Photo supplied by Lina Wolff
Lina Wolff is a writer from Lund, Sweden. Her first novel, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs (Bret Easton Ellis och de andra hundarna, 2012), was first published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2016. Its memorable title refers to the literary names given to stray dogs at a brothel (“Dante” and “Chaucer” are others), and through it, we are introduced to a writer unafraid of provocation. Layered with several narratives and hinged on the mercurial presence of a fictional short-story writer called Alba Cambó, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs won two prizes in Sweden: the Vi Magazine Award and the Swedish Radio Award for best novel. The English translation by Frank Perry also won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Wolff’s second novel, The Polyglot Lovers, won the August Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Sweden. Her collection of short stories, Many People Die Like You (Många människor dör som du, 2009; transl. And Other Stories, 2020), which appeared before her novels in Sweden, finally arrived in English after the publication of her novels and more awards (The Aniara Prize, The Piraten Award, and The Nine Society’s Winter Prize). Her work, often characterized by clinical observations delivered in a laconic tone, is highly literary and steeped in a historical and deep knowledge of the literature she lampoons.
After growing up in Sweden, Wolff lived in Italy, France, Spain and Catalonia. Most of her work is set in Spain and Catalonia. In fact, it is Spanish, Catalonian, and Latin American writers who have arguably exerted the most influence over Wolff’s work. One gets flashes of Mercè Rodoreda in how Wolff writes direct—to the point of almost emotionless—sentences to great surreal effect. One might also discern the influence of Gabriel García Márquez in the way her novels, rather than focusing on any one character, center on the interactions of an entire community of people. Perhaps inspired by García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Wolff also doesn’t give her novels strict beginnings and endings.
Wolff isn’t concerned with strict delineations in the lives of her characters either. As she skips between narratives, it’s as though she does not want big histories for her characters. We do not know a lot about her characters’s childhoods. We are not given potted histories or flashbacks that might serve as justification for their often derisible behavior. Narrative, for Wolff, is not meant to unify. If there exists any unifying philosophy within her oeuvre, it’s the idea that life is too fleeting for there to ever be a greater meaning behind our existence.
In writing this introduction and preparing to interview Wolff, I couldn’t help but think about the opening pages of Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, where, in reaction to a friend refusing to try on the clothes of someone who had died of a “broken heart,” our protagonist remarks, “What a dull way to die.” This is one question I’ve asked myself when reading Wolff: is there a difference between dull ways of living and dull ways of dying? Her novels are replete with statements and questions like this. Wolff’s deadpan delivery sometimes means the seriousness of them can be missed. But these pronouncements are deeply tied to some of the biggest questions about life.
I also found out that her mother had just died this past summer and that, during this time, Wolff had actually undertaken and finished another novel called The Devil’s Grip (Djävulsgreppet). She had split her time between writing the novel and caring for her dying mother. Busy as she was with the release of Carnality (Köttets tid) (which has already won the most prestigious literary prize in Sweden, the Aftonbladet's Literary Award), Wolff still found herself compelled to write this novel—about a woman who believes that a demon is influencing her relationship with a man—dashing it off in a “couple of weeks.” Not yet translated, the novel is due to be released soon in Sweden. Unlike anything Wolff has written, both in style and content, this new work saw her confront some even darker elements of personality—what Carl Jung might call “the shadow.” In the exclusive interview below, Wolff claims it was both one of the “easiest” novels to write while also being the hardest. Whether or not Wolff is or will ever be free from her suffering at the loss of her mother, she, at least, she has at least been able to find a form of creative freedom.
Wolff and I met over Zoom. She dialled in from Lund, Sweden, and I from Leeds, UK.
—Liam Bishop
I’d like to start by discussing how you develop your plots. Your novels are quite oblique because you layer them with characters and different narratives, so it’s almost like we get lots of starts and lots of endings in one book.
I am obsessed with plots and structures. I love reading a story with a good plot. I think a lot about how other writers arrange their plots and how I could arrange mine, and yet, in some way, when I write, I know deep within me that the most important thing is definitely not the plot. The more I can let the narrative follow a more organic and chaotic impulse, the more satisfied I will be with the result.
Because what remains with you after finishing a novel is not the plot. In a way, the ending is important but, in another way, the ending has no importance at all if the narrative is strong. Perhaps one of the most famous novels in the world—Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—proves this because it has such a poor ending. Some of my favourite novels, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, or Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, are incomplete because the writers died before finishing them, but that doesn’t change the feeling that they are masterpieces.
