Sara Brita Stridsberg (Solna, 1972) is a Swedish writer, with a long career, already, but who has become known in Spanish for the publication of three of her novels in Nordica Libros: Kärlekens Antarktis(“Antartica of love”),Drömfakulteten (The Faculty of Dreams) and Beckomberga: Ode till min familj (Beckomberga: ode to my family).

All of them were translated to Spanish by Carmen Montes Cano.

After several previous emails, sent and returned during these last three years, on Nov., 2nd. 2023 we finally met to talk about these three books, and some other subjects, in a Barcelona’s café, close to Sant Antoni’s market, where Stridsberg’s sensibility had to survive the noisy ambience.

MAE: In your three novels translated to Spanish, loneliness is shown to us as the great inner precipice that all characters face. I think it is one of the key topics of your work.

SS: Yes, and the fall. That may be one of the main subjects of my work: the fall. People falling without being captured.

MAE: What catches my attention on your writing is , mainly, the empathy. The way you place your empathy on the first page and it keeps going.

SS:Yes.

Stridsberg nods and answers with a monosyllable, the first of many other occasions.

MAE: Despite its burden of nostalgia and sadness, despite the collection of broken characters, “Beckomberga” struck me as a very vital book. Optimistic despite all prejudices. Life is worth it, no matter how hard we insist on ruining it. Your gaze at so much loneliness and pain, it is a bright gaze for me.

SS:Yes. I always hear that my books are full of darkness and full of life and laughter.

MAE:Laughter? Not so much for me.

SS: “The Faculty of Dreams” is funnier. I wrote it twenty years ago, in 2002. It’s an old book for me.

MAE:It sounds a lot more juvenile and full of angst.

SS:Yes.

MAE:I observe a risky, stripped-down stylistic bet, with a succession of small dialogued scenes that complete meanings as the book progresses. Given the reduced attention span of the modern reader, aren’t you afraid that this reader will get lost and end up abandoning the novel?

SS:You get afraid where I should get afraid, that the reader would abandon me. My translator in Spanish, Carmen Montes Cano, I like her so much.

MAE:She’s done a great job.

SS:Good. I met her in Sweden and she described my work once as the experience of somebody grabbing you by the throat at the first page and never later letting you go.

MAE:That’s a great compliment. Isn’t it?

SS:Yes. If I am losing the reader along the way, well, it was meant to be.

MAE: So be it!

SS: Yes. (Stridberg laughs). You shouldn’t stay if you do not want to stay. I can read a third of a book and leave, even though I love it. I can read ten pages and be deeply,deeply touched and leave it and move for the next book.

MAE: «Sometimes I think that Paul saved me from happiness, and I think I would not have known what to do with it». Child’s sexual abuse is present in the three works. In one case, it is the father who is the abuser. In the other case, another psychiatric patient, partner of the father.  In the third, another addict. You approach the taboo of the relationship between Jackie and Paul with a delicacy, which makes it even more painful for her to discover that her innocence has been taken from her. He already knows, before it happens, that his fascination with a young girl will lead him to jail. It takes her time to understand that she has been abused, cutting off her path to happiness.

SS:Exactly. To put it in extreme words, in a way his gift to her is letting her go, as she’s almost a child, and saving her from the happiness she is experiencing by meeting him. You should be saved from happiness. Sometimes happiness can be dangerous to you and you should avoid it.

MAE: We have a title for the interview.

SS:Perfect!

MAE: Still, you get us to empathize with all the characters. Even with those who should repel us. There I find one of the great assets of your writing: how you maintain the empathy towards the characters during the whole book, chapter after chapter.  You show us alternative realities, uprooted, within a Swedish society, and a model of coexistence, which differs from what has been sold to the world as a modelic society.

SS: Yes.

MAE: What links would you say unite the different works of your literature?

