Martin Berg is a Swedish publisher living in the aftermath of tragedy. More than a decade ago, his wife, a writer and academic named Cecilia, vanished one morning, leaving behind Martin and their two young children, Rakel and Elis. In her outstanding debut novel, Collected Works, translated into propulsive English by Agnes Broomé, Lydia Sandgren tells Martin’s story across two narrative timelines. The novel interweaves his youth and the progress of his life up to Cecilia’s disappearance with events in the present day, where Rakel, his daughter, is preparing a reader’s report on a German novel to which Martin has been offered the rights. It seems, astonishingly, to be about her missing mother.
It’s utterly gripping stuff, and if it didn’t weigh in at more than 700 pages, Collected Works would be one of those books one reads in a single sitting. Sandgren has constructed a delicious combination of a detective thriller with an achingly beautiful extended look at the way youth washes over a group of compelling characters in the last decades of the 20th century, only to leave them stranded in the 21st, wondering what happened. The rendering of the early lives of this core ensemble – Martin, Cecilia, and their closest friend, Gustav Becker, who becomes an internationally renowned painter but has more than a touch of Peter Pan about him, never growing up – is the central achievement of the novel. They are exquisitely drawn in all their gaucheness, their grandness, their vulnerability. It’s like the films of Richard Linklater transmuted to the page.
