“We live so many lives within our lives – smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up – and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.”
“With time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger.”
The Details by Ia Genberg is a very compelling, subtle and nuanced reflection on the meaning of relationships with others, memories of those who have departed our life, connection between the objects and memories, boundaries between our perception of the past, memories and how one remembers people who are no longer present in one’s life, how we measure people we meet against those we once knew, how we remember people who touched our lives, whether we should hold on to the memories and whether our memories of those who departed are somehow too polished due to the passage of time?
Told in the portraits of four people present at different stage in the unnamed narrator’s life, The Details is a portrayal of a singular life presented through the lenses of the lives of people who entered the narrator’s life at some point but are no longer part of it. Depiction of these four characters remains close to everyday life and in some way The Details constitutes an ode to the ordinariness.
The Details is a quiet, meditative book, yet there is something profound in the depiction of the relationships with these four individuals and how we get to understand the character of the narrator and how these people shaped her life.
These stories explore different kinds of love the narrator encounters throughout her life: romantic love like in her relationship with Johanna, platonic love with Niki, love for her parents like her mother, Brigitte., love for people who “just blow through our life” like Alejandro.
It appears that the conversation was the foundation of the narrator’s most impactful relationships.
The narrator fondly remembers her time with Niki who “touched [her] heart (….) like a soulmate.”
“Niki and I were just as happy to spend an entire Friday night with tea, or water, or nothing at all, since what drew us together – and which would from that point on constitute the core of all my relationships – was conversation: a multi-year long dialogue (…).”
Niki seems to hold the most special place in the narrator’s heart even years after Niki disappeared from her life:
“Today, several decades later, separated from that time by a new millennium and a new kind of world, I can still understand that scream, perhaps more so than ever, that yearning for closeness and getting to the heart of it all. “
In a similar vein the narrator reflects on her relationship with Alejandro:
“Early on in our friendship we’d explored the possibility that we were in love, but those feelings had soon subsided and made space for something much more enduring, a multi-year conversation (…), a true love without claim to ownership, a bracing pact in the face of every new circumstance in our respective lives.”
When it comes to the narrator’s relationship with Johanna, she recalls life with her as:
“the conversations we had, the place on Earth we shared. I would never again be as sure of anyone as I was of her. (….) We installed ourselves in each other in a manner that only happens with people who are certain of a long life together (…). We merged our books and belongings without difference or distinction (…).”
The relationship with Johanna appears to be the one where the narrator learns about those who appear to be in “full control” and come across as mature but at the same time there is an inhuman bent to them and the way they treat others. This relationship is deemed strong but ultimately it ends in less than one week which leaves the narrator abandoned, and emotionally paralysed.
“Life, in Johanna’s world, was lived in one direction, and that direction was forward, only forward. It’s how we differed from each other.”
Genberg’s utilises non-linear narrative, there is no chronology – the narrator remembers people not by information or dates but by moments spent with others, small details such as objects: books or vinyl associated with people who once were part of her daily life. The narrator herself emerges through depiction of her experiences with others. At some point when the narrator walks through the cemetery notices that chronology is no significant, but the details are. Every detail is dense with meaning. We become ourselves through the relationships with those important people in our lives – their stories and our connection to them constitute us as the whole. We carry the traces of people “we rub up against” – they have impact on the self.
The narrator remembers people often through the literary references and books they read or shared together.
“Literature was our favourite game. Johanna and I introduced each other to authors and themes, to eras and regions and singular works, to older books and contemporary books and books of different genres. We had similar tastes but opinions divergent enough to make our discussions interesting. There were certain things we didn’t agree on (Oates, Bukowski), other that moved us both unmoved (Gordimer, fantasy), and some we both loved (Klaus Oestergren, Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon trilogy, Lessing). I could tell how she felt about a book based on how fast she worked her way through it.“
The narrator’s relationship with Johanna has a special connection to The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster which ‘moved [the narrator] in a way [she] has never understood, and it is also why [she] has sought it out today, almost twenty-years later” when travelling to New York City standing in front of the house of Paul Auster.
“Some books remain in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.”
The narrator remembers fondly moments when Niki read from The Marsh King’s Daughter – the book that the narrator is reluctant to borrow to anyone these days because of a special place that it holds in her memories.
“It’s strange that more than thirty years later I’m still able to perfectly recall that blue-lacquered shelf (…) and the cover of The Man Without Qualities. The novel has been in my possession multiple times over the course of my life, but it always gets lost, whether in a break-up or by someone borrowing it and not returning it. (…) It is turned into one of those books you own without ever reading, a phenomenon you’ll come across in most people homes: an assurance for tomorrow, a future where you’ll have time to read.”
