What do you think?
Rate this book
Strega
Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, a modern gothic story of nine young women sent to work at a remote Alpine hotel and what happens when one of them goes missing
With toiletries, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, and at her mother's instruction, nineteen-year-old Rafa leaves her parents' home and the seaside town she grew up in. Out the train window, she sees the lit-up mountains and perfect trees--and the Olympic Hotel waiting for her perched above the small village of Strega. There, she and eight other young women receive the stiff black uniforms of seasonal workers and move into their shared dorm. But while they toil constantly to perform their role and prepare the hotel for guests, none arrive. Instead, they contort themselves daily to the expectations of their strict, matronly bosses without clear purpose and, in their spare moments, escape to the herb garden, confide in each other, and quickly find solace together. Finally, the hotel is filled with people for a wild and raucous party, only for one of the women to disappear. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths we teach young women, what we raise them to expect from the world, and whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.
With toiletries, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, and at her mother's instruction, nineteen-year-old Rafa leaves her parents' home and the seaside town she grew up in. Out the train window, she sees the lit-up mountains and perfect trees--and the Olympic Hotel waiting for her perched above the small village of Strega. There, she and eight other young women receive the stiff black uniforms of seasonal workers and move into their shared dorm. But while they toil constantly to perform their role and prepare the hotel for guests, none arrive. Instead, they contort themselves daily to the expectations of their strict, matronly bosses without clear purpose and, in their spare moments, escape to the herb garden, confide in each other, and quickly find solace together. Finally, the hotel is filled with people for a wild and raucous party, only for one of the women to disappear. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths we teach young women, what we raise them to expect from the world, and whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published May 22, 2020
292 people are currently reading
16885 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,067 reviews
January 27, 2023
Nie lubię tego typu książek. Totalnie do mnie nie trafiła
September 15, 2023
Strega is a gloriously self-assured debut from Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from the original Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Nine teenaged women on the cusp of adulthood are sent to work at a hotel in the Alps. For much of the book, not much appears to happen. The women reenact daily rituals, seemingly without purpose because the hotel is seemingly without guests. Then violence arrives, as we know it must. Holm is doing several things in this book, but the most interesting to me is her depiction of violence against women as a ritualized act. Violence is a phenomenon that women are prepared for from childhood, rites of passage facilitated often by women themselves. When the violence is visible, it can appear performative, seemingly unreal and yet very, very real. Every chapter, every sentence in this book contains layers of meaning - including a foreboding setting that can be seen as a representation of the European project: the empty Olympic Hotel, situated in a sinister town called Strega, a relic of a hollowed-out civilization haunted by a pre-modern world. Nuanced, eerie, and brilliant.
September 18, 2023
edit: po czasie podbijam ocenę, bo mocno we mnie wciąż siedzi
„Wiedziałam, że życie kobiety w każdej chwili może zmienić się w miejsce zbrodni.”
senna, niespieszna, niepokojąca, subtelna, wręcz zmysłowa i bardzo kobieca powieść
„Wiedziałam, że życie kobiety w każdej chwili może zmienić się w miejsce zbrodni.”
senna, niespieszna, niepokojąca, subtelna, wręcz zmysłowa i bardzo kobieca powieść
February 7, 2024
Winner of the Society of Authors’ Bernard Shaw Prize for Saskia Vogel’s brilliant translation
I looked at the mountains and the mountains looked back. Without a doubt an evil place in costume. Above the door, a neon sign started blinking – terminus in fluorescent green. I took the pocket mirror from my summer jacket’s inside pocket. My face was blank. My mouth was still bright red, but I touched up my lipstick anyway. I put the mirror away and gathered my things.
I stood up and got off the train. Here too the station was deserted. In the transit hall hung a clock. I noticed it was an hour off. The clock struck and a mechanical bird emerged from a hatch, as though guided by an invisible hand. Under the clock was a pool of water, which was expanding.
The village was called Strega and it was in the mountains. Later I learned that Strega was a chamber of horrors, where everything had frozen into a beastly shape. I learned that Strega was deep forests bathed in red light. Strega was girls plaiting each other’s hair just so. Girls who carried large stones through the mountains. Girls who bent their necks and stood that way. Strega was a lake and the foliage enclosing it. Strega was a night-light illuminating what was ugliest in the world. Strega was a murdered woman and her belongings. Her suitcase, her hair, her little boxes of liquorice and chocolate.
Strega is Saskia Vogel’s delicious translation of Johanne Lykke Holm’s Swedish novel of the same title.
The original novel was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2021 (alongside novels including Bolla and Is Mother Dead). The judges’ citation I reproduce in full below as it summarises the novel better than I can, but seven words of it sum up the novel perfectly: organically vibrant, gothically threatening, and intensely sensual - or in my words, Thomas Mann meets Anne Serre.