Speaking of Rodoreda, do you think writing a stricter plot would have inhibited her? Would a stricter plot mechanism inhibit you?
Chigozie Obioma once said in an interview, “We write in order to try and understand who we are and why we are suffering.” In conceiving Death in Spring, Rodoreda must have “seen” a larger story about a society, by a river, with lots of strange and inhumane rituals and ceremonies. She must have felt revolutionary when she got all these ideas and opened up her mind to all these mechanisms, and thought, “This can be a society I can write about, even though it is an incredibly dark society.”
Some read her works as a critique of the Franco regime and an allegory of a totalitarian society. You can apply this reading but to say that this novel is about the Franco regime reduces the novel to something very small. Although this might sound like a cliché, Rodoreda reaches beyond every kind of system; her work goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being, which is what one has to do as a writer. A story is created by an itching. There is something lying underneath the soil, if you will. I don’t know what this itching means when I feel it, but I know I can feel this itching, and I want to discover what this itching means.
Can you describe this itching?
It’s a mixture of pleasure and a kind of pain, a preoccupation and frustration. When you get the itching, you feel a sense of unease. Although you don’t experience the itching on your skin directly, you feel it physically, like something wants to come out from underneath and be given shape. For instance, when I’m writing novels from a certain viewpoint, I can feel myself becoming physically different, embodying certain traits of the character I’m trying to write.
It can be very frustrating if you aren’t giving this thing which requires a shape, a birth, and you’re not giving it the right birth. Sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself what you are doing wrong. That can be an itching too, and that is pure pain, because you can’t reject this form of itching, and it won’t disappear unless you answer the question. Some days you think the pain will win—that you might never reach that happy end—but other days, you look ahead to the satisfaction you get when the itch is finally scratched.
Your characters often exist in a world with a lot of correlation with the present, wherever you’ve chosen to set your stories. But you always remove your characters from their historical contexts. Why is this?
I like to create characters without a past. I put some of the reason for doing this down to reading an unhealthy amount of Mikhail Bakhtin, who called this idea “historylessness”. It’s only when I read him that I found I had actually been creating characters without a history. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact I like the idea of the character who is not overly determined by factors from his or her childhood. We’re used to the kind of novel where a character grows up in a certain place and certain way, and his or her life becomes shaped by circumstances. I find that approach to writing almost mathematical: if you give a character x and y, you get z.
Take Mercuro, for example, in Carnality: I gave him this kind of historylessness. The novel is split into two sections, and we see these characters take part in a game show called “Carnality.” Mercuro and his previous partner, Lucia, are asked personal questions about their relationship. Yet, you don’t know anything else about Mercuro’s childhood because it would be like “proving” that he became what he ultimately became. I find that boring.
We all have things that happen in our past which affect our present: unresolved conflicts, spurned wishes and desires. Do your characters not have this? How do you think about your own childhood?
I’m from a very academic family. My mother was a psychologist, and my father a scientist. We lived in Lund for ten years, and then we moved out to the countryside, a completely new environment. When we moved there, my dad laughed when I started to speak like the village kids because they were speaking in farmers’ dialect. He must have thought, what if my daughter starts to speak like the farmers? To me, being with these children was a relief. I really loved being with them because they were so much more fun than the children I had known in Lund. I became a completely different person when I played with them. When I look back at this, I think it’s such a mess: I can’t look into my own life and see what led to what. If I look down into that bit of myself when we lived in that village, I can’t say something happened because of this, or something happened because of that.
The greatest things in my life seem to have happened due to other mechanics, often in ways completely unexpected. Sometimes I think if I thought more about the past, I might have missed some crucial things which have happened to me. But, because I think the past is so messy, I’ve let it go. And if there is a mess within me, there could be a mess in anybody, right? It’s a choice one makes to not look too closely at the past. There are other, more interesting things that decide who you become and determine how you act.
Can you give some examples of what you mean when you say the greatest things in your life have happened due to other mechanics?
What I found when I started writing was that ideas come to you but they need a spark to come to fruition. This might be another idea from years ago. Most things related to creativity happen in an instantaneous and unexpected way. I am reluctant to explore these experiences too much since it is their very mystery that seems vital to me. The creative process is not rational. Ideas do not thrive alone; they need other ideas to help them germinate and thrive. You don't always know what that other idea is, whether it's already there, or even if it will ever be there. Sometimes I go through old documents, or old drafts of novels and stories, and see if there is some clue to an idea expressing itself. You have to work and be patient—actively patient. Don’t stop working.
