'The Details' book review: A novel that delves into the nuances of personal relationships
Ia Genberg’s 2022-Swedish novel The Details, which has been shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, is a moving portrait of loss, grief and remembrances. Translated by Kira Josefsson, the book is divided into four parts, each with a character that ties themselves to the protagonist—the woman writing about them.
It begins on a daunting note of a virus causing fever, and the writer being “followed by an urge to return to a particular novel”. The readers are then taken to the 90s’ Sweden, when she was dating Johanna. The two women love literature. When Johanna isn’t commenting on her lover’s writing or busy tackling the pace of her own life as a radio broadcaster, the two discuss books. But, there is more to the writer’s life. In the next section, we follow her friend Niki, who suddenly disappears. After that, there is Alejandro, a lover, who leaves things unexpected for the writer to scrap from. Finally, there is Brigette, her mother, whose life has been tremulous for the writer to ever make peace with.
Genberg loves contrasts. In many ways, her writing and thought appear like a painting with colours, skillfully and purposefully, distinct from one another. It is present in her associations with every character. For Johanna, life “was lived in one direction—forward. It’s how we differed from one another: I rarely completed anything big”, writes the author. Niki “loved things most people found gross”, and the flat they shared was never clean or organised. Alejandro believes in a life meant to unsettle him, one that would not bind him to Sweden’s comfort. Brigette never spoke a word to her children, but in a political congregation she seemed the loudest. There is something magical about these contrasts that Genberg presents through vignettes, and the story comes together in these details, without being gimmicky or unoriginal. The author spells out the unexpected vicissitudes of life by zooming in on the nuances of a person’s belief, their actions, their choice of music or literature, and their perception of each other. Like in a painting, contrast is used by the writers to reveal the characters as much as it is used to reveal herself.
This is, however, not to say that differences have to be separating; contrasts shouldn’t break people. By showing her adjustments to Johanna’s “words and gestures”; accepting “that’s all there is to the self… traces of the people we rub-up against”, we see modes of dealing with contrast. At a time, when more options are available at every given moment—with respect to friends or lovers—Genberg’s heartfelt admission of acceptance comes as an urgent reminder. It reinforces the realisation of how closely one can choose to love another, and how intensely we can let it seep into the everyday details of our lives. That the act of accepting someone different from yourself makes any relationship more rewarding, is what lies at the heart of this book.
It is a portrait of a writer who is uncovering figments of her life to construct a novel, much like Aysegül Savas’s protagonist in Walking on the Ceiling. Both novels propel the writers in a world where they are uncomfortably aware that writing both emerges and is consumed in this world. Genberg’s protagonist is told, in one of her writing workshops, that she has “a melancholic eye for details”. She laughed at it with her friend Sally. But by and by, she was consumed with the idea that that was all there is to it. Savas’s Nunu found boundaries blurring for herself, both of Istanbul (her home) and Paris (her refuge from it), and her desire for writing and for M (the author she’s obsessed with). Genberg’s protagonist has a similar hypnotic relationship with writing, but she finds herself unable to pen anything without Johanna’s presence.
She admits to it being a journey, one of writing about people who have been in, and out of, your life, but how does one write about a person who has brought you in the world, but never been in it? In these moments of indecision, she finds her writing emerge. But, the question she asks through her prose is: do we need to lead sad lives in order to write?
The last chapter on her mother is the most well-written. It clings to the reader the way Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story did. Like Ernaux’s text was filled with guilt and regrets for the mother, Genberg too is “observing her attentively” to understand Brigette. It breaks the reader’s heart into pieces, as though each detail of the writer’s life was never meant to be seen together, but as parts of an autonomous being. The mothers in both stories reveal the unhappiness that lies at the root of the writers’ desolation; that the grief is inherited from one woman to the next, not by blood, but in the act of witnessing and living alongside mothers who have it hard to make things easier for their daughters.
Genberg’s nomination to the Booker shortlist is only a new achievement added to the list of accolades the book has already won. The 156-page novel possesses you. It makes you reflect inwards, and gently pushes you out into the world to deal with it.
The Details
By: Ia Genberg
Publisher: Wildfire
Pages: 156
Price: Rs 599