The first person narrator of the novel, Rafa, aged 19, has been sent by her parents to a hotel in the mountains above the (fictitious) Alpine town of Strega, ostensibly as a seasonal worker but more as a boarder at a sort of ossified finishing school (see more at the extract below).
I had always imagined the future otherwise. I was to work the perfume counter at the department store. I was to save my money and keep it in the bank under my own name. I was to move into a flat where other women were also living, free souls with jobs and love lives. But I did as they had asked of me. I liked being an obedient daughter. It felt like being held by a beautiful patent leather collar.
There she finds herself alongside 8 other 19 year old women - Alba, Gaia, Barbara, Cassie, Alexa, Bambi, Paula and Lorca ( We came from various places, but were of the same age and mind) and in the service of three permanent staff: Rex the strictest who teaches them how to serve guests at formal dinners, Toni the receptionist/secretary who looks after their moral education; and Costas the housekeeper and cook.
Although there are in fact no guests to serve at the Hotel Olympic, a relic from a long-buried era, the dinner service is prepared each evening and then returned to the kitchens untouched:
One might imagine a hotel as a place for people, but that wasn’t the Olympic. At the Olympic, the clatter and smells were enclosed in the walls, like a haunting or a flickering memory.
…
It happened that I walked through the woods to consider the hotel from a distance. I looked out over the bitter waters of the Alpine lake. On the other side, the hotel rose out of the forest, red and immovable, a monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge.
The somewhat fevered relationship between the maids, and the portentous echoes of the past, are what gives the novel its “organically vibrant, gothically threatening, and intensely sensual” feel - I found myself reaching for my own description as “Thomas Mann meets Anne Serre” - amplified by the delicious prose.
Our parents had imagined the hotel to exist in another era, that it was in fact possible to send us there, to a place where no time had passed, as if we could slip behind a curtain, where the evil steam of reality could not reach us, but that proves to be a false hope.
Finally the hotel does burst in to life for one night, a local annual festival (with a rather sinister doll at its centre) but when the celebrations and dancing are over, one girl is missing.
A novel that speaks to the violence inflicted on women both directly by men and indirectly via the gendered expectations of society, and a stunning read.
4.5 stars.
An extract
We were nine young women doing seasonal work in the mountains, or nine young women put in safekeeping on the backside of the mountain, or nine young women who watched their hands being put to work, watched them lift starched fabrics to their face only to let them fall to the ground, watched them pour strong wine out of large carafes, like the hands of a statue, right into the parched earth, as though to sate it. We came from various places, but were of the same age and mind. None of us wanted to become a housekeeper, and none of us wanted to become a wife. We had been sent here to earn our keep, to become people of society. We were daughters of hardworking mothers and invisible fathers who slunk along the walls. We were in the mountains because someone had sold something. It could have been silver, it could have been heirloom gems. It cost money to send your daughters to the mountains. Daughters needed tickets, visas, milk chocolate. Daughters needed amulets. This could be a gold-mounted box inlaid with clear plastic stones, where she, the daughter, could store the only treasure she had ever saved: a milk tooth on which the blood remained.
Our parents were all deluded about the fact that the world had changed and would not go back to being what it once was. They did not believe in a future without the good woman and her duties. They wanted to prepare us for a life where we would care for child and home, where we would stay with one man, no matter who he was, where our hands would repeat the same movements. At the hotel, our hands always repeated the same movements, but this was no place for good women. Our parents had imagined the hotel to exist in another era, that it was in fact possible to send us there, to a place where no time had passed, as if we could slip behind a curtain, where the evil steam of reality could not reach us.
The hotel, which was in an isolated valley, surrounded by black mountains reaching out of dark and humid vegetation, by a small blue lake with icy water, had once been a famous and much-frequented place, a place for wedding parties and winter sports, a place that seemed magnetic, where it lay sparkling red among all the green. No one remembered when the hotel had begun to change, when the place had begun to seem repulsive to all healthy people, as though it possessed an inherent power, something fiendish and sick that kept people away. A suspicion was that a poisonous plant had begun to grow many years before, a plant that was now in full bloom. Someone had planted rosary pea. Someone had planted henbane. There were rumours that it was the nuns. The convent had been where it was for all of human time. The nuns had walked the same paths, drawn water from the same streams, dressed in the same starched cotton. They had lived this life, dipped in formalin and embalmed in the face of eternity, right up until the day the hotel was built.
(For a longer extract see https://granta.com/strega/)
Nordic Council Literature Prize citation
(From https://www.norden.org/en/nominee/joh...)
The publisher
The novel is the latest from the highly impressive Lolli Editions.
