Queen
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Long-awaited rediscovery of visionary Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig and her mythic, modernist classic, Queen
Birgitta Trotzig’s 1964 novella is the story of a girl named Judit who is stubborn and singular, distant and unyielding. She has a love of lilies. She is called Queen. Her entire world exists within Bäck, a village in the south of Sweden so named because a brook bends through it. At the age of nine, Judit’s mother falls ill during childbirth and passes Judit the strong little body of her brother Viktor. A sharp gleam springs forth from Viktor’s pale-blue infant eyes, and the two are bonded for life. Viktor and Judit, along with their wordless brother Albert (one who prefers the warm silence of animals), form a precarious family. In dark and mystical waves of language, Judit’s inner life is awakened to the reader. She has her secrets. The Queen prizes her alias like a precious gemstone; she dreams one day that the master gardener at Trolle Ljungby Castle will select her very own flower bulbs for planting; and she holds suspicions like hot stones to her heart. When Viktor decides to emigrate to the United States, the ground beneath Judit's feet forever shifts.
The English-language discovery of Birgitta Trotzig, one of the greatest Swedish writers of all time, is long overdue. Her dark, spiritual writings construct a truth and vision all her own. Trotzig's characters are ordinary and troubled, their lives barren and merciless, but an otherworldly light sweeps across them, making them stand with spectacular clarity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A strange widow arrives from the U.S. to Bäck, a remote coastal village in 1930 Sweden, in this magnificent 1964 novel from Trotzig (1929–2011), her English-language debut. The locals know little about Lydia, but the reader gathers she had married into the Lindgren family. Their ancestral farm is now run by 50-something Judit, known as the Queen for her imperious demeanor, and her younger brother Albert, a taciturn virgin. Their youngest sibling, Viktor, whom Judit cared for while their mother dealt with postpartum depression, left for America in 1920. Viktor met Lydia in New York City during the Depression, when they were both underemployed, and the pair became lovers, moving into a room together and sharing food. In the novel's final sections, the reader learns the details of the couple's brief marriage and Viktor's death, and the story takes surprising and poetic turns over the course of Lydia's time in Bäck, where she grows acquainted with Albert and Judit. Vogel's translation masterfully renders Trotzig's lush and lyrical descriptions of the rural Swedish landscape and Depression-era New York, the latter of which looks to Viktor like "the uncertain ocean of hunger and death." Readers will be grateful for this introduction to a distinguished writer.
