Praise
"Discovering Birgitta Trotzig in Saskia Vogel’s translation is an experience that might best be likened to the act of mouthing 'wow' to no one, or to a listening darkness, or to the sea. At the shimmering center of this book is the girl-woman named Judit, called Queen, whose eye contact the reader is made to seek as if entranced, be it given or avoided, dodged or desired. The sentences that describe Queen and her landscape are always two things at once: picture a child’s palm that holds two equally sized stones, worn smooth from the sea or a closely held pocket, damp with water or sweat. Rubbing together within this book are beads of solitude and company, darkness and light, nothing and emptiness, silence and utterance, flowers and bruises. Vogel’s bewitching translation of Trotzig’s already otherworldly language gives the reader all these images held, or hung, by hyphens: an “ice-sky” and a “water-dawn”; a childhood’s “night-moments,” “ever-new light-unstruck never-seen waves”; an object that is “sea-glazed.” This bleak-blinding book is nailed down with sentences that come and then come back like waves; the effect of this repetition feels lethal, legendary. Trotzig’s world, in Vogel’s translation, is as definitive as the sun, and as blurred as a winter sky without a moon to keep it still."
— Claire Foster, TYPE Books
"To me, Birgitta Trotzig is a giant. It's such a rich and fascinating body of work. She's Nobel-prize class. Reading Birgitta Trotzig is like walking into a dark cathedral. At first it's just dark, but after a while the eyes adjust, and you begin to make out the colors."
— Eva Ström, Sveriges Radion/Sweden's Radio
"It is difficult to overestimate the impact Birgitta Trotzig's novels have had on Swedish literature. Her penetrating explorations of human condition and existence has left its mark on generations of authors and their writing. She never ceases to captivate. Her dystopian landscapes, darkening worlds and damaged human destinies always contain their opposite: vision, light, healing. But only as long as someone has the power to sow the seeds of restoration, in order to repair a broken world. Perhaps her books, and her fervent appeal, her seriousness, have never been as relevant as now. Our age of destruction, predation and authoritarian violence needs her."
— Hanna Nordenhök
"We are very dependent on language to have feelings at all. If you have an impoverished language, you have less emotion. And if you have less emotion, you understand less about your fellow human beings. Language and complex poetic language truly have a fantastic task: helping people to find themselves and to find out what they really are and really are experiencing. And that's why I'm not afraid to write in a complex way because I know that there are people who can use these complex models in their own spiritual life. There aren't that many, but they exist, and it is for them that I write."
— Birgitta Trotzig
“Birgitta Trotzig was the one who showed me how language can open itself out and embrace. I needed to soften up, I needed a softer language, and it was she who showed me it was possible . . . conjurs a soft, gliding movement the reader feels in her body, with each adjective the image opens out and expands further. Language is both meaning and music, image and body. Something is held by this language. You can lean into it, as if the language itself were mother, as if the language itself were hands. To me it was trust, it seemed there was in Trotzig’s writing a trust of being itself, which I simply allowed to percolate in me, I read nearly everything she wrote, I doused myself in her language, which dared to lean, which holds, which gives.”
— Hanne Ørstavik
Many corners of [Queen] crackle with a kind of electric intensity in Vogel's translation . . . Taut with intensity.
— Kirkus Reviews