Lolli Editions is an independent publisher based at Somerset House in London. We publish radical and formally innovative fiction that challenges existing ideas and breathes new life into the novel form. Our aim is to introduce to the Anglophone world some of the most exciting writers that speak to our shared culture in new and compelling ways, from Europe and beyond.
Antonio Lolli was an itinerant 18th-century composer who lived between Italy, Scandinavia, England, and Russia. Transcending traditional, national schools, Lolli worked from the ethic that artistic thought, and the means through which it can express itself, should be the basis of art, rather than following any predetermined rules.
In particular they have an insight into contemporary cutting-edge Scandinavian literature that makes them one of the most exciting publishers in the UK, and this book (also Thread Ripper) is a brilliant example.
I looked at the mountains and the mountains looked back. Without a doubt an evil place in costume. Above the door, a neon sign started blinking – terminus in fluorescent green. I took the pocket mirror from my summer jacket’s inside pocket. My face was blank. My mouth was still bright red, but I touched up my lipstick anyway. I put the mirror away and gathered my things.
I stood up and got off the train. Here too the station was deserted. In the transit hall hung a clock. I noticed it was an hour off. The clock struck and a mechanical bird emerged from a hatch, as though guided by an invisible hand. Under the clock was a pool of water, which was expanding.
The village was called Strega and it was in the mountains. Later I learned that Strega was a chamber of horrors, where everything had frozen into a beastly shape. I learned that Strega was deep forests bathed in red light. Strega was girls plaiting each other’s hair just so. Girls who carried large stones through the mountains. Girls who bent their necks and stood that way. Strega was a lake and the foliage enclosing it. Strega was a night-light illuminating what was ugliest in the world. Strega was a murdered woman and her belongings. Her suitcase, her hair, her little boxes of liquorice and chocolate.
Strega is Saskia Vogel’s delicious translation of Johanne Lykke Holm’s Swedish novel of the same title.
The original novel was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2021 (alongside novels including Bolla and Is Mother Dead). The judges’ citation I reproduce in full below as it summarises the novel better than I can, but seven words of it sum up the novel perfectly: organically vibrant, gothically threatening, and intensely sensual - or in my words, Thomas Mann meets Anne Serre.
The first person narrator of the novel, Rafa, aged 19, has been sent by her parents to a hotel in the mountains above the (fictitious) Alpine town of Strega, ostensibly as a seasonal worker but more as a boarder at a sort of ossified finishing school (see more at the extract below).
I had always imagined the future otherwise. I was to work the perfume counter at the department store. I was to save my money and keep it in the bank under my own name. I was to move into a flat where other women were also living, free souls with jobs and love lives. But I did as they had asked of me. I liked being an obedient daughter. It felt like being held by a beautiful patent leather collar.
There she finds herself alongside 8 other 19 year old women - Alba, Gaia, Barbara, Cassie, Alexa, Bambi, Paula and Lorca ( We came from various places, but were of the same age and mind) and in the service of three permanent staff: Rex the strictest who teaches them how to serve guests at formal dinners, Toni the receptionist/secretary who looks after their moral education; and Costas the housekeeper and cook.
Although there are in fact no guests to serve at the Hotel Olympic, a relic from a long-buried era, the dinner service is prepared each evening and then returned to the kitchens untouched:
One might imagine a hotel as a place for people, but that wasn’t the Olympic. At the Olympic, the clatter and smells were enclosed in the walls, like a haunting or a flickering memory.
…
It happened that I walked through the woods to consider the hotel from a distance. I looked out over the bitter waters of the Alpine lake. On the other side, the hotel rose out of the forest, red and immovable, a monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge.
The somewhat fevered relationship between the maids, and the portentous echoes of the past, are what gives the novel its “organically vibrant, gothically threatening, and intensely sensual” feel - I found myself reaching for my own description as “Thomas Mann meets Anne Serre” - amplified by the delicious prose.
Our parents had imagined the hotel to exist in another era, that it was in fact possible to send us there, to a place where no time had passed, as if we could slip behind a curtain, where the evil steam of reality could not reach us, but that proves to be a false hope.
Finally the hotel does burst in to life for one night, a local annual festival (with a rather sinister doll at its centre) but when the celebrations and dancing are over, one girl is missing.
A novel that speaks to the violence inflicted on women both directly by men and indirectly via the gendered expectations of society, and a stunning read.
4.5 stars.