But I also see things like miracles everywhere I look in my life, as if there is some kind of magic behind it all: things have happened to me for inexplicable reasons. Were I to tell my dad, a scientist, about such thoughts, I think he’d be disappointed, but there have been many things which have also happened in my life that are so strange and beautiful and didn’t appear to happen through rationality. I remember when I was an au pair in Rome and I woke up one evening to hear a violin playing in the rain outside my window. Someone said miracles happen all the time, you just need the eye to see them. I think Almodovar said that.
I know your mother died last year, and I was very sorry to hear about that. How have you found getting back to writing, and have your thoughts on the creative process changed?
It was horrible. I am still recovering from my mother’s death, and I think I will be for the rest of my life. Enjoy your parents; soon they will be gone. You also feel like you are closer to death, which gives you a completely new perception of life. I had never been so close to death, and now I have been close to it and have seen death. In a way, coming so close to death is also beautiful. In my mother’s last weeks, we were exhausted, but seeing how her sick body changed was amazing. I felt like I was watching a game of nature, and that changes your vision of everything.
That dark room you go into when your parents die—you carry that with you. This experience really changed me, and I don’t have any expectations of being free from that. But I can be happier than I was. I actually wrote another novel—Carnality—when my mother was sick. It’s called The Devil’s Grip. Usually, it takes me four to five years to write a novel, but I wrote this novel in a couple of weeks, while she was not well. The only explanation I have is you get into a very, very dark room, and then you start to see things. It’s the darkest novel I’ve ever written, and yet it was so easy to write. I don’t have any memory of writing the novel, and now it’s going to be published in Swedish at some point this year, as well as Carnality in English.
I want to write the way I wrote The Devil’s Grip. Not with my mother dying of course, but with the satisfaction you get from feeling every day like you have advanced. That was a relief, a good feeling, and I would like to write like that again.
I’m awfully sorry to hear that. I’m glad you were able to find that novel to write and it gave you some sort of peace.
We see creativity as something “nice”; you explore yourself, and different parts of yourself. Here I discovered how creativity can be really scary when it feels like you're being dragged through a door into the dark. But I needed that novel so that I had some other place to go than reality. Being with a dying person is exhausting. You have to help, but you also have to be frank, because the person knows they're dying. She could be very sad, and we were so sad too, and we had to deal with all that sadness, and be present in the moment, because that was all we had. It’s a delicate situation when you have to be so sincere and plain; you do your best to manage her, whether you were massaging her feet or remembering something together, or just holding hands. Writing made me feel I had control of something I couldn’t control with my mother. But at the same time it was a demonic experience.
That’s an interesting choice of word. Has that sense of the demonic always been within you, or is it something which has developed as a result of writing this novel?
I discovered a voice within me, which is stronger than I expected, and I found that there is something entwined with my ideas of creativity that I’m not sure I can necessarily call “nice.” I was ready to give this voice permission to speak, because I listened to it and the itching feeling was so strong. I was present at the hospital a lot, and slept there with my mother, and when you start writing instead of sleeping and are with a dying person, there are parts inside you, like this dark voice, which can be very difficult to reconcile withing yourself. It was almost as if it was something was driving me to write the novel, and that’s scary to think about, and not something we associate with creativity. Just to have an awareness of that feeling is scary. But I don’t blame myself for having this voice or utilizing it to write a book.
I’m reminded of another interview you gave where you said, “Do not think your mother will not like this book,” as a way of suggesting that you shouldn’t worry too much about what people will think of you, as a person, as a result of what you write. How do you feel about your mother’s judgement here?
There is always a fear of judgement about what you write. I was so afraid, when my mother was alive, of her judgement, which I think I was projecting out onto her, because I really respect my reader. But I believe The Devil’s Grip is a good novel. It features a very destructive relationship between a man and a woman; the woman starts to believe that a demon is involved in their relationship. I caught a glimpse of my shadow writing The Devil’s Grip, and I had to work on accepting this shadow self, because I could have rejected it and said I can’t write this book out of fear or horror. While it’s a disturbing thought to think about yourself, I’m not frightened of the voice any more.