Across all four stories there are multiple references to the turn of the millennium, the narrator shares the excitement people felt in the anticipation for a new era which as it turned out was disproportionate once the new millennium began. The idea that the unwanted memories would disappear did not come to fruition, people “still gave [themselves] to small things, corrupt feelings”.
When reminiscing about her relationship with Alejandro, the narrator recalls Alejandro’s family history which was marred with the symbols of the 20th century such as massacres in Sobibor during WWII and Pinochet regime in Chile during the 1970s.
As we immerse ourselves in the portraits of these four characters, we witness the depiction of changing times over the course of many decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century with all technological developments which impacted the way in which people maintain their relationships and socialise.
In the portraits of the narrator’s relationships with Niki and Brigitte, we also observe how the understanding of psychology, depression, anxiety and mental health has changed over the recent decades.
“Today Niki would likely have been given some type of diagnosis for her mental instability.”
During the times of Brigitte and Niki’s friendship, the awareness of mental health and support for mental health challenges was abysmal but as the narrator reflects these days Niki would hopefully receive more help.
“[Niki] was s an ocean of feelings, with more gradients and nuances than she could handle (…) scared of being abandoned (…) catastrophically afraid and catastrophically incapable of handling that feeling (….), sort of alone in her worldview but still so full of conviction and ardour. (…) this was how she related to other people, that everything was black or white, love or hate, heaven or hell, nothing in between.”
From the portrait of Brigitte, we learn about her life, mental scars, which added to her lifelong anxiety, and withdrawn personality. Brigitte “was open, vulnerable, anticipating new catastrophes, already worried about new catastrophes, already aware of what another catastrophe might do to her. (…) [[Anxiety] was one with her, this survival mechanism that became her lifelong shield and disability, a minor function run amok. (…) Brigitte was elsewhere, somewhere inside herself. (…) Like anyone with intense anxiety, she was perpetually floating towards the surface, consumed with keeping the world in place and looking out for potential dangers. Her anxiety kept her living at surface level. (…) To adapt and blend in, to blend in so much that she disappeared. (…) She adapted to such a degree that what defined her personality was an absence of personality. (…) Her avoidant character became obvious to see, and I think people viewed her as uninteresting and bland. (…) There was only anxiety, vibrating and surface-level, exacting and constant, the only aspect of Brigitte that was visible to others. (…) She avoided offence and conflict at every cost.”
The narrator reflected on Brigitte’s mental health struggles years later:
“Many years later I started working at an inpatient psychiatric clinic in Stockholm, and at this job I met people who reminded me of Brigitte. The things they had been subjected to lingered in me long me past the end of my shifts, and their anxiety was like hers, an anxiety that does not wax and wane but endures in the form of a tension inside everything. Theirs is not laughter but anxious laughter, anxious joy, anxious walking, an anxious way of talking.”
The four portraits also show the change in the perception of social status and its meaning in person’s search for belonging and its impact on forging relationships with people from various social backgrounds. This is particularly visible in the narrator’s relationship with Johanna:
“For me (…) every expense required a sacrifice elsewhere in the budget. (….) My gifts to her, the act of giving, left me feeling in adequate, I couldn’t help but register their cost and how relatively few of them there were. I was (….) suddenly conscious of money and what my lack of inherited taste could mean. (…) There might have been a certain violence to the way she gifted, a triumphant supremacy that was affirmed each time she slid a rectangular box across the table (…). It was a kind of generosity that cost her nothing but which she knew I’d never be able to match, and which therefore gave her a secret upper hand. (…) I asked myself if this was what structural violence looked like to unconsciously teach someone about gifts, where to buy them, how to deliver them. To teach someone that you’re not supposed to buy the cheapest pair of pants, ready-made pesto, computer, or frying pan like I’d always done.“
In the narrator’s relationship with Brigitte, we observe changes in the social landscape occurring throughout the second half of the 20th century. We learn how in her youth during the 1950s and 1960s Brigitte’s desire to be her own person was reserved only for the more fortunate when it comes to the position within the society. In order to secure a better future for herself she needed to lean on something or someone – a man, the narrator’s father.
We see that the narrator’s father, the son of the single mother, a cleaner could be debating the sons of architects or teachers, that they shared the space on equal terms starting in the 1970s and 1980s while his mother and the narrator’s grandmother would still avoid entering the lift with someone of a so-called higher status in the earlier half of the 20th century.
The Details moved me deeply. Writing is nuanced veiled in melancholy. I highly recommend this book. It is also worth mentioning that this is one of the long listed titles for the International Booker Prize which I hope more people have an opportunity to read.