Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath, (Translated from Swedish to English by the author), Cheeky Frawg Books, 2012.
karintidbeck.com/
“I have never read anything like Jagannath. Karin Tidbeck’s imagination is recognizably Nordic, but otherwise unclassifiable–quietly, intelligently, unutterably strange. And various. And ominous. And funny. And mysteriously tender. These are wonderful stories.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
“Restrained and vivid, poised and strange, Tidbeck, with her impossible harmonies, is a vital voice.” – China Mieville
Enter the strange and wonderful world of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck with this feast of darkly fantastical short stories. Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the “Pyret” or the title story, “Jagannath,” about a biological ark in the far future, Tidbeck’s unique imagination will enthrall, amuse, and unsettle you. How else to describe a collection that includes “Cloudberry Jam,” a story that opens with the line “I made you in a tin can”? Marvels, quirky character studies, and outright surreal monstrosities await you in the book widely praised by Michael Swanwick, Ursula K. Le Guin, China Mieville, and Karen Joy Fowler.
“Tidbeck has a gift for the uncanny and the unsettling. In these wonderful, subtle stories, magic arrives quietly. It comes from the forests or the earth or was always there in your own family or maybe exists in another realm entirely…leaving you slightly dazed and more than a little enchanted.” – Karen Joy Fowler
“Tidbeck has a gift for the uncanny and the unsettling. In these wonderful, subtle stories, magic arrives quietly. It comes from the forests or the earth or was always there in your own family or maybe exists in another realm entirely…leaving you slightly dazed and more than a little enchanted.” – Karen Joy Fowler
“Were this collection to contain only its biomechanoid wonder of a title story, it would still be amazing. Jagannath heralds the arrival of a bold and brilliant new voice, which I see too few of these days. You must read Karin Tidbeck.” – Caitlin R. Kiernan
“In Karin Tidbeck’s collection Jagannath, the mundane becomes strange and the strange familiar with near-Hitchcockian subtlety. I loved Tidbeck’s clean, classic prose. It creates beautifully eerie music for a twilight domain.” – Karen Lord
“I can’t think of when I last read a collection that blew me away the way that Jagannath has, or one that’s left me somewhat at a loss to describe just how strange and beautiful and haunting these tales are.” – Elizabeth Hand (from her introduction)
I made you in a tin can. The can used to have sausages in it or something; I can’t remember. There wasn’t a label. It was one of the mystery cans that the charity in Åre
village handed out. Most of the time it would be sausages or split pea soup.
This is how I did it: I waited until it was my time of the month. I took the tin can from the shelf under the sink. I filled it halfway with fresh water and put half a teaspoon of salt in it. Next I put in a small, gnarled carrot from last year’s garden. I had saved it because it had two prongs, like little legs, and arm-like stumps. Then I held the can between my legs and let some blood trickle into it. Finally, some of my spit. I put some clingfilm over the opening. The rest of the night, I sat with the can in my lap, and sang to you. That’s how you were made, in October, as the first snows fell.
—from “Cloudberry Jam”
How weird can short fiction get and still find an audience among mainstream readers? Judging from the stories in the first book by Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, the answer is: pretty weird.
I made you in a tin can. The can used to have sausages in it or something; I can’t remember. There wasn’t a label. It was one of the mystery cans that the charity in Åre
village handed out. Most of the time it would be sausages or split pea soup.
This is how I did it: I waited until it was my time of the month. I took the tin can from the shelf under the sink. I filled it halfway with fresh water and put half a teaspoon of salt in it. Next I put in a small, gnarled carrot from last year’s garden. I had saved it because it had two prongs, like little legs, and arm-like stumps. Then I held the can between my legs and let some blood trickle into it. Finally, some of my spit. I put some clingfilm over the opening. The rest of the night, I sat with the can in my lap, and sang to you. That’s how you were made, in October, as the first snows fell.
—from “Cloudberry Jam”
How weird can short fiction get and still find an audience among mainstream readers? Judging from the stories in the first book by Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, the answer is: pretty weird.
Several fast-moving literary currents, national and international, propel Tidbeck's highly imaginative fiction along. As a Swede, she grew up in the dark tradition of Scandinavian folklore, a succession of moonless nights filled with the comings and goings of strange and menacing forest creatures. As part of her literary education she has read Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula Le Guin. She has also drawn from the well of the American weird, from H.P. Lovecraft and others, as part of her stint as a student at the Clarion West Writer's Workshop at the University of California, Irvine, where many of the best science fiction and fantasy writers in America have taught.Given such a background, the strengths and idiosyncrasies of Tidbeck's first collection of short fiction should not seem all that strange. Except that, given her background, the actual stories themselves can turn quite weird — good weird, that is, meaning successful if sometimes odd. No story illustrates this better than the title piece, fiction about the reproductive facilities in the belly of — we might assume, though it could be other — some kind of interstellar spacecraft of the far future, beginning with the birth of an infant named Rak: "Rak's earliest memories were of rocking movement, of Papa's voice whispering to her as she sucked her sustenance, the background gurgle of Mother's abdominal walls."
Weird angles in the telling of it, weird creatures being born, weird effects throughout the story, with Tidbeck's imagination standing as close to, say, the images from David Lynch's Eraserhead as much as to horror writers like Warren Fahy and others.
Rebecka Eriksson No less odd and disconcerting is "Pyret [Py:ret]," a brilliant, if more traditional, fantasy story disguised, in the Borgesian tradition, as mock history. Introduced in the form of an academic paper about mysterious creatures called Pyret who live in the Swedish countryside, the story opens into a personal account on the part of the writer of the paper, which builds to some rather terrifying anecdotal material about the writer's family.
Other families also appear in these stories, or at least the beginnings of families. In "Cloudberry Jam," one woman grows in a tin can an amalgam of a creature, made out of her menstrual blood, spit, fresh water, a half teaspoon of salt and a garden-variety vegetable. Another evocative tale, "Reindeer Mountain," gives us a third-person rendering of a family gathering in a remote northern lakeside town, and a pair of sisters attempting to deal with dark fairylike creatures called "vittra," to whose attractions one of them eventually succumbs.
One midnight in winter this girl — her name is Cilla — sits up in bed, pulls aside the curtain and looks out at the town lying quiet on the shore of the lake, with "the mountain beyond backlit by the eerie glow of the sun skimming just below the horizon." The sight brings with it a sensation "Cilla could neither name nor explain. It was like a longing, worse than anything she had ever experienced, but for what she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen, and she was terrified that she would miss it."
For you, dear reader, something wonderful — and weird — is going to happen if you open this book.
