Sandra reviewed Silver by Sara Kadefors
Like a bridge over troubled water
3 stars
Yay, a novel written in the first person! Yeah, yeah, present tense which isn't wholly my jam but compared to the limited third person that's been every single book for the past hundred years this is a every welcome breath of fresh air. I've read a couple of Kadefors' earlier books and I love them. This is her most recent (that I know of) and I recommend it as a good starting point as sort of a greatest hits of a lot of her earlier tropes.
Her specialty is people whose values lead them astray or who can't live up to their own ideals and often with main PoV chars that are clearly messed up and there's no risk of conflating them with being spokespeople for the author. They're just so starkly self-important running 10000 mph into their own walls and fences. But it's not a "laughing at them" style …
Yay, a novel written in the first person! Yeah, yeah, present tense which isn't wholly my jam but compared to the limited third person that's been every single book for the past hundred years this is a every welcome breath of fresh air. I've read a couple of Kadefors' earlier books and I love them. This is her most recent (that I know of) and I recommend it as a good starting point as sort of a greatest hits of a lot of her earlier tropes.
Her specialty is people whose values lead them astray or who can't live up to their own ideals and often with main PoV chars that are clearly messed up and there's no risk of conflating them with being spokespeople for the author. They're just so starkly self-important running 10000 mph into their own walls and fences. But it's not a "laughing at them" style of writing, either. We feel for them and with them.
I recently read Jennette McCurdy's autobiography (which I bought the same day as I bought Silver) and that one had a rhythm to it where at the end of each chapter the knife would twist further. That's not what this is; Silver (which is fiction) has more of a symphonic descent into hecked-up–ness.
An editor (or the author herself) has decided to italicize English words that are common in Swedish but not lexicalized yet, like "pipe" and "make" which are spelled like they are in English. While others like "hike" are spelled "hajk" which has been a Swedish for for longer. But it's only handful of words in the entire 246 page book i.e. nothing I need to write a whole essay about. The 246 is an awkward page count since it means the last ten pages are blank to get to an even printing signature count. Write your own ending?♥︎ This is Piratförlaget so pages are miscut and reading the book quickly gives a jittery and uneven appearance as the page number sometimes is precariously close to falling off the page and other times sit comfortably in the margin.
After reading a bunch of 20th century classics it's jarring to read a 2024 book that's unambiguously 2024:
Just thinking about giving up hair dye makes me feel like I'm losing control. I can't do anything about melting glaciers, oil leaks, fish death, Ukraine, Gaza, civil wars, Huthi rebels, gun violence, racism, fascism, extremism, or Donald Trump, but I can do something about my hair.
It's a book about hair but also a book about writing, being stuck in art, and being alone and navigating rejection. It doesn't wind its strings as tight as Kadefors's own Fågelbovägen 32 or the aforementioned McCurdy bio let alone standing at the end of all things staring a the salt dunes as in The Drought, but it's about it's own flavor of calamity and a wonderful read in its own right. Really what I needed right now and I'm grateful for it.