The Details: A Novel

"Genberg was another discovery for me, although The Details was a bestseller in Sweden. As you were saying earlier, this prize gives us a chance to discover books that have been recognised and applauded in their home countries, but which we might not necessarily know of. It won Sweden’s top fiction award, the August Prize, and has been translated into 29 languages. This is a slim, elliptical novel, a portrait of four relationships that seduced me from the start. There’s something about the tone, the intimacy… As Edgar Allan Poe put it: melancholy, beauty, loss—what is more poetic? Then she throws in a slew of literary references, mediating the world through books, reflections on life, relationships, our contemporary experience of connection and isolation. The way she uses language! This is another book I kept wanting to quote from. Her translator says in an end note that the book was an unexpected sensation. It’s a quiet book, comprising chronicles of mostly ordinary people. But, and I’m quoting here, “that quiet holds a grace that vaults the sum total of quotidian moments into something more expansive.” She has a remarkably sharp eye for these four characters and their relationships—one is a female former lover, another with a roommate, with a hurricane ex-boyfriend, then the narrator’s traumatised mother. Using, as she says, details rather than information, she gives us not simply the residue of life presented in a combination of letters, but an evocation of contemporary Stockholm, a moving portrait of her narrator. I’ve always looked to fiction as a way to inhabit other worlds and other sensibilities. Translations expand and deepen those worlds and create an international community of readers. To me, reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience which would otherwise be confined to one perspective or one life. Novels carry us to places where we might never set foot. They connect us to new sensations and memories, different worlds. Our shortlist opens onto these vast geographies of the mind, re-examines events of the past, enters new regions of emotion. It shows lives lived against the backdrop of history, or—more precisely—the interweaving of the intimate and the political in radically original ways. So I don’t know if it has changed how I view any of this, but it’s given me an even bigger appreciation of what is on offer. And certainly it has been a wonderful opportunity, with these 149 books, to become more aware of what is going on around the world in terms of writing and translation. I urge everyone to read the longlisted books too. It was a tough process, going from 13 to six, as it will be moving from six to one. So I exhort your readers to look at the longlist."