It's waiting for you. - Alan Cheuse
For the past few years, there have been a number of salutary efforts to bring international SF to the attention of the wider community (by which I mean monolingual English-language readers) – a new translation award, recent Japanese and Latin American anthologies, sterling reviews for Angelica Gorodischer, Johanna Sinisalo, and Hannu Rajaniemi, etc. Now Cheeky Frawg books, the latest imprint by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, is introducing us to the work of Karin Tidbeck, a young Swedish author, who like Rajaniemi also writes in English, and who promises to be one of the most distinctive new voices in short fiction since Margo Lanagan. Her collection Jagannath includes eleven stories, mostly translated from the Swedish (presumably by the author, since no translator is given), seven of which originally appeared in her 2010 collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?, though a few have appeared in English, and one is original to the collection. It’s a slim volume, and some of the stories are only a few pages long, but it’s not quite like anything you’ve seen, even though you may hear vague echoes of everyone from Kafka to Borges to Tove Jansson. The Borges echo is most notable in a story-disguised-as-essay called ‘‘Pyret (Py:Ret)’’, which would hardly be out of place in The Book of Imaginary Beings. It describes a benign creature called a Pyret, persisting in Swedish folklore from the time of the Icelandic sagas, sometimes mimicking other animals. What appear to be genuine scholarly citations lead to an anecdotal account from the 1860s and another from the 1970s, finally to the narrator’s own efforts to investigate the latter, which in turn leads to a surprising epiphany about the nature of her own research. There’s a Kafkaesque feel to ‘‘Arvid Pekon’’, in which a bureaucrat working in a government employment office begins receiving odd calls from a Miss Sycorax, at first wanting to speak to her dead mother, then to the Beetle King. Beetles and cockroaches begin to invade his life, possibly hallucinatorily, until his own reality is called into question. It’s governed by the same sort of horror-story dream logic that haunts Kafka’s characters, and to much the same effect. Another story, with an almost conventional but effective horror twist, is ‘‘Rebecka’’, in which the title character repeatedly attempts suicide, only to be foiled by what she believes to be acts of God, until she comes up with a chilling scheme to ‘‘do something he can’t ignore.’’
But most of Tidbeck’s stories lie firmly in her own territory, a half-mythical region most emblematically represented by the strange and brutal world shared by two stories, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’ and ‘‘Aunts’’. The former opens with what appears to be a refined game of croquet, but immediately starts going weird when we learn that the host is Mnemosyne, the pages who serve the drinks are changelings, and the goal seems to be to smash the balls into the faces of the pages. Augusta finds a putrefying corpse in a nearby wood and steals a watch from it, but needs to consult a page to even find out what it is – she and her decadent friends, not quite human, live in a twilight world outside of time, but by discovering time she learns she has fallen into it. Also on this estate is an orangery, which houses the title characters of ‘‘Aunts’’, three enormous women, tended by ‘‘nieces,’’ who ‘‘had one single holy task: to expand.’’ At a certain point, the Aunts split open from sheer enormity, and the nieces scoop out the organs, which will feed the next generation of Aunts, who begin life as fetal creatures clinging to and devouring their dead Aunts’ hearts. It’s a bizarre world, with some of the grotesque ambience of a Heinrich Kley drawing or a John Bauer painting (Bauer is alluded to in another story), that seems to leave room for additional stories – we’re told it’s only one of eight worlds, but ‘‘the most perfect one.’’
But the Aunts aren’t the most remarkable mother figures in the book; in the title story ‘‘Jagannath’’ (a name presumably drawn from the Hindu deity), survivors of an unspecified catastrophe survive by working inside an enormous biomechanical ‘‘great Mother,’’ keeping her organs functioning as she nurtures and protects them from ‘‘the horrible place’’ outside. Vaguely recalling Kit Reed’s ‘‘Perpetua’’, it’s one of the more recognizably SFnal tales in the book. So, in a way, is ‘‘Beatrice’’, which is Tidbeck’s surreal take on a steampunk romance, as a physician who has fallen in unrequited love with an airship meets a printer’s assistant who has fallen in love with a steam engine. Tidbeck has the discipline to follow such absurdist premises with a kind of fierce plot logic that almost makes them seem inevitable.
As should be apparent by now, Tidbeck often uses character names as titles – ‘‘Beatrice’’, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’, ‘‘Rebecka’’ – and this suggests her primary concern with character; even in the briefest and most elliptical of her tales, the motivations that drive her figures through these strange landscapes seem credible. She seems to view families as inherently fantastical, not only with those mythologized mother figures, but with children who might be imaged as tiny, gnarled creatures (‘‘Miss Nyberg and I’’ or ‘‘Cloudberry Jam’’, which opens with the line ‘‘I made you in a tin can’’) or parents who are remote, alienated, and in the case of ‘‘Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom’’, dead (the story is a series of letters to a dead father, which again echoes Kafka). The fullest portrayals of families are ‘‘Brita’s Holiday Village’’, in the form of the diary entries of a writer trying to complete a novel drawing on her family history, and ‘‘Reindeer Mountain’’, the collection’s one original story and possibly its best. Twelve-year-old Cilla and her sister Sara are visiting the family village, where an aging great-uncle is being moved out of a cottage he has lived alone in for decades. Cilla’s discoveries about her family, and her family’s possible involvement with the vittra, elf-like nature spirits of Swedish folklore, sets up a series of mysteries that are both emotionally authentic and genuinely eerie. It’s a gorgeously shaped tale that may not be Tidbeck’s most bizarre, but which demonstrates as well as any how her various oddities are grounded in an absolutely authentic sense of place, and a keen understanding of how the heart works, even when it isn’t assisted by shift workers inside the body. - Gary K. Wolfe
Where do they keep coming from? Over the last handful of weeks I’ve read and reviewed Near + Far by Cat Rambo, At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson and Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand—three new collections of short stories, all from small presses, all by female authors, and all superb. And then, just when I think it can’t get any better, along comes Karin Tidbeck’s debut collection Jagannath, which may just be the best one of the bunch. If you take into account that this is Tidbeck’s debut collection in English and that it was translated from Swedish to English by the author herself, it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer level of talent on display here.
Karin Tidbeck had been writing and publishing short stories in Swedish for several years when, given the relatively small number of venues for short speculative fiction in her homeland, she decided to set her sights on the English language markets. She applied for and was accepted into the prestigious Clarion Writers Workshop, translated some of her own stories into English, and lo and behold, slowly her name started popping up in English language publications. The first time I spotted her was in last year’s inaugural issue of Unstuck Annual (which I reviewed here) with the quirky, tender story “Cloudberry Jam”, but I freely confess that, at that time, I had no idea yet of what she was really capable of. Thanks to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg imprint, we now have a lovely, slim volume of Karin Tidbeck’s stunning short fiction.
In her introduction to this collection, Elizabeth Hand writes that it’s “rare, almost unheard of, to encounter an author so extraordinarily gifted she appears to have sprung full-blown into the literary world, like Athena from the head of Zeus.” That’s absolutely spot-on: in the thirteen stories in her English language debut, Karin Tidbeck consistently displays staggering levels of originality, skill and confidence. Her range is amazing. I haven’t been this excited about discovering a new short story author since a good friend practically forced me to read Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.
Speaking of range: one of the most impressive qualities of Jagannath is its diversity. In terms of style, these stories range from gentle magical realism to somewhat terrifying Nordic-tinged mythical fantasy, from folk tale to mind-bending science fiction, from a faux non-fiction text about a mythological creature to something that reads like a collaboration between Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick. Some of these stories operate in the realm of the deeply personal, focusing on melancholy, dreamy family memories, while others are so alien that even the concept of family as we know it is no longer recognizable.
Despite this diversity, there’s a strong sense of unity and cohesiveness to this collection, thanks to the common thread of Karin Tidbeck’s visionary imagination and subtle, incisive prose. Throughout this collection’s wild spectrum of forms and ideas, Karin Tidbeck’s writing simply shines. She has mastered the art of keeping things simple on the surface, letting the story speak for itself, and subtly goading the reader into investigating what’s been left unsaid. She has the nifty ability to introduce something utterly bizarre early on so the reader takes it more or less for granted, and then build outwards from that point.
