The Antarctica of Love
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
The international star Sara Stridsberg returns with The Antarctica of Love, an unnamed woman's tale of her murder, her brief life, and the world that moves on after she left it
They say you die three times. The first time for me was when my heart stopped beating beneath his hands by the lake, and the second was when what was left of me was lowered into the ground in front of Ivan and Raksha at Bromma Church. The third time will be the last time my name is spoken on earth.
She was a neglected child, an unreliable mother, a sex worker, a drug user—and then, like so many, a nameless victim of a violent crime. But first she was a human being, a full, complicated person, and she insists that we know her fully as she tells her story from beyond the grave. We witness her short life, the harrowing murder that ended it, and her grief over the loved ones she has left behind. We see her parents struggle with guilt and loss. We watch her children grow up in adopted families and patch together imperfect lives. We feel her dreams, fears, and passions. And still we will never know her name.
A heartrending novel of life after death, Sara Stridsberg’s The Antarctica of Love is an unflinching testament of a woman on the margins, a tale of family lost and found, a report of a murder in the voice of the victim, and a story that brims with unexpected tenderness and hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stridsberg (Valerie) opens this ruminative, heartrending novel with the murder of its narrator, 24-year-old Kristina. A sex worker addicted to heroin who "never wanted to be saved," she tells her story from the solitary nothingness of the afterlife, doling out how she came to be with the man who rapes, strangles, and dismembers her. Kristina watches her mother, Raksha, grieve her death and reconcile briefly with her father, Ivan. She recounts how her four-year-old brother's drowning, when she was 11, devastated the family, and she remembers her marriage to Shane, which offered a promise of fulfillment but was ultimately sunk by their shared addiction to heroin. Their son, Valle, was put in foster care by the state, leading Kristina to surrender their daughter, Solveig, to social services at birth. Kristina repeatedly returns to her murder, adding overwhelmingly grievous details. Passages about her struggle to stay clean while pregnant with Solveig and about Valle's struggle to adapt to the foster system, however, are sublime ("I think Solveig was trying to hide away from us in there, and I can understand why, we had nothing to offer her on the other side"). Despite the bleak story, readers will be moved by the dead narrator's white-knuckled grip on life.