An extract
We were nine young women doing seasonal work in the mountains, or nine young women put in safekeeping on the backside of the mountain, or nine young women who watched their hands being put to work, watched them lift starched fabrics to their face only to let them fall to the ground, watched them pour strong wine out of large carafes, like the hands of a statue, right into the parched earth, as though to sate it. We came from various places, but were of the same age and mind. None of us wanted to become a housekeeper, and none of us wanted to become a wife. We had been sent here to earn our keep, to become people of society. We were daughters of hardworking mothers and invisible fathers who slunk along the walls. We were in the mountains because someone had sold something. It could have been silver, it could have been heirloom gems. It cost money to send your daughters to the mountains. Daughters needed tickets, visas, milk chocolate. Daughters needed amulets. This could be a gold-mounted box inlaid with clear plastic stones, where she, the daughter, could store the only treasure she had ever saved: a milk tooth on which the blood remained.
Our parents were all deluded about the fact that the world had changed and would not go back to being what it once was. They did not believe in a future without the good woman and her duties. They wanted to prepare us for a life where we would care for child and home, where we would stay with one man, no matter who he was, where our hands would repeat the same movements. At the hotel, our hands always repeated the same movements, but this was no place for good women. Our parents had imagined the hotel to exist in another era, that it was in fact possible to send us there, to a place where no time had passed, as if we could slip behind a curtain, where the evil steam of reality could not reach us.
The hotel, which was in an isolated valley, surrounded by black mountains reaching out of dark and humid vegetation, by a small blue lake with icy water, had once been a famous and much-frequented place, a place for wedding parties and winter sports, a place that seemed magnetic, where it lay sparkling red among all the green. No one remembered when the hotel had begun to change, when the place had begun to seem repulsive to all healthy people, as though it possessed an inherent power, something fiendish and sick that kept people away. A suspicion was that a poisonous plant had begun to grow many years before, a plant that was now in full bloom. Someone had planted rosary pea. Someone had planted henbane. There were rumours that it was the nuns. The convent had been where it was for all of human time. The nuns had walked the same paths, drawn water from the same streams, dressed in the same starched cotton. They had lived this life, dipped in formalin and embalmed in the face of eternity, right up until the day the hotel was built.
(For a longer extract see https://granta.com/strega/)
Nordic Council Literature Prize citation
Johanne Lykke Holm’s dreamily atmospheric novel depicts a group of girls, or young women, as seasonal workers at a mountain hotel perched above the fictional Italian village of Strega. Every day the rooms are aired out and the sheets are ironed for guests who never arrive. In the common role in which they are being schooled in, the boundaries between the girls begin to blur. Their routines are punctuated by excursions – explorations of an internal and external nature that are organically vibrant, gothically threatening, and intensely sensual. This culminates in a disaster, orchestrated by the same strict superior who oversees their day-to-day work.
In a way, the secluded hotel – reminiscent of the hotels of Thomas Mann and Stephen King – is somewhere beyond the scope of time and the outside world. Instead, it is the norms of the past, or the archetypal timelessness of myth, that are staged here – ceremonies to be seduced by, or to try to escape from. The evil of the hotel can also be seen as that of the world. At the centre of the novel is the vision of a young woman’s death – a motif that has been aestheticised in post-romantic poetry as often as it is in contemporary popular culture – as an eternal rite of passage, as something that always happens/threatens to happen/has already happened: “We knew that a girl’s life could be turned into a crime scene at any moment.”
The author contends with motifs such as these out of boldness, not a lack of originality. And what breathes new life into them is Lykke Holm’s sober hallucinatory prose, which constantly surprises the reader with unexpected word choices and statements. The supernatural permeates the everyday through the stimulating and uninhibited imagery: “A curtain spilled out of an open window like ectoplasm.” In this unusually beautiful novel, Lykke Holm not only conjures up a girls’ world full of holiness and secrecy, but points to the possibility of another, less romantic romance – still enchanted, but stripped of illusion.
(From https://www.norden.org/en/nominee/joh...)
The publisher
The novel is the latest from the highly impressive Lolli Editions.
Lolli Editions is an independent publisher based at Somerset House in London. We publish radical and formally innovative fiction that challenges existing ideas and breathes new life into the novel form. Our aim is to introduce to the Anglophone world some of the most exciting writers that speak to our shared culture in new and compelling ways, from Europe and beyond.
Antonio Lolli was an itinerant 18th-century composer who lived between Italy, Scandinavia, England, and Russia. Transcending traditional, national schools, Lolli worked from the ethic that artistic thought, and the means through which it can express itself, should be the basis of art, rather than following any predetermined rules.
In particular they have an insight into contemporary cutting-edge Scandinavian literature that makes them one of the most exciting publishers in the UK, and this book (also Thread Ripper) is a brilliant example.
August 10, 2022
This one was a bit over my head. It’s carried almost entirely by the force of its symbolism and imagery, and wow is it beautiful imagery, but I also have no idea what just happened.
Thanks to Riverhead Books for providing an arc!
Thanks to Riverhead Books for providing an arc!