Given the emotional and conceptual richness of these stories, it would have been all too easy to overwrite them, but instead Tidbeck maintains an impressive discipline when it comes to writing economically. These stories are tight; not a word is wasted. Even more admirable is that the resulting clarity of expression never comes across as cold. Instead, Tidbeck’s writing is frequently moving, tender, occasionally even funny. Her prose is an amazing balancing act that’s all the more impressive coming from a debut author.
And again, let’s not forget: Tidbeck isn’t even writing in her first language here. In Jagannath’s Afterword, she writes eloquently about how difficult it is to transmit the complete range of meanings and connotations of certain Swedish words and expressions into English. Her translation does occasionally result in a slightly awkward turn of phrase, but this just serves to emphasize the strangeness of these stories and the difficulty of contorting your mind and imagination into a new language. I once started learning Spanish because I wanted to be able to read Julio Cortázar’s short stories in the original language, and as crazy as it may sound, Jagannath makes me itch to learn some Swedish.
This collection is full of characters and ideas that will remain with you for a long time, from the sad, confused man who falls in love with a miniature airship (at one point plaintively thinking “How he wanted to climb into her little gondola”) to the poor, abused woman who will go to any length to draw the attention of the Lord and be relieved of her suffering; from the drab government employee running the most surreal switchboard ever to the elegant, otherworldly courtier who accidentally introduces time into the floating, timeless lands beyond the veil....
It’s hard to pick favorites from this incredible lineup of stories, because new connections and shared themes reveal themselves upon re-reading. Just the way Tidbeck explores the idea of parenthood from story to story and from setting to setting is both wonderfully inventive and, at times, somewhat disturbing. The way these stories continue to reveal new layers and levels of impact makes up a lot for what I would consider the collection’s only real weakness: it’s too short. This is a masterful debut, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been this impressed with a short story collection, but weighing in at just under 150 pages I simply wanted more. I wanted more to such an extent that I ended up reading Jagannath twice, back to back, and then almost swung right back around for a third read-through. I’ll take quality over quantity any day, but still: please send more stories soon, Karin. - Stefan Raets
I read Jagannath as soon as Jeff VanderMeer let me have the ebook edition to sell. Since then BristolCon and Kevin’s visit have happened, so I’m having to reacquaint myself with the book. This is a real pleasure.
Of course you don’t need me to tell you that. This is a book, and debut collection no less, that comes with enthusiastic recommendations from Ursula Le Guin, China Mièville and Elizabeth Hand. You don’t see that every day. Of course, as Liz points out in her introduction, Karin Tidbeck is not quite as new a writer as she seems. This is not her first book; it is her first book in English. Nevertheless, while Tidbeck has now had a novel published in her native Swedish, Jagannath represents a substantial proportion of her fiction output to date. It is an impressive achievement.
But what, exactly is it? Well, it is a collection of short stories. Those stories, as you might guess from the people publishing them, and recommending them, are typical of what is usually called “weird fiction”. They are, she says ominously, exactly the sort of thing that tends to win World Fantasy awards. I think that a nomination next year is a strong possibility. And yet, Jagannath is also something fresh and different.
The reasons for that are partly cultural. Weird fiction often riffs of folk legends of scary supernatural beings. Several of the stories in Jagannath do so, but in this case they are scary supernatural beings from Swedish folk tales. “Reindeer Mountain”, for example, is a tale about the vittra, which Wikipedia tells me, unhelpfully, are nature spirits that could be elves or dwarves. Tidbeck’s vittra look like elves, but live inside the eponymous mountain of the title, thereby partaking of both Tolkienian natures.
Once you start looking at the behavior of these creatures, of course, they start to seem quite familiar, but Tidbeck is still able to present them in fresh and distinctive ways. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” is a story about an elf-woman who comes out of the forest, bears a child with a human man, and vanishes again. That’s a fairly standard narrative, but Tidbeck tells it from the point of view of the child, now a grown woman, who is sorting through the effects of her recently deceased father and trying to make sense of her life. Why did her hippy mother disappear without warning one day? Why did her father become an alcoholic? And what is the mysterious bell-like sound she occasionally hears coming from the woods.
Then again, some of the creatures may not be Swedish at all. “Pyret” tells of a race of shape-shifting beings who are able to disguise themselves as sheep, cows and even people. It seems that they like to be near humans. If they are creatures from Swedish folklore then their existence has been erased from the Internet by the massive online presence of a popular brand of children’s clothes. Tidbeck may have made them up. They might even be aliens. Who knows? Does it matter?
Other stories are more obviously science-fictional. “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” deal with the nature of time, and the possibility of worlds outside of time. The title story, “Jagannath”, is a post-apocalyptic tale, though it is not clear whether the dead world in which the tale is set used to be ours, or is somewhere else entirely.
In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles. – “Aunts”
Indeed, being unclear is perhaps the signature effect of the collection. Liminality is key to all that Tidbeck does, and is key to weird fiction as well. The stories in the collection often leave you unsure as to what actually happened in them, and that’s a good thing. It is the prime source of their creepiness. There is something out there, or hiding in the shadows, but you don’t know what it is, and you are afraid to find out.
It is worth noting at this point that Tidbeck translated all of the stories herself. This is unusual. Hannu Rajaniemi writes in English, but he has lived in Scotland for years. Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, but has chosen to write only in English. Tidbeck lives in Sweden, writes in Swedish, and then re-writes her fiction in English. I’m struggling to think of anyone else who does that unaided. I’m sure that it teaches you a heck of a lot about language.
The reason that people such as Zoran Živković employ translators, even though they are fluent in conversational English, is that fiction is hard. To do fiction really well you have to know the language really well. Tidbeck is good enough to get published in two languages. And she’s also inventive enough, and a good enough story teller, to impress some of the best in the business. People like that don’t come along every day. - Cheryl Morgan
n a long twilight, the sound of tiny bells hangs in the air: a young woman’s mother is coming for her from the forest. Elsewhere, by the side of a lake, a family reunion is in progress, merry aunts and cousins hatching from cocoons. And in a tin can provided by charity, a tiny creature made of spit, salt, menstrual blood and a carrot kicks its legs, while the first October snow begins to fall. These are some of the strange, seductive images you’ll find in Karin Tidbeck’s stories.
Jagannath: Stories (Cheeky Frawg, 2012) is Tidbeck’s English-language book debut. It brings together works previously published in English, the author’s translations of her own stories—most of them from her Swedish collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?—and original material. On the strength of Vem är Arvid Pekon?, Tidbeck won a grant from the Swedish Authors’ Fund; her first novel, Amatka, is forthcoming this fall from Sweden’s largest publisher. Jagannath gives English-language readers the chance to enter the shifting territory of Tidbeck’s marvelous multiple worlds.
