Let’s be honest: it’s almost fucking impossible to read Linda Boström on her own terms. Unless you are way ahead of the Swedish poetry scene, it is likely that you’ve come to Boström through Karl Ove Knausgård; it is what it is, but it is something that should be addressed.
This inability to read 'Linda' qua Linda has been effected into being through her former husband’s wildly successful My Struggle series. Notably, books 2 and 6 are brutal regarding the states of marital bliss (or lack thereof) and Linda’s struggle with schizophrenia. Knausgård controls the narrative as he is the author. Karl Ove is also, however, a human being, and one that displays an unusual capacity for itemizing life as data—a sort of radicalized empathy that, being human, is bound to fail at times. Linda is reduced to, for lack of a better term, a familial foil whose mental fluctuations necessitate that Knausgård is left to both—uh—ontologically fluff-and-fold for all members of their very young family. He does not hide his resentment of her when things hit fans; he owns his frustration and, crucially, despises his own inability to truly understand the severity of Linda’s depressive lows. This could go on forever.
The point is that all of this backstory WILL inform how you approach Linda, no matter how cognizant of the fact or not. I am sure many bitter men have reduced her to a shrew, the Witch Against Happy Karl Ove, from her characterization in My Struggle. I hope these readers recognize that Karl Ove—whom I adore, yes, but not above scrutiny—would be the first and loudest person to tell you that you are, put gently, one dumb motherfucker.
Which leaves us with this, Helios. It is fantastic. No: it is fan-fucking-tastic, and not because of or in spite of the Knausgårdian Paradox (more on this below). It is just a great novel, genuinely strange and insular, deeply fucked up as I like ‘em. There is no cosplaying go on here, anyone: Boström is the real deal when she gets the barrel of the bat on it.
So we end with my hypothetical Knausgård Paradox: you cannot read Boström without some lens of Knausgård, but the reason you have come to read Boström is because of her presence in Knausgård’s masterwork. I think it need be noted that Linda and Karl Ove were married when all of the books were written and rolled out. They even spawned again somewhere in the middle bits. Linda was not unaware, at LEAST by book 2, of her ‘character’ in My Struggle; to suggest otherwise is to paint her as victim and that’s something I am unwilling to do. However, I will not suggest that she leapfrogged her fame/infamy and attention into a career as a writer: she already was one. Just read this, as close to ignorant of Knausgårdian perspective as possible, and the clarity and precision of Linda’s idiosyncratic voice WILL emerge if you let it. I risk auguring that the Knausgård Paradox is really just the phenomenon of what happens when two incredibly talented artists collide and spark off and into each other. It creates this external nattering, the bullshit literati gossip, that reifies how much everyone loves a villain, even when there isn’t one. Linda is that gargoyle in the frieze of Knausgård, no matter how much that was not the intention of Karl Ove. They were a fucking family, trying. Like so many of us, they failed. This is immaterial to both my life and this material. That’s that. This? This is Linda and her incredible debut as a novelist. Simultaneity, intersectionalism, the Knausgård Paradox, whatever, can go fuck itself. This is just great work—
And that is why I read.