April 29, 2024
In English, the Italian word strega means witch, however in Johanne Lykke’s Holm’s novel of the same name it, refers to a fictional town near the Alps. Despite the fact that witches do not feature blantantly, there is a coven like aspect to the novel’s plot.
Rafa is sent to work as a maid at the Olympic Hotel near the village of Strega. There she meets a handful of girls like her from all walks of life, also ready to be trained to be maids. Under the strict matrons this group undergo schedules, rituals and punishments, there’s also moments of fun and mischievousness. There is one problem though.
The hotel is always empty; food is wasted, beds are never slept in and yet Rafa and the gang still have many chores to fulfil.
The only exception is on a day of the dead-like celebration where the hotel holds a party and one of the girls goes missing, presumed murdered. This creates a chain-like series of events which include manic dreams, futile searches and disturbing details.
Although I have not read a lot of horror novels, I am quite acquainted with horror cinema and Strega has a lot of elements from them. Deserted Hotel ( The Shining) , A group of girls bound in some twisted unity (Dario Argento’s Suspiria) , there’s a convent across from the hotel (take your pick but I’m going for Black Narcissus, minus the sex) and due to the excellent translation there is a creeping sense of unease ( I’m going for Hereditary here, a film which ramps tension till the last minute). Like every good horror film, Strega starts innocently enough but the reader knows something bad is going to happen and when it does the payoff is great.
However Strega is not only about creeping paranoia and horror of having someone close in your circle missing. It’s also about gender stereotypes – the cleaning staff are all women – and femicide, as seen by Rafa’s dreams in visions, where she imagines men doing all the evil things.
Over the past few years Lolli have been consistently pushing the boundaries of fiction , the short story and even take experimental fiction to new places and now once again we’ve got an interesting take on horror: this is not a book that is supposed to scare the reader, yet in an obtuse way one feels horror lurking between the lines. Strega is excellent and example at how horror can have a social conscious of sorts.
Rafa is sent to work as a maid at the Olympic Hotel near the village of Strega. There she meets a handful of girls like her from all walks of life, also ready to be trained to be maids. Under the strict matrons this group undergo schedules, rituals and punishments, there’s also moments of fun and mischievousness. There is one problem though.
The hotel is always empty; food is wasted, beds are never slept in and yet Rafa and the gang still have many chores to fulfil.
The only exception is on a day of the dead-like celebration where the hotel holds a party and one of the girls goes missing, presumed murdered. This creates a chain-like series of events which include manic dreams, futile searches and disturbing details.
Although I have not read a lot of horror novels, I am quite acquainted with horror cinema and Strega has a lot of elements from them. Deserted Hotel ( The Shining) , A group of girls bound in some twisted unity (Dario Argento’s Suspiria) , there’s a convent across from the hotel (take your pick but I’m going for Black Narcissus, minus the sex) and due to the excellent translation there is a creeping sense of unease ( I’m going for Hereditary here, a film which ramps tension till the last minute). Like every good horror film, Strega starts innocently enough but the reader knows something bad is going to happen and when it does the payoff is great.
However Strega is not only about creeping paranoia and horror of having someone close in your circle missing. It’s also about gender stereotypes – the cleaning staff are all women – and femicide, as seen by Rafa’s dreams in visions, where she imagines men doing all the evil things.
Over the past few years Lolli have been consistently pushing the boundaries of fiction , the short story and even take experimental fiction to new places and now once again we’ve got an interesting take on horror: this is not a book that is supposed to scare the reader, yet in an obtuse way one feels horror lurking between the lines. Strega is excellent and example at how horror can have a social conscious of sorts.
June 5, 2022
Osobliwa, nieoczywista, napisana pięknym stylem, w którym pomiędzy słowami kryje się mrok.
August 7, 2022
interesting. but not much else.
review to come / 3 or 3.5 stars
--------------
tbr review
i want to be scared but also be reading pretty writing. i feel like this is the right book for that
(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
review to come / 3 or 3.5 stars
--------------
tbr review
i want to be scared but also be reading pretty writing. i feel like this is the right book for that
(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
January 8, 2023
If Florence Welch, Shirley Jackson, and Wes Anderson sat down to write a haunting, evocative, lyrical, atmospheric, and overall perfect novel, this would be it.
January 30, 2021
Actual score: 2.5
I like the story, and at first the writing is beautiful and rich. But after a while it gets too rich and, just as when you eat too much of a very rich cake, you end up feeling overfull and slightly weird.
I like the story, and at first the writing is beautiful and rich. But after a while it gets too rich and, just as when you eat too much of a very rich cake, you end up feeling overfull and slightly weird.
April 9, 2024
Hmmmm...
Still ruminating on this one. The storytelling style was...unusual. The vibes are very gothic and the tone is foreboding. Our POV is from a young woman named, Rafael "Rafa" who finds herself in an isolated village called, Strega.