The stories in Jagannath are fascinating, frightening, and above all, tender. There’s an intimacy to them that’s immediately enchanting: several take the form of diaries or letters, or words exchanged with a close friend. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” is written to the narrator’s dead father. I first read this story in Shimmer Magazine earlier this year: that’s when the name “Karin Tidbeck” stuck in my mind, along with the haunting melancholy of this story of a broken family, lost hope, and magic. “Some Letters” concerns a young woman, Viveka, who returns to the place she grew up, an old schoolhouse where her parents lived with the other members of a commune: the loss of Viveka’s nuclear family (her mother disappeared when she was three; she lost her father to alcoholism and then death) is mingled with the loss of the commune, which was both an extended family and a vision of a utopian future. Loss fills every line of the story, like Viveka’s last memory of her mother: a red dress and the sound of tiny bells. Who was Viveka’s mother? That question both deepens the sadness of the story, and expands it outward toward mystery, toward the forest.
The red dress returns in “Reindeer Mountain,” where it becomes the sign of the vittra: tall, handsome, magical people who live inside the mountain, and like to wear red. Two sisters struggle with fear of madness and envy of each other in this story of a family with mixed human-vittra blood. The theme of human contact with other species, subtle in “Some Letters from Ove Lindström” and explicit in “Reindeer Mountain,” runs through the collection. “Pyret,” a sly gem in the form of an encyclopedia entry, details the habits of vittra cattle. A footnote informs us that the most common crime among those accused of witchcraft in medieval times was “illegal mingling”: humans consorting with non-human beings.
Many of the stories in Jagannath play with this theme: in “Beatrice,” a woman’s love affair with a steam engine produces a whistle-voiced, coal-chewing child; in both “Miss Nyberg and I” and “Cloudberry Jam,” children are grown like plants. The narrator of “Brita’s Holiday Village” discovers two families at once: while her memories of her relatives begin to emerge in her writing, she dreams the life of a second, insect-like family. And in the collection’s title story, the mother of a family carries her brood inside her.
Other themes include transformation, the nature of time, and the judgments of God. The stories “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” take place in the same world, a fairyland of the actual fairytale type, where games are bloody and casual torture is the order of the day. The stories show two different perspectives on what happens when time enters this timeless realm. These stories—like “Rebecka,” in which torture leads to salvation—explore different types of illegal mingling, mixing transgression with law and cannibalism with comfort. The intimate tone of so many of Tidbeck’s tales invites the reader to blend in as well, to imagine a personal shift into something slightly different. The words of “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” are ostensibly written to a dead man, but when you read them, you’ll know better. Like all of the stories in Jagannath, these letters are for us. - Sofia Samatar
In the afterword to Jagannath, her first English-language short story collection, Karin Tidbeck writes about learning both American and British English (along with her native Swedish) through various sources, from "The Beatles and the rituals of tea time" to "MTV and the movies, and . . . science fiction paperbacks" (p. 129). It's clear that Tidbeck, who translates her own work, has let this diversity of influence seep into her writing. Her prose is remarkably strong and uncluttered, resting not only in the space between genre and literary fiction, but at the interstices between further ill-defined generic subdivisions like science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, and the rapidly growing fungal bud of weird fiction. Jagannath proves that under all the pontificating and arguing about genres and their hierarchical worth, what ultimately defines literary value is good writing. Whether an example of good writing fits into predefined marketing slots or is a more slippery thing is a different conversation. There is no attempt on Tidbeck's part to cater to "markets"; this is a series of songs from the heart, mysterious and beautiful, sometimes impenetrable and dark as winter-cooled obsidian, sometimes light and effervescent as sunlit spring clouds.
One sees in the title story the lurid shadings of those science fiction paperbacks of Tidbeck's childhood, mingled with the intimate sadness of losing a mother (whether through the departures of adulthood or death) and growing up. It's a vivid evocation of the weirdly fantastic—evolved humans living as symbiotes in a giant biomechanical creature that conceives and protects them from the hazards of what one assumes is post-apocalyptic Earth—and the personal—protagonist Rak's moving coming-of-age as she discovers for herself that resident midwife Papa’s fatalistic comment "We only live if Mother lives" (p. 118) need not be true. In its intricately sensory yet metaphoric imagery of bodies in transition, birth, death, and decay, the story also illustrates Tidbeck's recurring concern with the cyclical nature of life and how it necessitates the paradoxical dualism of existence, be it in the coexistence of staggering beauty and great ugliness, love and violence, life and death.
It's telling that Tidbeck chose to title that story and the collection "Jagannath," which is the name of a Hindu deity, and the Sanskrit root for the English word "juggernaut." A juggernaut is, of course, something that crushes everything in its inexorable path. In this group of stories, that crushing, god-like entity might well be time, which both destroys and replenishes (gestation and maturation, aging and death), which spares nothing as it rolls over human creation but leaves everything in its wake touched by the smouldering glow of magic. The past is, after all, forever romanticized and narrativized by us, eternally slipping into the numinous realms of myth as the present solidifies into what is perceived as real. So it is in Tidbeck's stories, where nostalgia and recall hold an implacable power, and time itself is an awful force that both gives and takes with no regard for frail human considerations.
In "Aunts," we see the ritualized lives of a trinity of corpulent women in a "floating" world beyond time, the impossibility of their grotesque, self-sustaining cannibalistic life cycles interrupted and ruined by the stain of time left on their home by an unseen visitor. In the dream-like yet emotionally honest "Brita's Holiday Village," a writer spends a cool Swedish summer at a remote holiday retreat and witnesses what is possibly the brief life cycle (again time rearing its head) of an entire village that feeds off her presence, her imagination, and her familial past, to exist. The latter story shows how Tidbeck sometimes, to ominous effect, personifies magical beings as leaching off human life in desperation as they begin to fade in the face of cyclical time, just as we in turn cling to myth and old stories as everything around us changes. She also does this in "Pyret," a pseudo-nonfiction profile of a shapeshifting creature from Nordic folklore that starts out like a fascinating essay on an elusive animal and eventually takes on the disturbing atmosphere of a magical version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (recalling Tidbeck's comment about her various influences). "Beatrice," "Miss Nyberg and I," and "Cloudberry Jam" deal with the birth and growth of children, made fantastical within the contexts of steampunk and magic realism, grounded in the pride and pain of seeing offspring grow further and further from the parent. All are bittersweet pleasures, but "Cloudberry Jam" is especially touching in its exploration of the life of a single mother with an extraordinary, and difficult, child in the form of a vegetative homunculus she "made . . . in a tin can" (p. 83).
Sometimes Tidbeck skews closer to reality, with as much success. "Some Letters For Ove Lindström" is a lovely ode to a dead father and a vanished mother that wouldn't seem out place in Granta or The New Yorker, never explaining whether its narrator's hints that her mother might not have been human are the fantasia of nostalgia. It's a portrait, again, of what is gone, imparting memory and the mundane with incandescent power.
"Reindeer Mountain," the one original story written for the collection, gives the reader a haunting glimpse of the "vittra," a folkloric Scandinavian race that shares similarities with the Faerie. The fantasy is elegantly grounded in the family life of two young sisters, Sara and Cilla, who respond to the magical call of these beings differently. It's a story that sees the generational narrative of family as inherently enchanted, though not always positively—bloodlines picking up the strains of folklore and myth as they transmute along the years. Tidbeck returns here to the call of nostalgia and history, of passing time weighing down on the souls of humans and heightening their awareness of what has passed and what’s to come. Sara sees the magic that surrounds their family's soon-to-be-torn-down country house as portentous, while Cilla sees "what she had been pining for, that wonderful something waiting out there" (p. 80).
