The debut is almost shockingly true to form
Published at 04:00
“Anatomy of the heart” by Monica Rosenberg
The title of Monica Rosenberg’s debut book is really lousy. “Anatomy of the heart” sounds like a generic pop album you find on Spotify, suspiciously AI-generated. Written by an upper-middle-aged nurse, the book is as thin as a palette knife and mysteriously divided into three sections with Roman numerals. I foresee a collection of poems where the language is not up to par and a publisher who gleefully exclaims “You might be able to turn it into short stories”. Bad idea!
But guess how wrong I am. “Anatomy of the heart” turns out to be an almost shocking debut. The short stories often revolve around single parents seen through the eyes of the child. The characters are cast out in the world, wonderfully lonely, sadly reflecting on time. Rosenberg writes a prose in which a lot of concreteness is stripped away: A tree is just a “tree”, the city is called “staden”; as if we were in a prototype. It’s a risky approach, the text risks becoming bland and elevated at the same time – like pale watercolor in a gold frame. But Rosenberg is unusually sure-handed: She turns down a certain type of detail to highlight others.
Take the short story “The Child” which depicts a failed relationship from the woman’s perspective. Like many others, the couple tries to save their love by getting pregnant, but when the child is born, she falls into postpartum depression and the partner leaves. It gets so bad that “the whites” visit the home – and as a reader, you get hooked. “The whites” appears as a strangely vague description of someone who worked as a nurse.
But what Rosenberg is doing, it seems to me, is saying: “Ignore the depression and the hospital, fix your eyes on this old-fashioned pram with bumpy wheels patiently being pulled through the slush.” Because the depression is out of sight, the mother feeds the baby mashed potatoes. Then comes the wistfully beautiful ending where we understand that she has been temporarily posted exactly where she should be. However, we don’t get to know how the mother fares in the end – and I suspect that the author wants to show precisely that there is no final reckoning for a human life.
Here’s how to do it Rosenberg recurring. In the short story “Magnetism”, which depicts a war, she lets the reader fix their eyes on a pair of siblings’ travel chess whose magnets hold the pieces in place when the bombs fall. Isn’t it amazing how a skilled writer can make us watch chess pieces while reinforced concrete is crashing in the background! Perhaps a metaphor for the fact that we all have an inner room with strict rules, where we can hibernate? In the short story “Tulpanhjärtat” a boy is delighted with a long-awaited little brother. But the baby turns blue, his heart pumps oxygen-free blood through his body. Then the strange thing happens: It’s summer – and the family is sitting under a blue sky with juice in the baby bottle. The Chekhovian rifle is hung back – fully loaded.
I become childish fond of the way Rosenberg makes us stare at his faded, easily recognizable subjects. And then suddenly we realize that the artist painted the important motifs next to it, on the wall. What is this if not the meaning of literature? To jolt us out of our automated way of seeing, during which things wither away. But not to take us to an alien world, but closer to our own. To show that a “stone” is actually a stone, as a famous Russian formalist put it.
When I close “Anatomy of the Heart” it strikes me that today’s best debutantes are strikingly often short story writers. Isak Grondahls “Symptom”, Elika Lagerlöfs “The last castrate” and Martin Kalins “The guests” are books that this brilliant debut joins. Perhaps you can see it as a counter-movement to the storytellification of literature, where simple stories are smeared in giant format. But I also think it’s about something else. We live in a terrible time with climate change and looming major wars. These short stories lower the thunderous background noise, to show that life in the midst of all the devastation is still rare.
Rasmus Landström is Aftonbladet’s literature editor.
SHORT STORIES
» Anatomy of the heart
Monica Rosenberg
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