She joins up with eight other women to work at an empty hotel. Rafa makes fast friends with Alba, they become very close--maybe lovers.
There's something wrong with this place. Guests never arrive. There's something about a convent and nuns who make a strange, green, elixir. One night, men show up at the hotel for a night of dancing and revelry, and the young women are caught up in the dancing and partying. One woman, Cassie, performs for everyone and then disappears.
The prose is intentionally ambiguous and disorienting. I was never quite sure what was happening and my mind was constantly chasing down loose ends.
Very entertaining and visual...I felt like I was watching an A24 fever-dream movie. Recommended for readers who show up for the vibes and don't get hung up on plot details or a lack of deep characterization work. Quick read/short chapters
Still ruminating on this one. The storytelling style was...unusual. The vibes are very gothic and the tone is foreboding. Our POV is from a young woman named, Rafael "Rafa" who finds herself in an isolated village called, Strega.
She joins up with eight other women to work at an empty hotel. Rafa makes fast friends with Alba, they become very close--maybe lovers.
There's something wrong with this place. Guests never arrive. There's something about a convent and nuns who make a strange, green, elixir. One night, men show up at the hotel for a night of dancing and revelry, and the young women are caught up in the dancing and partying. One woman, Cassie, performs for everyone and then disappears.
The prose is intentionally ambiguous and disorienting. I was never quite sure what was happening and my mind was constantly chasing down loose ends.
Very entertaining and visual...I felt like I was watching an A24 fever-dream movie. Recommended for readers who show up for the vibes and don't get hung up on plot details or a lack of deep characterization work. Quick read/short chapters
January 11, 2024
Oniryczne i naturalistyczne. Trochę jak narkotyczny trans, pełen kolorów, odgłosów, natury i kobiecości - w różnych odsłonach i wymiarach.
Nie zdziwię się jeśli po czasie podniosę ocenę, bo to ten typ literatury, z którym można się „nie lubić”, ale nie można go nie docenić
Nie zdziwię się jeśli po czasie podniosę ocenę, bo to ten typ literatury, z którym można się „nie lubić”, ale nie można go nie docenić
September 22, 2025
This book will not be for everyone but it was 110% for me. I bought this book yesterday on a whim, I've never heard of it but the cover and synopsis caught my eye. I was obsessed and began annotating by page one. It's a perfect gothic atmospheric read that is so mundane yet a perfect literary horror.
I don't think I'd openly recommend this to everyone, it's definitely for a specific person, but I am so IN LOVE with this read. It had its full circle moments, it's sapphic, and such a moody read.
It's a novel about the abuse women face from men whether that be physically or with societal expectations and I ATE IT UP.
I don't think I'd openly recommend this to everyone, it's definitely for a specific person, but I am so IN LOVE with this read. It had its full circle moments, it's sapphic, and such a moody read.
It's a novel about the abuse women face from men whether that be physically or with societal expectations and I ATE IT UP.
June 14, 2022
Bardzo oniryczna, ale nie w dobrym tego słowa znaczeniu - raczej jakby ktoś opowiadał ci swój sen, a ty tylko czekasz, aż skończy. Kompletnie się z nią rozminęłam, nie trafiła do mnie żadnym elementem, a wręcz niesamowicie mnie denerwowała - zwłaszcza niezrozumiała dla mnie obsesja bohaterki. Fatalnie mi się ją czytało, wprawiła mnie w zastój, z którego dopiero co wyszłam.
January 19, 2023
The Goodreads description of what happens in this book is not what this book is about really.
Does a girl go work in a hotel with other girls? Yeah.
Does one go missing? Yeah.
Is any of it remotely interesting? Maybe 20 pages of it? That interesting part could’ve been a meh short story but the author spent 150+ pages talking about how moldy the hotel is & the smell of chlorophyll.
It’s a book about nothing. Skip it.
Does a girl go work in a hotel with other girls? Yeah.
Does one go missing? Yeah.
Is any of it remotely interesting? Maybe 20 pages of it? That interesting part could’ve been a meh short story but the author spent 150+ pages talking about how moldy the hotel is & the smell of chlorophyll.
It’s a book about nothing. Skip it.
