Ebba Witt-Brattström, Love/War, Trans. by
Kate Lambert, Nordisk
Books, 2017.
So successful in its
native Sweden that it has gone on to become both a play and an opera,
Ebba Witt-Brattström’s debut novel, Love/War, was originally
released in 2016, two years after her much publicised divorce from
Swedish Academy chair, Horace Engdahl.
A novel of
fragments, it is laid out in the form of a hate-filled discourse
between the two protagonists, She and He. Peppered with cultural
references and in homage to Strindberg as well as Märta Tikkanen,
this powerful work from one of the founding members of the Feminist
Initiative is unlike anything in contemporary literature right now.
“I’m glad to
have gotten it over with. And if I can help just one woman to see
through this male dominant behaviour, it’s been worth every moment.
If my ex-husband has read the book? No, we don’t have any contact
with one another. Thank God.”
Ebba
Witt-Brattström, interview with Åsa Asplid, Expressen.se, February
3rd 2016
I was lucky to get sent the second book from Nordisk books. After
Havoc, I wondered what they would choose for the second book. They
have chosen a modern novel that has a lot of style about it. It is
written by Ebba Witt-Brattström a well-known figure in Sweden for
her feminist setting up one a feminist party in Sweden, which she has
since left she is also a professor of Nordic Literature in Helsinki.
This is her first book to be translated into English.
He said:
I duppose this
morning
wasn’t worse
than usual.
It wn’t get
any better than
this.
It’s far more
probable
that from now on
goodwil
on either side
will decrease
by a few percentage
points
a week.
I don’t know
what could possibly
turn that process
around.
The opening lines of
the book show the husband as cold in his way as he accepts the way
things are.
We have a novel that
is in the form of two voices the two voice indicate just as he and
she throughout the book. They are a married couple. what we see here
is an unleashing of two minds that in many ways are the same but due
to a lifetime spent together there paths have gone in a classic mid
20th century marriage where the man has been allowed to take the lead
and the “classic male role” and what we see is the pent-up anger
of the wife, but also a husband that has allowed his wife not
pursue her dreams and has over time underappreciated her role by
calling her a pussy a sub. She has grown afraid of him the love that
burnt so bright has turned to pure hate. The final nails in the
coffin of a marriage seen in the last conversations they take at each
other. Like two expert fencers diving in the point of a blade in the
form of words trying to draw blood from one another.
She said
speak for yourself.
Ypur idealisation of
the woman’s
feelings for the man
doesn’t seem to
apply to the man’s
feeling for the
woman.
Love is a story of a
couple.
not the conditional
submission
of one party
to the needs of the
other.
BE WHITE MAN’S
SLAVE
You are only
enthralled
by the woman’s
sacrifice.
you call that love.
My arse
She said:
Now I have dreamt
two nights in a row
that I was happy and
carried a knife in my hand,
a bloody knife, and
my heart was as light as a bird
She puts her anger
so well her the way she has felt like his slave during the later part
of the marriage now she has seen love turn to hate.
I loved the detached
nature of the voices. As the book unwinds we are given breadcrumbs of
their lives as we gather what lead them to this position. I was
reminded of Beckett in the voices .The way the work is just voices
brought to mind the classic piece by him Not I, which was a female
voice like this one that is full of bile of a lifetime of being put
in her place this is the voice of a woman that has had her dreams
spurned. This is the story of a marriage splitting, a battle voiced
in words that has the feeling of being very real. the fact the
writers own marriage broke up around the time this book came out it.
The books original title in Swedish is a nod to another classic
Nordic work that of the love of the century by Martha Tikkanen the
Finnish writer.where a woman tries to voice her anger towards her
alcoholic husband.
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this. Sitting
somewhere between poetry and prose, this is a fly-on-the-wall film of
the slow, painful, disintegration of a relationship between two
people who should probably have split up a long time ago. The
‘Love/War’ of the title hints at the partners’ opposite and
incompatible understandings of the nature of the relationship –
both what it was, and what it’s become.
A war doesn’t
actually end
until one side is
totally defeated
or dead
She said:
You’re talking
power politics
my dear.
When lovers are at
war
there are no winners
only losers.
The extract quoted
in the blurb is a good sample of the style; the disjointed dialogue
continues to the bitter end. And it’s peppered with literary
allusions in several different languages (sources and translations
are provided at the back) – these are clever, educated people, who
are just as susceptible to making a pig’s ear of their personal
lives as anybody else. He’s abusive; she’s embittered. Nobody’s
having any fun here; and yet I laughed. Usually it was because of a
particularly well-chosen quotation.
It’s very
readable; the conversation carried me along with it, as much as I was
hoping for everybody’s sake for it all to be over. As in poetry,
every word counts, and they’ve been chosen well. - Kathleen Jowitt
Love/War
is the latest title from new publisher Nordisk Books, founded in 2016
and focusing on publishing Scandanvian literature. Excitingly it's
not out yet and if you're near London you can attend the book launch
at Hatchard's bookshop on November 3rd. Get tickets for that here.
The
concept of the novel is intriguing to begin with - the entire book is
laid out sort of like a poem, and it's a conversation between two
people, She and He, who are trying to decide whether their
relationship is ultimately over or not. Throughout the book they
recount the wrongs they feeel the other has done them. She is a
feminist (Witt-Brattstrom is a founding member of the Feminist
Initiative Party in Sweden) and he at various points seems to be very
anti-feminist, saying at several points that a man should be in
charge in his own house. It becomes clear through the book that the
relationship has been abusive and the 'war' of the title is
startlingly clear at times.
When
I started reading I worried that the unconventional format of the
book would make it hard to get into but that very much wasn't the
case. The narrative between the two characters is tense and angry for
the most part, but like all conversations it goes up and down with
the recriminations and occassional moments of what seems like
reconcilliation. If you follow us on Instagram you'll have probably
seen a photo of an excerpt that I put up in our stories the other
day, and it was one of those books where I felt the need to
continually take photos or mark it up in some way. I think it should
be studied, and I mean that in the best way.
Throughout
the book there are one line interruptions which are references to
other things - occassionally in English but often in French or German
- and I felt much as I did when I was studying T.S Eliot's Four
Quartets at university and the whole thing was annotated with all the
parts that were references to something else. Love/War actually has
an appendix at the back which tells what a lot of the references are
from and that's really helpful, but I do feel like I'll want to go
back and read it again in order to get the most possible from it.
It
was a very quick read for me and really made me think about
relationships and the way that people treat each other. At times
brutal but also beautiful in the bleakest of ways, Love/War is an
excellent addition to any bookshelf. -
https://www.ninjabookbox.com/post/2017/10/17/thoughts-about-lovewar-by-ebba-witt-brattstrom-trans-kate-lambert-indie-extravaganza-day
Born in Stockholm to a German father and Estonian mother who had
sought refuge in Sweden during the war, Ebba Witt-Brattström has won
numerous awards for journalism and criticism. She was Swedish
newspaper, Expressen’s, runner up in their ‘Women of the Year
2017’ survey.
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