Some of the pieces stand apart as their own literary experiments, and are arguably the weakest of the crop, though not to the extent that they are less than good stories. For example, the sinister, Kafkaesque satire "Who is Arvid Pekon?" turns a government switchboard operator's dreary, depersonalizing job into a literal hell as he becomes aware that he's little more than a pawn for higher powers. It's a broader, less fascinating piece than the rest. "Rebecka" is reminiscent of Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God" in its vision of a world where a paternalistic God has manifested and turns out to be more Big Brother than benevolent savior. "Herr Cederberg" is a light piece that is essentially an extended metaphor for transcending the pettiness of human cruelty.
Tidbeck is at her best when she delves into humanity's enduring fascination with loss, and how compelling that loss can be. Loss defines our lives, representing as it can a fearful ideal of the unattainable. What is gone or never existed takes on an unbearable grace. Tidbeck mentions that the Swedish even have a specific name for this existential ache that can never be fulfilled in the face of reality’s brutal demands and gentle sorrows—"svårmod," which she roughly translates to "hardship mood."
Tidbeck recognizes that much mythology and magical thinking arises from that ache in the human heart, reflecting both our fears and hopes for something beyond what we perceive with our senses. It's an ache that speculative fiction can directly indulge or ease, if temporarily, and she knows this all too well. Her stories tap into the universality of magic as an underlying presence in even a reality defined by rational paradigm, if only because rationalism is the counterweight to magical thinking and thus casts the latter in a bittersweet light of remembrance. And that light is present in the motif of twilight, which is ever-present in the stories, as it is in Tidbeck's native Sweden. "Augusta Prima" directly addresses this metaphorical throughline, giving us a thesis statement of sorts. In it Augusta, an immortal being who lives in the same realm as the grotesque women in "Aunts," accidentally slips into the human experience of time when she finds a stopwatch and finds out the "nature of the world[s]" from a visiting "djinneya":
There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk. . . . Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. (p. 106)
In the fading, liminal glimmer of twilight Karin Tidbeck sees past, present, and future, and weaves stories out of all three, standing between magical and rational realities, Heart and Thought. She knows they stand closer together than we often expect. As the juggernaut of time barrels onward, we are constantly losing magic. But in Jagannath Tidbeck humbly suggests that magic is never truly lost, just waiting, always, to return. - Indrapramit Das
Brita’s Holiday Village by Karin Tidbeck http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/tuesday-fiction-britas-holiday-village-by-karin-tidbeck-author-week-5/
Weird angles in the telling of it, weird creatures being born, weird effects throughout the story, with Tidbeck's imagination standing as close to, say, the images from David Lynch's Eraserhead as much as to horror writers like Warren Fahy and others.
Rebecka Eriksson No less odd and disconcerting is "Pyret [Py:ret]," a brilliant, if more traditional, fantasy story disguised, in the Borgesian tradition, as mock history. Introduced in the form of an academic paper about mysterious creatures called Pyret who live in the Swedish countryside, the story opens into a personal account on the part of the writer of the paper, which builds to some rather terrifying anecdotal material about the writer's family.
Other families also appear in these stories, or at least the beginnings of families. In "Cloudberry Jam," one woman grows in a tin can an amalgam of a creature, made out of her menstrual blood, spit, fresh water, a half teaspoon of salt and a garden-variety vegetable. Another evocative tale, "Reindeer Mountain," gives us a third-person rendering of a family gathering in a remote northern lakeside town, and a pair of sisters attempting to deal with dark fairylike creatures called "vittra," to whose attractions one of them eventually succumbs.
One midnight in winter this girl — her name is Cilla — sits up in bed, pulls aside the curtain and looks out at the town lying quiet on the shore of the lake, with "the mountain beyond backlit by the eerie glow of the sun skimming just below the horizon." The sight brings with it a sensation "Cilla could neither name nor explain. It was like a longing, worse than anything she had ever experienced, but for what she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen, and she was terrified that she would miss it."
For you, dear reader, something wonderful — and weird — is going to happen if you open this book.
It's waiting for you. - Alan Cheuse
For the past few years, there have been a number of salutary efforts to bring international SF to the attention of the wider community (by which I mean monolingual English-language readers) – a new translation award, recent Japanese and Latin American anthologies, sterling reviews for Angelica Gorodischer, Johanna Sinisalo, and Hannu Rajaniemi, etc. Now Cheeky Frawg books, the latest imprint by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, is introducing us to the work of Karin Tidbeck, a young Swedish author, who like Rajaniemi also writes in English, and who promises to be one of the most distinctive new voices in short fiction since Margo Lanagan. Her collection Jagannath includes eleven stories, mostly translated from the Swedish (presumably by the author, since no translator is given), seven of which originally appeared in her 2010 collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?, though a few have appeared in English, and one is original to the collection. It’s a slim volume, and some of the stories are only a few pages long, but it’s not quite like anything you’ve seen, even though you may hear vague echoes of everyone from Kafka to Borges to Tove Jansson. The Borges echo is most notable in a story-disguised-as-essay called ‘‘Pyret (Py:Ret)’’, which would hardly be out of place in The Book of Imaginary Beings. It describes a benign creature called a Pyret, persisting in Swedish folklore from the time of the Icelandic sagas, sometimes mimicking other animals. What appear to be genuine scholarly citations lead to an anecdotal account from the 1860s and another from the 1970s, finally to the narrator’s own efforts to investigate the latter, which in turn leads to a surprising epiphany about the nature of her own research. There’s a Kafkaesque feel to ‘‘Arvid Pekon’’, in which a bureaucrat working in a government employment office begins receiving odd calls from a Miss Sycorax, at first wanting to speak to her dead mother, then to the Beetle King. Beetles and cockroaches begin to invade his life, possibly hallucinatorily, until his own reality is called into question. It’s governed by the same sort of horror-story dream logic that haunts Kafka’s characters, and to much the same effect. Another story, with an almost conventional but effective horror twist, is ‘‘Rebecka’’, in which the title character repeatedly attempts suicide, only to be foiled by what she believes to be acts of God, until she comes up with a chilling scheme to ‘‘do something he can’t ignore.’’
But most of Tidbeck’s stories lie firmly in her own territory, a half-mythical region most emblematically represented by the strange and brutal world shared by two stories, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’ and ‘‘Aunts’’. The former opens with what appears to be a refined game of croquet, but immediately starts going weird when we learn that the host is Mnemosyne, the pages who serve the drinks are changelings, and the goal seems to be to smash the balls into the faces of the pages. Augusta finds a putrefying corpse in a nearby wood and steals a watch from it, but needs to consult a page to even find out what it is – she and her decadent friends, not quite human, live in a twilight world outside of time, but by discovering time she learns she has fallen into it. Also on this estate is an orangery, which houses the title characters of ‘‘Aunts’’, three enormous women, tended by ‘‘nieces,’’ who ‘‘had one single holy task: to expand.’’ At a certain point, the Aunts split open from sheer enormity, and the nieces scoop out the organs, which will feed the next generation of Aunts, who begin life as fetal creatures clinging to and devouring their dead Aunts’ hearts. It’s a bizarre world, with some of the grotesque ambience of a Heinrich Kley drawing or a John Bauer painting (Bauer is alluded to in another story), that seems to leave room for additional stories – we’re told it’s only one of eight worlds, but ‘‘the most perfect one.’’