SS: That’s a huge question. It’s so difficult, because I have written five novels, I finished the sixth recently, and a lot of plays for the theater. All the characters live within me. The links between my works could be one way to see and stay with things. In “Antartica of love”, I had this voice inside of me for years before starting writing and it said: “look at my dead body while I am not here. Please, don’t look away. Look at my kids when I am gone.” I had this feeling when I was so fed up with everyone looking at murdered women, as an entertainment. That is all that people do, spending their evenings in front of the TV looking at murdered women. So I had that feeling at that time that if you are so fond of murder, then you have to stay with me, follow me deep into the woods and don’t look away. I also had the same feeling on “Beckomberga” and “The faculty of dreams”. I visited the Tenderloin district, where she died (Valerie Solanas)…

MAE:Previously to writing the book?

SS: While writing the book. And I saw this huge sign saying “Stay”. I never saw letters so big, and I thought that’s the sign of all my writing. The word “Stay”. Stay with her. Stay with the lonesome. Many years before, I read about this man who was a prisoner in Guantanamo and he left a note where it said “Please, take a picture of my body when I’m dead”.

MAE:Don’t forget us.

SS: Yes, I had this sentence within me for years. Like a tiny, tiny prayer. “I was here for a while. Please, just witness my short time here”. That has something to do with the lonesome girl in the woods being murdered. These things were connected within me. The word “Stay” is a signature of my work. Please, stay. Don’t look away. Like you said, keeping the empathy through the book. It could be the title of the next book, though it has a title already. It could be the subtitle.

MAE:What’s the title?

SS: That’s a secret.

MAE:Are you superstitious?

SS: Yes, I am.

MAE:How long have you been working on this one?

SS: Five or six years, but I wrote a collection of short stories, meanwhile.

MAE:Beckomberga is full with continuous references to Olof Palme and the end of a sort of a protective state. How do you remember the murder of Olof Palme? It was a killing that shocked the world, even in Spain, because Palme had been implicated against the Franco dictatorship. Palme was a hero for my father, for example. I remember very well the day he died.

SS: Yeah, me too. To me, and I believe to everyone in Sweden,  it’s the time before and the time after the killing of Olof Palme.

MAE:It’s like a frontier.

SS: Yes. In a way, the idea of Sweden as a welfare state, like a paradise, may have died that day in 1986. When I wrote Beckomberga I was so moved, because I knew that in Sweden, before being killed, we had this image that he was so loved, but Palme was also one of the most hated men in the world. Especially in Sweden. They called it “the Palme hatred”, such a strong hate. As a child, if I mentioned Palme to my Grandfather, he would spit and scream, because he was the opposite politically. The years before being killed, there were rumors in Stockholm that he was a maniac and a lunatic, because nobody could take his politics seriously because he was such a utopian politician, that they created those rumors that he was in Beckomberga at nighttime and working in the government during the daytime. Rumors that people had seen him in taxis going to Beckomberga, with his rolling eyes, like a complete maniac. He went there often because his mother stood  there for a couple of years before dying, and he never commented on these rumors.

MAE:Beckomberga was an institution well known in Sweden?

Yes. It was close to Stockholm.

MAE: After reading your stories, we are left with the idea that only crazy people and addicts seem to understand the essence of existence and are willing to transmit the truth.

SS: Not really. In Beckomberga, I think that Jackie sees more than her father, Jimmy Darling he is lying all the time and full of himself, and she is the one who can cross the borders between sanity and insanity.

MAE:She is the adult in this relationship. The father is somehow and eternal teenager

SS: Yes. And she has the capacity to love.

MAE:Jackie never abandons the eternal feminine mission of saving her father, husband, child, even if they themselves do not wish to be saved. Although they seem to wish to sink those female figures with them, in their enormous weakness and / or selfishness. Sink them in the sea, even, as we can read Jim: “—I wish you were with me at the end. If you could be with me on the beach, when I went into the sea, I wouldn’t be so scared. «

SS: Yes, he wants some company when he is suiciding.

MAE:He wants to sink his own daughter.

SS: In a way, he would love to bring her to the grave.

MAE: And yet, Jackie fails in her mission to save her father. «I have never saved anyone, I have never saved anyone even remotely.» It is a terrible final sentence, which tells us of a life dedicated to love, and even so, broken.

SS: Yes. In the end it may be a good thing never saving anyone and being saved from love.

