You know the popular theory about how you are a sum of everyone you have ever met? The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish to English by Kira Josefsson, feels like the book version of that — a collage of memories; a box of old photographs translated imperfectly into language.
Nominated for the International Book Prize 2024, the short novel narrates the details about four people — a chapter dedicated to each person — in the narrator’s life, as she remembers them while in the grips of fever. Within these pages are other people, too, who walk in and out of the main frame at will.
Framing
The framing technique of the four chapters is accepted to be limiting; the novel being as deeply self-aware as it possibly can be. The narrator says,
“We live so many lives within our lives — smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up — and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.”
Regardless of the frame, the details are preserved — “inseparable and distinct, next to one another” — without a fixed chronology, but making a “unified whole” (of sorts) that inspires a “nameless joy”.
With this as a theme, The Details is a novel in which you are less concerned with what is being told and more with what it is trying to achieve.
Portrait
Genberg creates the first-person ‘I’ — a portrait of the narrator’s self through describing, memoir-like, her interactions with the people in her life. She says,
“…to me they were like tattoos, everything and every detail present and intact, everyone I’d loved and liked was still with me”
The narrator is not giving us mere information about these people, but details of how they made her feel — emotions that have stayed with her.
About her first conversation with Alejandro, for instance, she says,
“…what he told me, the information he shared with me, I carefully committed to memory with a view to recounting it… but the information was just the container and not by any stretch the details that woke me up the next morning, heart thumping…” (original emphasis).
And,
“I considered that maybe there was no place I’d rather be than in the details next to all this information, all this surface” (original emphasis).
Brush Strokes
Despite the emphasis on details, Genberg’s novel understands loss — the loss that is writing, detailing itself, but also the loss of people when they leave without any details that may help find them again.
On the loss of people in an age with only letters and landline phones, the narrator says,
“Letting someone leave literally meant letting someone get lost.”
On writing, she says,
“This apparent structure [a methodological approach] might be what makes searching for something [or someone] so much like writing: the stroll of the thought down to the paper that appears purposeful when it is not; a map with twenty equilateral rectangles superimposed on an unfamiliar town, a quest for someone who is here but has disappeared.”
As the loss, disappearance, or absence persists, broad brush strokes and clichés may be used to draw people from memory, as Genberg does in some parts of the novel. For instance,
“Niki was an adventure, an endless all-genre drama where nothing was static and nothing could be predicted.”
In the end, though, The Details felt like I was at a party, listening to a stranger talking about their lost loves, and it was time to go home, but I couldn’t dare to interrupt them, especially because their story had eloquence, besides clichés — snippets of which may very well be filed under information, not details in my mind.
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