March 23, 2024
Mocno kobieca, duszna i oniryczna książka, w której kryje się wiele tajemnic i symboli. To się bardziej czuje niż rozumie, klimat balansuje na granicy jawy i snu, a piętrzące się sekrety nie zawsze znajdują rozwiązanie. Styl autorki jest na tyle specyficzny, że łatwo go pokochać lub znienawidzić, mnie szczerze denerwowało ciągle pojawiające się „x pachniało jak y”, co przy dużej częstotliwości oraz małej liczbie stron szybko robi się męczące, ale poza tym czyta się przyjemnie. Nie do końca moja lektura, ale bez wątpienia interesująca. 3,5
July 2, 2022
Pauzo, nie idż tą drogą 🙏
May 8, 2023
Un'atmosfera oscura aleggia in questo libro, la quale si addensa ad ogni pagina mentre il contatto con la realtà si affievolisce. La vicenda si involve in una bolla onirica sostenuta dallo stile sinestetico dell'autrice, che trapunta ogni frase di riferimenti sensoriali spesso inquietanti. Purtroppo, della bolla ha anche la stabilità ed è proprio il modo di scrivere di Lykke Holm a causarne lo scoppio: le frasi telegrafiche si inseguono frettolose in capitoli brevissimi, in un mitragliare sfiancante che ben presto mi è venuto a noia.
Alle parole non viene mai data la possibilità di prendere fiato e, quindi, di depositarsi.
Forse, se la trama avesse una qualche sostanza, ciò potrebbe anche risultare efficace nel suscitare spaesamento e straniamento. Purtroppo, non è così: a fare una "storia" non bastano un colpo di scena centrale che si è fatto attendere troppo e che viene lasciato all'interpretazione, né un incontro forse reale forse simbolico che introduce un trip bislacco. E, di certo, non basta la perculata del finale, che vorrebbe essere qualcosa di simile alla trottola di Inception, pur non avendo nulla alle spalle a motivarne il sovraccarico di enfasi che le viene addossato.
Una volta, nello studio di un tatuatore, ho visto il teschio di un rapace sospeso su un ciocco di legno con un filo di ferro tinto di nero. La mia testa ha associato spesso questa composizione al romanzo di Lykke Holm: qualcosa di ricercatamente inquietante ma inconsistente, che si vuole far passare per opera di grand'arte.
Bastano, poi, un gruppo di donne isolate e un non approfondito mostro maschile a scomodare scrittrici femministe di peso negli strilli? Per me, forse no.
[È il secondo libro della cinquina dello Strega Europeo che leggo - o almeno inizio - e mi lascia tiepido. Sono io il problema?]
Alle parole non viene mai data la possibilità di prendere fiato e, quindi, di depositarsi.
Forse, se la trama avesse una qualche sostanza, ciò potrebbe anche risultare efficace nel suscitare spaesamento e straniamento. Purtroppo, non è così: a fare una "storia" non bastano un colpo di scena centrale che si è fatto attendere troppo e che viene lasciato all'interpretazione, né un incontro forse reale forse simbolico che introduce un trip bislacco. E, di certo, non basta la perculata del finale, che vorrebbe essere qualcosa di simile alla trottola di Inception, pur non avendo nulla alle spalle a motivarne il sovraccarico di enfasi che le viene addossato.
Una volta, nello studio di un tatuatore, ho visto il teschio di un rapace sospeso su un ciocco di legno con un filo di ferro tinto di nero. La mia testa ha associato spesso questa composizione al romanzo di Lykke Holm: qualcosa di ricercatamente inquietante ma inconsistente, che si vuole far passare per opera di grand'arte.
Bastano, poi, un gruppo di donne isolate e un non approfondito mostro maschile a scomodare scrittrici femministe di peso negli strilli? Per me, forse no.
[È il secondo libro della cinquina dello Strega Europeo che leggo - o almeno inizio - e mi lascia tiepido. Sono io il problema?]
January 7, 2024
Strega is flowery, bizarre, and inconsequential.
Great premise, but the execution is only worth it if you’re a reader who likes vivid imagery and good writing at the expense of everything else.
If you liked Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh you may enjoy this.
Great premise, but the execution is only worth it if you’re a reader who likes vivid imagery and good writing at the expense of everything else.
If you liked Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh you may enjoy this.
August 29, 2022
Chciałam dać 3,5, ale takiego popisu kunsztu literackiego mie czytałam od czasów „Lolity”.
Ta historia to lepki surrealizm i oniryzm, piękne słowa wabiące zapachem ziół i ściekające po brodzie kroplami trucizny, którą przed momentem z namaszczeniem napoiła nas autorka (i tłumaczka!). Mam dreszcze na myśl o tej dusznej, wymykającej się wszelkim schematom prozie pełnej lęku, zniewolenia i śmierci. „Strega” to dla mnie najlepszy przykład nieoczywistej, a przez to tak niepokojącej powieści grozy.
Właśnie w trakcie pisania tej opinii zmieniłam ocenę na 5. No nie mogę, po prostu nie mogę tej książki nie docenić na każdej płaszczyźnie! I co, że się w niej gubiłam? Przecież to powieść-labirynt, wymykającą się zdolnościom poznawczym mara szaleńca.