MAE: Unhappiness, madness, passed down from generation to generation. The fear of transmitting it seems inferior to the fear of breaking that chain, and allowing oneself to be happy.

SS: Yes. That’s my question in every book, I think: how to live your history, your first family, how do you get rid of them.

MAE:A quote from Jim, “Alcohol is a gift for man. You too will find out one day. ”, has reminded me of a character who is the absolute antithesis of him, musician and poet Vinicius de Moraes, who used to say that “Whiskey is man’s best friend. It is a bottled puppy. «

SS: I don’t know him but the quote is good.

MAE: Your characters are anchored in the present and the past. Never in the future. In the future, they just anticipate finding their death.

SS: Not all my characters. Some of them are occupied with death, like Jimmy Darling,  but others like Jackie are busy with life.

MAE: Jackie remembers the experience of motherhood in a way that I have heard from other women of our generation: “When Marion came into the world it was as if suddenly she anchored me better to the earth, as if gravity encompassed me too”.

SS:This is the biggest gift you can get as a human being, to be anchored to the earth. I do not know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had kids. It was like being grounded. My son is seventeen and will be leaving in a couple of years. I don’t know if after your kids you still have the anchor or it flies away. On my way to meeting you, I left my kids in the apartment and I was telling myself “I have to remind myself that now I am the writer”, because for me it is important not to mix my writing life and my family life. There are two different characters: the mother-me and the writer-me. And the writer is always saved by the kids, by the role of the mother. Some people are so obsessed with this idea  that they cannot combine writing because they are mothers, but for me it has always been easy to write because I am a mother. Otherwise I would have to live with my writing. When they come back from school, it’s like being saved  from happiness again. I have to leave my writing, being with them, being a normal person and a mother . They’re seventeen and fourteen. It’s like social control. You can’t fly away deep into darkness. You have to stay.

MAE: It’s an elevator that grounds you to the Ground Floor.

SS:Exactly.

MAE:  In the end of the book, we understand Jackie’s own inability to love a man. She makes good the prophecy of her father: «you have never needed a father and you will never need a man».

SS:Yes.

MAE: Is Beckomberga a symbol of the welfare state? Of its rise and fall.

SS:I don´t know if it is but sometimes I had this thought while writing because all these psychiatric hospitals were built at the same time, when the Socialdemocrat government arrived and closed in the mid 90s. And it is such a strong image of all these ill people being left behind, walking out in complete loneliness after closing these institutions. It’s kind of a freaking thought, because they were also saved from something because Beckomberga, in a way, was such a violent place, where people were locked in for decades. I wanted to add my vision that these institutions were so very dark. When I was a kid, the worst thing you could say to a child, except for “whore” maybe, was that “are you from Beckies (Beckomberga)? And since my father was from Beckies I thought of it as a scary house in the Swedish countryside. In this book I wanted to add this little history of life saying Beckomberga and these institutions could also have an aspect of taking care and saving people.

MAE:  You introduce a lot of dream life and a lot of sensory description of the characters. You describe the eyes and glances of all them. These sensations are generating a sedimentation through which the story progresses. The subconscious seems to take over your writing, sometimes.

SS: Yes, I am writing with no thoughts. I have very loud music, so I cannot hear my thoughts.

MAE: Which music?

SS:All kinds of music. I listen to the same song two hundred times. Samuel Beckett said that writing is happening between the hand and the paper. For me it is between the hand and the computer, without going to my brain.

MAE: Vigdis Hjorth said a frase that I love: «Writing is the relationship between head, gut and hand».

SS:I love Vigdis but I do not use my head at all.

MAE: I feel a combination of theater, poetry and muscle, in your writing.

SS:Yeah, that’s right. I have the feeling that all art enters my body not through my brain, but through my skin or my blood or my muscles.

MAE:  Can writing, literature in general, heal our traumas?

SS:Yes. Louise Bourgeois said that art is the warranty of sanity. For me it’s writing my warranty of sanity. I stayed sane because of my writing. I do not know what would have happened to me without my writing. I think I chose between being an alcoholic or a writer. those were the two options.

MAE:  Do you think of the audience while writing?