But the Aunts aren’t the most remarkable mother figures in the book; in the title story ‘‘Jagannath’’ (a name presumably drawn from the Hindu deity), survivors of an unspecified catastrophe survive by working inside an enormous biomechanical ‘‘great Mother,’’ keeping her organs functioning as she nurtures and protects them from ‘‘the horrible place’’ outside. Vaguely recalling Kit Reed’s ‘‘Perpetua’’, it’s one of the more recognizably SFnal tales in the book. So, in a way, is ‘‘Beatrice’’, which is Tidbeck’s surreal take on a steampunk romance, as a physician who has fallen in unrequited love with an airship meets a printer’s assistant who has fallen in love with a steam engine. Tidbeck has the discipline to follow such absurdist premises with a kind of fierce plot logic that almost makes them seem inevitable.
As should be apparent by now, Tidbeck often uses character names as titles – ‘‘Beatrice’’, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’, ‘‘Rebecka’’ – and this suggests her primary concern with character; even in the briefest and most elliptical of her tales, the motivations that drive her figures through these strange landscapes seem credible. She seems to view families as inherently fantastical, not only with those mythologized mother figures, but with children who might be imaged as tiny, gnarled creatures (‘‘Miss Nyberg and I’’ or ‘‘Cloudberry Jam’’, which opens with the line ‘‘I made you in a tin can’’) or parents who are remote, alienated, and in the case of ‘‘Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom’’, dead (the story is a series of letters to a dead father, which again echoes Kafka). The fullest portrayals of families are ‘‘Brita’s Holiday Village’’, in the form of the diary entries of a writer trying to complete a novel drawing on her family history, and ‘‘Reindeer Mountain’’, the collection’s one original story and possibly its best. Twelve-year-old Cilla and her sister Sara are visiting the family village, where an aging great-uncle is being moved out of a cottage he has lived alone in for decades. Cilla’s discoveries about her family, and her family’s possible involvement with the vittra, elf-like nature spirits of Swedish folklore, sets up a series of mysteries that are both emotionally authentic and genuinely eerie. It’s a gorgeously shaped tale that may not be Tidbeck’s most bizarre, but which demonstrates as well as any how her various oddities are grounded in an absolutely authentic sense of place, and a keen understanding of how the heart works, even when it isn’t assisted by shift workers inside the body. - Gary K. Wolfe
Where do they keep coming from? Over the last handful of weeks I’ve read and reviewed Near + Far by Cat Rambo, At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson and Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand—three new collections of short stories, all from small presses, all by female authors, and all superb. And then, just when I think it can’t get any better, along comes Karin Tidbeck’s debut collection Jagannath, which may just be the best one of the bunch. If you take into account that this is Tidbeck’s debut collection in English and that it was translated from Swedish to English by the author herself, it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer level of talent on display here.
Karin Tidbeck had been writing and publishing short stories in Swedish for several years when, given the relatively small number of venues for short speculative fiction in her homeland, she decided to set her sights on the English language markets. She applied for and was accepted into the prestigious Clarion Writers Workshop, translated some of her own stories into English, and lo and behold, slowly her name started popping up in English language publications. The first time I spotted her was in last year’s inaugural issue of Unstuck Annual (which I reviewed here) with the quirky, tender story “Cloudberry Jam”, but I freely confess that, at that time, I had no idea yet of what she was really capable of. Thanks to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg imprint, we now have a lovely, slim volume of Karin Tidbeck’s stunning short fiction.
In her introduction to this collection, Elizabeth Hand writes that it’s “rare, almost unheard of, to encounter an author so extraordinarily gifted she appears to have sprung full-blown into the literary world, like Athena from the head of Zeus.” That’s absolutely spot-on: in the thirteen stories in her English language debut, Karin Tidbeck consistently displays staggering levels of originality, skill and confidence. Her range is amazing. I haven’t been this excited about discovering a new short story author since a good friend practically forced me to read Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.
Speaking of range: one of the most impressive qualities of Jagannath is its diversity. In terms of style, these stories range from gentle magical realism to somewhat terrifying Nordic-tinged mythical fantasy, from folk tale to mind-bending science fiction, from a faux non-fiction text about a mythological creature to something that reads like a collaboration between Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick. Some of these stories operate in the realm of the deeply personal, focusing on melancholy, dreamy family memories, while others are so alien that even the concept of family as we know it is no longer recognizable.
Despite this diversity, there’s a strong sense of unity and cohesiveness to this collection, thanks to the common thread of Karin Tidbeck’s visionary imagination and subtle, incisive prose. Throughout this collection’s wild spectrum of forms and ideas, Karin Tidbeck’s writing simply shines. She has mastered the art of keeping things simple on the surface, letting the story speak for itself, and subtly goading the reader into investigating what’s been left unsaid. She has the nifty ability to introduce something utterly bizarre early on so the reader takes it more or less for granted, and then build outwards from that point.
Given the emotional and conceptual richness of these stories, it would have been all too easy to overwrite them, but instead Tidbeck maintains an impressive discipline when it comes to writing economically. These stories are tight; not a word is wasted. Even more admirable is that the resulting clarity of expression never comes across as cold. Instead, Tidbeck’s writing is frequently moving, tender, occasionally even funny. Her prose is an amazing balancing act that’s all the more impressive coming from a debut author.
And again, let’s not forget: Tidbeck isn’t even writing in her first language here. In Jagannath’s Afterword, she writes eloquently about how difficult it is to transmit the complete range of meanings and connotations of certain Swedish words and expressions into English. Her translation does occasionally result in a slightly awkward turn of phrase, but this just serves to emphasize the strangeness of these stories and the difficulty of contorting your mind and imagination into a new language. I once started learning Spanish because I wanted to be able to read Julio Cortázar’s short stories in the original language, and as crazy as it may sound, Jagannath makes me itch to learn some Swedish.
This collection is full of characters and ideas that will remain with you for a long time, from the sad, confused man who falls in love with a miniature airship (at one point plaintively thinking “How he wanted to climb into her little gondola”) to the poor, abused woman who will go to any length to draw the attention of the Lord and be relieved of her suffering; from the drab government employee running the most surreal switchboard ever to the elegant, otherworldly courtier who accidentally introduces time into the floating, timeless lands beyond the veil....
It’s hard to pick favorites from this incredible lineup of stories, because new connections and shared themes reveal themselves upon re-reading. Just the way Tidbeck explores the idea of parenthood from story to story and from setting to setting is both wonderfully inventive and, at times, somewhat disturbing. The way these stories continue to reveal new layers and levels of impact makes up a lot for what I would consider the collection’s only real weakness: it’s too short. This is a masterful debut, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been this impressed with a short story collection, but weighing in at just under 150 pages I simply wanted more. I wanted more to such an extent that I ended up reading Jagannath twice, back to back, and then almost swung right back around for a third read-through. I’ll take quality over quantity any day, but still: please send more stories soon, Karin. - Stefan Raets
I read Jagannath as soon as Jeff VanderMeer let me have the ebook edition to sell. Since then BristolCon and Kevin’s visit have happened, so I’m having to reacquaint myself with the book. This is a real pleasure.
