I had, I think she would not be dead, ”she says.
An Inni that she does not save, although she initially believes it, nor does she have children. “We like to think that we are the ones who take care of our children, but deep down they also take care of us. You feel more stable with them. You have to be the mature one. But despite her great pain for it, there is something stronger than her love for her children, drugs, ”says the author, who remembers interviewing a heroin-addicted woman who was on the street. She “would say: ‘I understand that they took my son from me, but I don’t know why they had to do it in such a brutal way. And that has ended in the work, ”she remarks.
“I have had this novel inside me for a decade,” explains Stridsberg, who resigned in 2018 from his position at the Swedish Academy, the one that chooses the Nobel Prize for Literature, for how the scandal over the sexual assaults of the husband of another academic was managed. . “I hope things have changed at the Academy, but it’s too soon to tell,” she admits. And she explains that one of the starting points of La Antártida del amor was reading that a prisoner in Guantánamo left a small note when he died asking that they take a picture of him when he was dead.
“Those words touched me. That man had nothing and he only hoped that someone would testify to his existence with a simple photo. And at the same time, since I was a child I wanted to write a novel about a dead woman. I saw in the newspapers the little black and white photos of murdered girls. I was wondering if that was my future or would I go to university, ”he recalls. And both threads merged into one voice.
He doesn’t remember when he decided to write the moment of Inni’s death over and over again, that the book was like a circle, but he believes that “it has to do with today’s entertainment culture, obsessed with murder in literature and series. I thought if people wanted murder, I would have it, but then they were going to have to be with me, come all the way, be with the girl in the woods. In the series they dispose of the body at the beginning and then look for the murderer, often very intelligent and even sexy. There is a riddle to solve. And death is not really an enigma. You can’t solve it. That’s why it reappears over and over again in the book. Somehow it’s my revenge for so many dead girls. Do you want crime? I’ll give it to you. She has dirt in her mouth, but she can still talk. And she wanted her to have the last word.”