SS:More and more. In the beginning, I never did. Even after my first two novels I never thought of the audience. Writing “The faculty of dreams”, I had this childish attitude that I wanted everyone to hate it.

MAE: Why?

SS:I don’t know. I was childish. I wrote “The faculty of dreams” twenty years ago. The teeanger book, you know.

MAE: Your “fuck you! book”.

SS:Yes, the “fuck you! book”. Nowadays, I am more careful and I am writing slower. I know what I am doing now, and that makes me think a little bit more in the audience.

MAE: Do you want to be understood?

SS:I don´t know. I don’t wanna beg for it. (We both laugh). If somebody understands, that’s fine for me.

MAE: It sounds like you do not want to beg for love.

SS:No! I’m too proud. When I am writing, I try to figure something out of myself. When I wrote Beckomberga, I wanted to figure out everything about my childhood and the hospital Beckomberga and all the lonesome people in the street, which I wanted to know where they came from.

MAE: Outside of Sweden, where were your books best received?

SS:I really don’t know. France, maybe.

MAE: I was very surprised by the praisings by the New Yorker.

SS: Of “The faculty of dreams”. So maybe America and France. That book was huge in France, but that was twenty years ago. Then I failed to show up on some trips I should have gone. I have to restart with France now.

MAE:  Reading your novels, sometimes I was left thinking about the role of their translators. Has the process of transmitting to other languages your stories been difficult for them?

SS:Yes, I think so. I work very closely with my English translator. She describes it as a difficult process to translate me. I always have the feeling that translators want to take the text back to normal language. They want to do it mainstream.

MAE: Your writing is very physical.

SS:Yes, maybe, but my English translator is great, she understands the rythm of my writing, and Carmen seems to be right on my heart beat.

MAE: How many languages ​​have they been translated into?

SS:Twenty-six or twenty-seven.

MAE:  When and how did you realize that you were going to devote your life to literature?

SS:I never really  realized. It just happened. Literature chose me. It saved me.

MAE: Who would you say have been your literary influences?

SS:I don’t know, there are so many, in different periods of my life.

MAE:  Have other arts influenced your writing?

SS:Yes! Sometimes I think that arts, music especially, has influenced my writing more than literature.

MAE: Which music?

SS:All kinds of music.

MAE: Are there any specificities of Swedish, and Scandinavian literature in general, that make them different to the rest of the Western canon?

SS:I don’t know. I have no idea.

MAE:  Is mental illness a form of identity?

SS:No, it’s more of a curse.

MAE:  Your stories give the impression that there is no way to survive the trauma, to which the characters always return.

SS:Yeah, but in “Antartica of love”, my only happy ending that I ever wrote ,  she dies in the first page and then she keeps on dying and looking to her death through the whole book, but in the end she is looking at her daughter, teaching at the university about the stars. Even if the main character is a murdered person, it is a happy ending because she gave away her daughter to save her. That’s the biggest thing she did in life. She says: “This is thanks to me. I made this”. So it is a way out of trauma at least to the next generations.

MAE:  Is there anything left to comment about your departure from the Swedish Academy?

SS:Not really.

(We both laugh)

MAE:  ​​Do you feel vindicated?

SS:I think it was good for the world and for literature and for justice that I was in the Swedish Academy at that time. Otherwise, I don’t know what would have happened. My job is to reveal secrets, to write what I see, not to keep secrets. I was in the right place, at that time, I could speak and I could write. I often think of writers from countries under dictatorships who can’t use their voices. And then I think about me and other writers here in Europe, how do I use my freedom of speech and how do I use it for. It’s a question that keeps coming back for me, but at that time, I am sure that I was in the right place.

MAE: Did you pay a price for that?

SS:You have to pay a price for everything. There is no such thing as a free lunch, I have heard

MAE:  Were you in favor of giving Philip Roth the Nobel Prize?

SS:I never commented on that price,since I was on the Nobel committee.

MAE: Do you like Roth’s literature, anyway?

SS:I like him, but he is not one of my main heroes.

We say goodbye with the promise that I will send her recommendations on local writers’ and vegetarian restaurants.