Book review: Eerily seductive debut of Matilda Gyllenberg

A woman walks around in a recently renovated förortshus and ”feel cheated of life” – a common picture of the medelklasstristess in samtidslitteraturen.

the Finnish-Swedish Matilda Gyllenbergs first novel, ”The lungsjuka the house” already suggests in the title that there is something wrong with the property itself, and not just the spoiled woman looking for mold and poor workmanship, which is why she is not happy. She would stand here with husband and daughter, and shine forth to the world. ”I live in a house bathed in light.”

start in it which meant the light over the stage in the vaguely cartoon Finnish town with the lure of the small town, over the idyllic villabolaget where you buy into so that the properties are owned in common and no fence is needed. There have been a gårdsorkester and collective business days before the present pulled in and transformed the joint to the individual. At the same time as föräldrakooperativ and personaldrivna schools were riskkapitalägda companies where it came to maintain their place in the queue have all now several cars in the driveway, automatic gräsbevattning and their life projects is the success of the child.

so far, So Gyllenbergs a woman is the sister of Anna in Agnes Lidbecks ”Find themselves” , equal, rational and distant, as locked in a state of normality and equal painfully själviakttagande. But Gyllenberg playing more with genres, so to the tale and satire to get his before the novel plunges down in the eerie gothic when the child, whose idiotic nickname ”Persikopastejen” (PP) is used just to spread the feeling of gullifierad stupidity, suddenly disappears.

It without a trace of the missing child becomes a skräckhälsning out of every parent's nightmare, but also as a cry from the diary of villaområdets past as the main character finds and reads with growing concern. Or the liver? Parallel track, another missing child, and labyrinthine meetings, but also gets the reader to wonder whether the missing child's mother, perhaps, is an abuser.

John's presence possibly only in his head and the hologram, to generic förortsfäder belongs to the ominous stories in which Joyce Carol Oates meets Charlotte Perkins Gilmans classic short story ”The yellow wallpaper” from 1892. In Perkins Gilmans the depiction of the victorian kvinnofångenskapen is also a close John and a nameless småbarnsmor in a room whose wallpaper wearing a ”distressed , ornate designs that commit all imaginable artistic trespasses”. Of Gyllenberg, it is instead the skin of the child as krackelerar in strange patterns.

Matilda Gyllenberg examines guilt and responsibility in love relationships, between adults and between children and parents, and her lost, not particularly sympathetic woman, alluding to the Pain Tikkanens ”the Century's love story” (”Keep your roses /lay the table of the table in place ”) when she appeals to her husband to ”remember her clothing size,” but she also teaches her children, fear and abandonment by staging situations that provoke horror. The tillkämpade normality resulting in higher tension, more and more offences.

whose variegated pattern, sometimes flowing together and there is so much that is in the walls that will be depicted; war trauma as underground tunnels between generations, racism and abuse in which class society's engine room. But on the whole, Matilda Gyllenbergs debut is eerily seductive, not least to the, light and stylish, works like a literary echo chamber.