Sara Stridsberg shows an eye for the uncanny in her compellingly strange and sinister short stories
Curious and Curiouser: Hunter in Huskvarna — folk tales with a bracing Nordic edge
I think I became a writer to stay sane,” the Swedish author Sara Stridsberg noted in an interview in 2019, adding, “Or maybe because you don’t have to be sane when you’re a writer.” The shifting sands of psychology and security ripple through her fiction, which has previously included novels and children’s books. In Hunter in Huskvarna, a collection of short stories, her psychological interests inform narratives riven with dysfunction and distortion.
Stridsberg has perfected a kind of contemporary fairy tale with a bracing Scandinavian edge, here elegantly translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner. In the title story, a teenage girl struggles with life in a rural Swedish town, where the moral hand of the church and the economic influence of the local arms factory retain a firm grip. Her one beacon of comfort is an alliance with Hunter, a quiet boy who collects stray dogs. But the arrival of a wolf, like a spectre from the surrounding woodland, tests the friendship.
Nature is often a harbinger. In “The Whales”, it is a portent of ruin: a daughter recounts her mother’s childhood trip to see a dead blue whale hanging in a Stockholm slaughterhouse. Visitors queue to walk around inside, where “lanterns illuminated the grey flesh, and the ribs formed the ceiling”. Yet in the fantastical “The Victoria Water Lilly”, flora and fauna provide a safe space for two 16-year-old girls, who make love in the cloakroom of the Natural History Museum next to Brunnsviken lake, and at night curl up together on a giant water lily in the botanical gardens: “When it bloomed you could lie inside, like in a nest.”
These gothic romances enthral thanks to their painterly set pieces: lovers wrapped in leaves, carcasses captivating crowds, wolves running through the pines. Stridsberg’s eerie scenes echo the folkloric — and erotic — compositions of Nordic artists such as Edvard Munch and Theodor Kittelsen. This is storytelling with an eye for the uncanny.
In her novel The Faculty of Dreams, longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, Stridsberg fictionalised the life of Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who shot Andy Warhol. As in that book, these stories explore how mental illness festers in the disconnect between one person’s logic and societal norms.
Stridsberg’s views on the human psyche centre on the premise that few families provide what they should. Parents are diminished, errant or simply unmentioned, while their children are feral, resourceful and troubled. Nuclear families are replaced with strange flocks. The titular trio in “Three Sisters”, a curious fable about female solidarity, are anything but conventional siblings. All on the cusp of adulthood, they are seemingly unrelated, share an unnamed male guardian and live together in a lighthouse owned by a crone with skin as “diaphanous as a silkworm chrysalis”.
The tales enjoy a slippery relationship with reality — something that makes them compelling if occasionally baffling. In the longest, “The Family”, a young woman joins a bizarre society of antiquaries housed in a castle. Within its walls, women dress as swans, and portraits come alive. The protagonist wants to “leave everything behind her as though she were running away from a mighty forest fire”. The scenario has more rabbit holes than Alice in Wonderland.
Her characters frequently bolt. But, authorially, Stridsberg is confident in her Swedish settings (a couple of stories set in America are less convincing). When her imagination is anchored, even lightly, to notions of home, it conjures strange, sinister and dreamlike reveries.
Hunter in Huskvarna and Other Stories by Sara Stridsberg MacLehose Press £10, 288 pages