About
In my hometown in Sweden, my friends and I used to stage plays at a small theater. I still recall the glare of the spotlights and the hush of the audience. More than anything, I recall the whisper that would come from the prompter’s box when I forgot my lines. I thought of it then as divine intervention. Part of me still does.
I went on to study literature at the University of Lund, Sweden, later at the University of California at Davis. During the eighties, while living in San Francisco, I covered the local art beat for Art & Auction in New York. Those were heady times. New galleries were opening, new money was mixing with old, and new collections were being assembled. In many ways it was the contemporary version of Artful Players, my book about art in early San Francisco – just as wildly irreverent and almost as much fun.
By the time I wrote Fylgia, my first novel, I was living with my husband on the coast north of San Francisco. The idea for Fylgia came to me as a single scene. A family crosses a snowy field to a country churchyard in Sweden. A man lowers a small white coffin into the frozen ground. Beside him, a woman clenches her fists. A man in black, a wreath around his arm, watches from the pasture below. Only after the others leave does he approach the grave. That was all I knew, but I was off.
Now back in San Francisco, I’m working on a new novel. The setting is a manor house in southern Sweden, much like the ones I used to visit when I was a student in Lund. Again, the idea came to me as a single scene. Men and women wait in a mirrored room. Curtains stir in the breeze, rose petals lie scattered on white tablecloths, someone plays a Beethoven sonata on a grand piano. The whole room is full of gestures and hidden meanings: here, a roving gaze, there a subtle turning away. And so the creation of Rilke Summer began, the novel that’s now nearing completion. It insisted on being written.
Perhaps that’s what stories do. They won’t leave you alone.
Chapter 1
A VILLAGE CAUGHT IN CHANGE In the mid-fifties, in the evenings, I used to walk with Hjalmar to the lake. I was a child of ten or so, sent to the country for the summer. Hjalmar was my great-uncle; he and his brother Gustav owned Torp, a farm in Kungsäter, a small...
Chapter 2
HOW THE NEW CHURCH WAS BUILT They say when God created Sweden he began with the south, and so it became fertile and good in every way. The Devil, meanwhile, ran farther north, where he created the district of Mark. On the surface it was...
Chapter 3
FINA’S CHURCHING Carl was not the first in line to inherit Torp. His brother August was two years older and thus the rightful heir. August, however, left for America. Thus Carl took over Torp. His sisters Mina and Augusta, as compensation,...
Chapter 4
HOUSE EXAMINATION You could recognize him from afar as he came up the hill towards Torp -- his wide-brimmed hat, his erect posture, his landau pulled by his gray mare, the rod of his whip swaying in its stand. As he approached, did he reflect...
Chapter 5
THE GREAT BRÄNNVIN BRAWL Ever since the inn closed a long time ago, travelers wishing to put up in Kungsäter have been out of luck. In my case the problem with accommodations is solved when my uncle Bengt offers me the use of the cabin in...
Chapter 6
AN INSPIRED MOVE For centuries weaving had been an important part of life in Mark. In almost every cottage women worked at their looms, often assisted by husbands and children. In the early 1800s, local middlemen began supplying these hand...
Chapter 7
THE LESS THEY KNEW THE BETTER In 1896, when Anna was seven years old, she started school. Paulina was her teacher in the early years. A sparrow of a woman, Paulina had a thin, wrinkled neck, set off by a starched, oversized collar pinched...
Chapter 8
MODERN WOMEN DON’T LIKE TO MILK Ardennes Stallion Fredrik Lundgren was a man with a firm handshake. Villagers remember him as purposeful and trustworthy, fired by new ideas in farming and economics. "Lundgren was not like the rest of...
Chapter 9
THE HAPPIEST MOMENT OF HIS LIFE Adolf and Beatrice Anna and her sister Ida used to take the train to Varberg. They would stand on the open platform of the last car, thrilled by the wind and the speed. Rows of haystacks receded into the...