Ta historia to lepki surrealizm i oniryzm, piękne słowa wabiące zapachem ziół i ściekające po brodzie kroplami trucizny, którą przed momentem z namaszczeniem napoiła nas autorka (i tłumaczka!). Mam dreszcze na myśl o tej dusznej, wymykającej się wszelkim schematom prozie pełnej lęku, zniewolenia i śmierci. „Strega” to dla mnie najlepszy przykład nieoczywistej, a przez to tak niepokojącej powieści grozy.
Właśnie w trakcie pisania tej opinii zmieniłam ocenę na 5. No nie mogę, po prostu nie mogę tej książki nie docenić na każdej płaszczyźnie! I co, że się w niej gubiłam? Przecież to powieść-labirynt, wymykającą się zdolnościom poznawczym mara szaleńca.
December 29, 2022
Some girls at a hotel no one visits and then they leave idk
January 21, 2023
Muszę się wstrzymać z oceną, bo czuję się jakbym zeszła z kołowrotka i nie ogarniam bazy na ten moment😅 jedno słowo, które mi przychodzi do głowy, by opisać tę powieść to psychodeliczna👀
September 16, 2021
Nine young women meet quite by chance at a majestic mountain hotel where they work, although there are almost never any guests there. Nevertheless, they learn all of the duties associated with keeping the large, practically empty house spotlessly clean, preparing and serving meals and adhere to a strict discipline.
Their story is told in a prose that approaches poetry and the surreal. It is another astonishing debut.
Their story is told in a prose that approaches poetry and the surreal. It is another astonishing debut.
August 9, 2024
new cult book just got recommended to you
February 7, 2024
Dziwna, duszna, mackowata opowieść. Motorem eksploratywnym niewątpliwie jest w niej język - przekazujący zapachy, smaki, faktury i relatywizmy barwne; niekiedy wplątany we własną, jednoobrotową oś. Niestety, zastawia pułapki. Czekanie. Nabieranie się. Niepokojenie. Cierpliwe obrastanie w nadzieję na Coś Wielkiego. I ja, naiwna, obrosłam. A wielkość "Stregi" tkwi w jej subtelnym szaleństwie, w mroku kwitnącej, kobieco-kobiecej erotyki, w intrydze tęsknoty. To też w zasadzie, wbrew pozorom, smutna książka. Tykająca bomba, która kończy swój rytm ciszą.
August 20, 2022
I try to read a few novels in Swedish every year, and Strega was perhaps not the easiest choice, as it builds on quiet yet ominous atmosphere through vivid and often surprising imagery. I think I did alright, but probably missed some poetic nuances due to not being completely fluent in the language. The novel is set at an Alpine hotel, the milieu and the slowly unfolding events evoking a Gothic atmosphere. There is something timeless in the setting echoing Thomas Mann, but the concerns of the story have more to do with gendered expectations, I’d say. This would be a worthy revisit in English or Finnish at a later time, thus for now a relatively conservative rating.
February 2, 2023
Do końca miałam nadzieję, że uda mi się z niej wynieść więcej i że jednak mi się choć trochę spodoba. Cóż.
Read
August 10, 2023Strega is a Swedish feminist novel that defies genre. Refusing to be boxed in, this short novel is part gothic, part horror, part thriller. Most importantly, it’s a biting exploration of the cost of womanhood.
Our protagonist, Rafa, is at the intersection between girlhood and adulthood, and she is spending a season working at a remote hotel in the mountains, beside a lake and small town: the titular Strega.
For the novel’s first half, Rafa befriends the other eight girls, particularly one girl named Alba. The nine of them learn their roles, bond, learn the hotel and its staff, and wait for the guests to arrive.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/intersectiona...
Our protagonist, Rafa, is at the intersection between girlhood and adulthood, and she is spending a season working at a remote hotel in the mountains, beside a lake and small town: the titular Strega.
For the novel’s first half, Rafa befriends the other eight girls, particularly one girl named Alba. The nine of them learn their roles, bond, learn the hotel and its staff, and wait for the guests to arrive.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/intersectiona...
January 31, 2023
The prose was absolutely stunning, Virginia Woolfesque with its ability to weave gently in and out of consciousness. I applaud the beauty of the writing.
But this is a book I would have written an essay about at university, something I would have unpicked with a pencil, magnifying glass and stack of library books. I no longer want books that hide their meanings behind illusive shrouds and lose me in their prose. I want texture, plot, character, excitement.
But it really was beautiful - ethereal even - just not something I want to rave about.
But this is a book I would have written an essay about at university, something I would have unpicked with a pencil, magnifying glass and stack of library books. I no longer want books that hide their meanings behind illusive shrouds and lose me in their prose. I want texture, plot, character, excitement.
But it really was beautiful - ethereal even - just not something I want to rave about.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,067 reviews