And the Walls Became the World All Around, its title taken from a line in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, is gashed, keening, forensic. It has been finessed from 13 notebooks kept by the Swedish poet and artist Johanna Ekström who, just a week before she died of cancer in spring 2022, asked her friend Sigrid Rausing to transcribe them with a view to publication. Such an unusual – perhaps even onerous – request. Then again, Ekström’s parents were writers and literary grandees; Rausing is the publisher and former editor of Granta: no life without books.
And the Walls … is less about cancer than it is about winter. Early sections take place during the slowdown and muteness of the pandemic. Ekström’s mother Margareta is mute – unable to speak, or even read or write, after suffering a huge stroke in the mid-1990s. “N”, a translator with whom Ekström falls in love, sinks into depression and becomes unreachable. In September 2021 she learns she has ocular melanoma, but a mood of foreclosure and expiry already hangs over every page. “What am I to him now?” she wonders about N. “A dark house. All the lights turned off.” Elsewhere she admits, “I feel like a ship with engine failure.”