I have had to think, though, whether or not I am an “evil” person. Writing the book felt like there was something else that was propelling me to write what I wrote, which I wasn’t in control of, and why I thought it was demonic. Something that was beyond me. Once you start to play with these dark forces, you can’t just suddenly back out and say I wasn’t responsible for that text or whatever. I was there and I wrote what I wrote. It’s a devil’s grip, and once I started, I couldn’t stop writing about this couple's relationship.
What helped me while I was writing it was reading a lot of Jung. He welcomes the idea of a “shadow self”—the more aware you are of this shadow, the greater possibility you have of becoming a better person. Just to embrace that is scary in itself. I have found it helpful to look at something that may have originated from me as not really a part of me, to treat it as something very dark, like a demon. Ask yourself, how would you treat a demon? You’d get rid of it at any cost, right? You wouldn’t sit in the garden and have a cup of tea with it. Perhaps it might be of some help to others to think like that; then again, I didn’t really write this book to be helpful.
I guess it depends on how you understand this idea of a “demon”? Does it represent a darker part of our personality? Or do we try and take ownership of that demon? Or is it a part of ourselves you’re “othering” because it’s too painful to handle and accept it is a part of you? You’re a writer, for instance, who creates quite “bad” characters, especially men.
I am, ultimately, really interested in the characters I write about. These two aggressive, sometimes violent, men such as Illich in Bret Easton Ellis and Ruben in The Polyglot Lovers (De polyglotta älskarna, 2016; transl. And Other Stories, 2019) really interest me and intrigue me. I want to know how they work. It’s more important for me to know how they work than feel offended by what they do. I’m not going to create characters who are all right or all wrong in everything they do. Ellinor, Ruben’s girlfriend, is a good character, but she has a lot of flaws and weaknesses, and she can be quite mean. Really good characters would be really boring. Most people, I believe, are not, beneath the surface at least, perfectly good people.
One moment I particularly remember in The Polyglot Lovers is when Ellinor finds Michel Houellebecq’s novels hidden in Ruben’s bookcase. This seemed very significant. Firstly, it wasn’t the first time Houellebecq had appeared in your novels. Secondly, it felt significant that Ellinor, the female protagonist, had uncovered and discovered this aspect of Ruben, as though she had found the reasons for his “darker side”.
I wanted to understand how a woman would have to act to be with a person like Ruben or the kind of man Michel Houellebecq writes about. I was thirty-five when I wrote The Polyglot Lovers. I was beginning to feel like I was ageing, and it, honestly, felt horrible. So, watching him write about the lust and the sex, still admiring him, I felt like he was sticking a knife in me when he then said, as a woman, once you start ageing, everything ends for you. He doesn’t say that about men. That can be a painful thing to read as a woman, especially when you like some of his other work; this was a writer I admired, appreciated, and he’s killing you at the same time. He hates you.
How do you deal with that? You start hating the writer, but that’s weak. If the writer is good, he’s good, even if he doesn’t like you, and if you want to be honest about literature, you have to admit when someone is good. I felt like a character in one of his books in a way, and I decided I have to do something about this, or I will die even more.
I like how you use Houellebecq as a platform and somebody to tussle with. I felt a platform you were both sharing was the philosophy of Schopenhauer. I get a real sense in your novels of the fleetingness of existence, something I think Houellebecq also engages with, yet he follows it down a more miserable and pessimistic path than you do. For you, however, it seemed like there was a more hopeful, if bittersweet, reading of Schopenhauer. I’m reminded of the quote, “Animals live their life without an enduring goal, instead they live for a moment so fleeting.” I felt like that could be applied to some of your writing. Sometimes, it felt like there wasn’t much room for much in between living and dying in your novels, but there is a lot to be said for being alive.
That’s very beautiful. I really believe that, and that quote touches something within me. Nobody will say I write mindful books because I have so much violence, darkness, and people who don’t know how to get out of suffering. But I think that, definitely, I want to create this energy around the present moment and make that the most important thing. My characters will continue to avoid being cynical, which is something Houellebecq doesn’t avoid. I want my characters to be naive and even if they hope for something good and fail, they still have that sense of hope.
I took up karate while reading Houellebecq. That helped me by making me realize there are worlds outside words: you can actually punch someone in the face. For a verbal person, that can be a forbidden, yet thrilling, insight. You don’t have to write something to deal with sadness or frustration you might feel towards a person or a phenomenon. And it actually works. Now, I feel cured from my Houellebecqian illness. We are done, so you won’t be seeing him in Carnality.