Of course you don’t need me to tell you that. This is a book, and debut collection no less, that comes with enthusiastic recommendations from Ursula Le Guin, China Mièville and Elizabeth Hand. You don’t see that every day. Of course, as Liz points out in her introduction, Karin Tidbeck is not quite as new a writer as she seems. This is not her first book; it is her first book in English. Nevertheless, while Tidbeck has now had a novel published in her native Swedish, Jagannath represents a substantial proportion of her fiction output to date. It is an impressive achievement.
But what, exactly is it? Well, it is a collection of short stories. Those stories, as you might guess from the people publishing them, and recommending them, are typical of what is usually called “weird fiction”. They are, she says ominously, exactly the sort of thing that tends to win World Fantasy awards. I think that a nomination next year is a strong possibility. And yet, Jagannath is also something fresh and different.
The reasons for that are partly cultural. Weird fiction often riffs of folk legends of scary supernatural beings. Several of the stories in Jagannath do so, but in this case they are scary supernatural beings from Swedish folk tales. “Reindeer Mountain”, for example, is a tale about the vittra, which Wikipedia tells me, unhelpfully, are nature spirits that could be elves or dwarves. Tidbeck’s vittra look like elves, but live inside the eponymous mountain of the title, thereby partaking of both Tolkienian natures.
Once you start looking at the behavior of these creatures, of course, they start to seem quite familiar, but Tidbeck is still able to present them in fresh and distinctive ways. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” is a story about an elf-woman who comes out of the forest, bears a child with a human man, and vanishes again. That’s a fairly standard narrative, but Tidbeck tells it from the point of view of the child, now a grown woman, who is sorting through the effects of her recently deceased father and trying to make sense of her life. Why did her hippy mother disappear without warning one day? Why did her father become an alcoholic? And what is the mysterious bell-like sound she occasionally hears coming from the woods.
Then again, some of the creatures may not be Swedish at all. “Pyret” tells of a race of shape-shifting beings who are able to disguise themselves as sheep, cows and even people. It seems that they like to be near humans. If they are creatures from Swedish folklore then their existence has been erased from the Internet by the massive online presence of a popular brand of children’s clothes. Tidbeck may have made them up. They might even be aliens. Who knows? Does it matter?
Other stories are more obviously science-fictional. “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” deal with the nature of time, and the possibility of worlds outside of time. The title story, “Jagannath”, is a post-apocalyptic tale, though it is not clear whether the dead world in which the tale is set used to be ours, or is somewhere else entirely.
In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles. – “Aunts”
Indeed, being unclear is perhaps the signature effect of the collection. Liminality is key to all that Tidbeck does, and is key to weird fiction as well. The stories in the collection often leave you unsure as to what actually happened in them, and that’s a good thing. It is the prime source of their creepiness. There is something out there, or hiding in the shadows, but you don’t know what it is, and you are afraid to find out.
It is worth noting at this point that Tidbeck translated all of the stories herself. This is unusual. Hannu Rajaniemi writes in English, but he has lived in Scotland for years. Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, but has chosen to write only in English. Tidbeck lives in Sweden, writes in Swedish, and then re-writes her fiction in English. I’m struggling to think of anyone else who does that unaided. I’m sure that it teaches you a heck of a lot about language.
The reason that people such as Zoran Živković employ translators, even though they are fluent in conversational English, is that fiction is hard. To do fiction really well you have to know the language really well. Tidbeck is good enough to get published in two languages. And she’s also inventive enough, and a good enough story teller, to impress some of the best in the business. People like that don’t come along every day. - Cheryl Morgan
n a long twilight, the sound of tiny bells hangs in the air: a young woman’s mother is coming for her from the forest. Elsewhere, by the side of a lake, a family reunion is in progress, merry aunts and cousins hatching from cocoons. And in a tin can provided by charity, a tiny creature made of spit, salt, menstrual blood and a carrot kicks its legs, while the first October snow begins to fall. These are some of the strange, seductive images you’ll find in Karin Tidbeck’s stories.
Jagannath: Stories (Cheeky Frawg, 2012) is Tidbeck’s English-language book debut. It brings together works previously published in English, the author’s translations of her own stories—most of them from her Swedish collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?—and original material. On the strength of Vem är Arvid Pekon?, Tidbeck won a grant from the Swedish Authors’ Fund; her first novel, Amatka, is forthcoming this fall from Sweden’s largest publisher. Jagannath gives English-language readers the chance to enter the shifting territory of Tidbeck’s marvelous multiple worlds.
The stories in Jagannath are fascinating, frightening, and above all, tender. There’s an intimacy to them that’s immediately enchanting: several take the form of diaries or letters, or words exchanged with a close friend. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” is written to the narrator’s dead father. I first read this story in Shimmer Magazine earlier this year: that’s when the name “Karin Tidbeck” stuck in my mind, along with the haunting melancholy of this story of a broken family, lost hope, and magic. “Some Letters” concerns a young woman, Viveka, who returns to the place she grew up, an old schoolhouse where her parents lived with the other members of a commune: the loss of Viveka’s nuclear family (her mother disappeared when she was three; she lost her father to alcoholism and then death) is mingled with the loss of the commune, which was both an extended family and a vision of a utopian future. Loss fills every line of the story, like Viveka’s last memory of her mother: a red dress and the sound of tiny bells. Who was Viveka’s mother? That question both deepens the sadness of the story, and expands it outward toward mystery, toward the forest.
The red dress returns in “Reindeer Mountain,” where it becomes the sign of the vittra: tall, handsome, magical people who live inside the mountain, and like to wear red. Two sisters struggle with fear of madness and envy of each other in this story of a family with mixed human-vittra blood. The theme of human contact with other species, subtle in “Some Letters from Ove Lindström” and explicit in “Reindeer Mountain,” runs through the collection. “Pyret,” a sly gem in the form of an encyclopedia entry, details the habits of vittra cattle. A footnote informs us that the most common crime among those accused of witchcraft in medieval times was “illegal mingling”: humans consorting with non-human beings.
Many of the stories in Jagannath play with this theme: in “Beatrice,” a woman’s love affair with a steam engine produces a whistle-voiced, coal-chewing child; in both “Miss Nyberg and I” and “Cloudberry Jam,” children are grown like plants. The narrator of “Brita’s Holiday Village” discovers two families at once: while her memories of her relatives begin to emerge in her writing, she dreams the life of a second, insect-like family. And in the collection’s title story, the mother of a family carries her brood inside her.
Other themes include transformation, the nature of time, and the judgments of God. The stories “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” take place in the same world, a fairyland of the actual fairytale type, where games are bloody and casual torture is the order of the day. The stories show two different perspectives on what happens when time enters this timeless realm. These stories—like “Rebecka,” in which torture leads to salvation—explore different types of illegal mingling, mixing transgression with law and cannibalism with comfort. The intimate tone of so many of Tidbeck’s tales invites the reader to blend in as well, to imagine a personal shift into something slightly different. The words of “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” are ostensibly written to a dead man, but when you read them, you’ll know better. Like all of the stories in Jagannath, these letters are for us. - Sofia Samatar
In the afterword to Jagannath, her first English-language short story collection, Karin Tidbeck writes about learning both American and British English (along with her native Swedish) through various sources, from "The Beatles and the rituals of tea time" to "MTV and the movies, and . . . science fiction paperbacks" (p. 129). It's clear that Tidbeck, who translates her own work, has let this diversity of influence seep into her writing. Her prose is remarkably strong and uncluttered, resting not only in the space between genre and literary fiction, but at the interstices between further ill-defined generic subdivisions like science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, and the rapidly growing fungal bud of weird fiction. Jagannath proves that under all the pontificating and arguing about genres and their hierarchical worth, what ultimately defines literary value is good writing. Whether an example of good writing fits into predefined marketing slots or is a more slippery thing is a different conversation. There is no attempt on Tidbeck's part to cater to "markets"; this is a series of songs from the heart, mysterious and beautiful, sometimes impenetrable and dark as winter-cooled obsidian, sometimes light and effervescent as sunlit spring clouds.
