“Pyret” is a pastiche of an academic essay about “a mysterious life form. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” consists solely of letters a bereft daughter writes to her dead father “Brita’s Holiday Village” is the diary of the lonely, thirty-two-year-old would-be writer who finds that by entering the village she has crossed a boundary between reality and dreams. “Miss Nyberg and I,” “Herr Bederberg,” and “Cloudberry Jam” are slight vignettes. Tidbeck seems able to adopt any storytelling mode. Tragic outcomes of their encounters with the weird are deeply affecting. Unemployed, with few if any friends, none close, they subsist in a social and cultural vacuum, their reality “a thin veneer behind which strange creatures move.” Yet some authorial magic brings them to life, and the often. But when she uses a figure of speech, it’s perfect: in a park, office workers on their lunch break “stretched out on the lawns, drinking the first summer sun like pale lizards.” In most stories, this stripped-down quality extends to characters: she rarely provides background about their acquaintances, hobbies, family. lest the slightest adornment destroy her stories’ delicate, subtle balance of weirdness and melancholy. Tidbeck’s style is simple, almost minimalist. Her one novel, Amatka (2012 Mix), awaits publication in English.

Jagannath won the 2013 Crawford Memorial Award, given annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts to a new writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. Since 2010 she has translated her work, including these thirteen stories, into English. Tidbeck began publishing in Swedish in 2002. “Beatrice” opens: “Franz Hiller, a physician, fell in love with an airship.” “Reindeer Mountain,” with “Cilla was twelve years old the summer Sara put on her great-grandmother’s wedding dress and disappeared up the mountain.” And “Cloudberry Jam” with “I made you in a tin can.” How could anyone not want to read on? Tidbeck establishes this peculiar tonality in her stories’ first sentences and then never falters.

ISBN 9780985790400Īfter reading the singular stories in Swedish author Karin Tidbeck’s first collection, what lingers in the mind is their deadpan strangeness.

Jagannath by karin tidbeck