One sees in the title story the lurid shadings of those science fiction paperbacks of Tidbeck's childhood, mingled with the intimate sadness of losing a mother (whether through the departures of adulthood or death) and growing up. It's a vivid evocation of the weirdly fantastic—evolved humans living as symbiotes in a giant biomechanical creature that conceives and protects them from the hazards of what one assumes is post-apocalyptic Earth—and the personal—protagonist Rak's moving coming-of-age as she discovers for herself that resident midwife Papa’s fatalistic comment "We only live if Mother lives" (p. 118) need not be true. In its intricately sensory yet metaphoric imagery of bodies in transition, birth, death, and decay, the story also illustrates Tidbeck's recurring concern with the cyclical nature of life and how it necessitates the paradoxical dualism of existence, be it in the coexistence of staggering beauty and great ugliness, love and violence, life and death.
It's telling that Tidbeck chose to title that story and the collection "Jagannath," which is the name of a Hindu deity, and the Sanskrit root for the English word "juggernaut." A juggernaut is, of course, something that crushes everything in its inexorable path. In this group of stories, that crushing, god-like entity might well be time, which both destroys and replenishes (gestation and maturation, aging and death), which spares nothing as it rolls over human creation but leaves everything in its wake touched by the smouldering glow of magic. The past is, after all, forever romanticized and narrativized by us, eternally slipping into the numinous realms of myth as the present solidifies into what is perceived as real. So it is in Tidbeck's stories, where nostalgia and recall hold an implacable power, and time itself is an awful force that both gives and takes with no regard for frail human considerations.
In "Aunts," we see the ritualized lives of a trinity of corpulent women in a "floating" world beyond time, the impossibility of their grotesque, self-sustaining cannibalistic life cycles interrupted and ruined by the stain of time left on their home by an unseen visitor. In the dream-like yet emotionally honest "Brita's Holiday Village," a writer spends a cool Swedish summer at a remote holiday retreat and witnesses what is possibly the brief life cycle (again time rearing its head) of an entire village that feeds off her presence, her imagination, and her familial past, to exist. The latter story shows how Tidbeck sometimes, to ominous effect, personifies magical beings as leaching off human life in desperation as they begin to fade in the face of cyclical time, just as we in turn cling to myth and old stories as everything around us changes. She also does this in "Pyret," a pseudo-nonfiction profile of a shapeshifting creature from Nordic folklore that starts out like a fascinating essay on an elusive animal and eventually takes on the disturbing atmosphere of a magical version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (recalling Tidbeck's comment about her various influences). "Beatrice," "Miss Nyberg and I," and "Cloudberry Jam" deal with the birth and growth of children, made fantastical within the contexts of steampunk and magic realism, grounded in the pride and pain of seeing offspring grow further and further from the parent. All are bittersweet pleasures, but "Cloudberry Jam" is especially touching in its exploration of the life of a single mother with an extraordinary, and difficult, child in the form of a vegetative homunculus she "made . . . in a tin can" (p. 83).
Sometimes Tidbeck skews closer to reality, with as much success. "Some Letters For Ove Lindström" is a lovely ode to a dead father and a vanished mother that wouldn't seem out place in Granta or The New Yorker, never explaining whether its narrator's hints that her mother might not have been human are the fantasia of nostalgia. It's a portrait, again, of what is gone, imparting memory and the mundane with incandescent power.
"Reindeer Mountain," the one original story written for the collection, gives the reader a haunting glimpse of the "vittra," a folkloric Scandinavian race that shares similarities with the Faerie. The fantasy is elegantly grounded in the family life of two young sisters, Sara and Cilla, who respond to the magical call of these beings differently. It's a story that sees the generational narrative of family as inherently enchanted, though not always positively—bloodlines picking up the strains of folklore and myth as they transmute along the years. Tidbeck returns here to the call of nostalgia and history, of passing time weighing down on the souls of humans and heightening their awareness of what has passed and what’s to come. Sara sees the magic that surrounds their family's soon-to-be-torn-down country house as portentous, while Cilla sees "what she had been pining for, that wonderful something waiting out there" (p. 80).
Some of the pieces stand apart as their own literary experiments, and are arguably the weakest of the crop, though not to the extent that they are less than good stories. For example, the sinister, Kafkaesque satire "Who is Arvid Pekon?" turns a government switchboard operator's dreary, depersonalizing job into a literal hell as he becomes aware that he's little more than a pawn for higher powers. It's a broader, less fascinating piece than the rest. "Rebecka" is reminiscent of Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God" in its vision of a world where a paternalistic God has manifested and turns out to be more Big Brother than benevolent savior. "Herr Cederberg" is a light piece that is essentially an extended metaphor for transcending the pettiness of human cruelty.
Tidbeck is at her best when she delves into humanity's enduring fascination with loss, and how compelling that loss can be. Loss defines our lives, representing as it can a fearful ideal of the unattainable. What is gone or never existed takes on an unbearable grace. Tidbeck mentions that the Swedish even have a specific name for this existential ache that can never be fulfilled in the face of reality’s brutal demands and gentle sorrows—"svårmod," which she roughly translates to "hardship mood."
Tidbeck recognizes that much mythology and magical thinking arises from that ache in the human heart, reflecting both our fears and hopes for something beyond what we perceive with our senses. It's an ache that speculative fiction can directly indulge or ease, if temporarily, and she knows this all too well. Her stories tap into the universality of magic as an underlying presence in even a reality defined by rational paradigm, if only because rationalism is the counterweight to magical thinking and thus casts the latter in a bittersweet light of remembrance. And that light is present in the motif of twilight, which is ever-present in the stories, as it is in Tidbeck's native Sweden. "Augusta Prima" directly addresses this metaphorical throughline, giving us a thesis statement of sorts. In it Augusta, an immortal being who lives in the same realm as the grotesque women in "Aunts," accidentally slips into the human experience of time when she finds a stopwatch and finds out the "nature of the world[s]" from a visiting "djinneya":
There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk. . . . Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. (p. 106)
In the fading, liminal glimmer of twilight Karin Tidbeck sees past, present, and future, and weaves stories out of all three, standing between magical and rational realities, Heart and Thought. She knows they stand closer together than we often expect. As the juggernaut of time barrels onward, we are constantly losing magic. But in Jagannath Tidbeck humbly suggests that magic is never truly lost, just waiting, always, to return. - Indrapramit Das
Brita’s Holiday Village by Karin Tidbeck http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/tuesday-fiction-britas-holiday-village-by-karin-tidbeck-author-week-5/
Landscapes by Karin Tidbeck (Author Week #5)
http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/landscapes-by-karin-tidbeck-author-week-5/
http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/landscapes-by-karin-tidbeck-author-week-5/
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