The Antarctica of love

Stridsberg (Valerie) opens this ruminative, heartrending novel with the murder of its narrator, 24-year-old Kristina. A sex worker addicted to heroin who "never wanted to be saved," she tells her story from the solitary nothingness of the afterlife, doling out how she came to be with the man who rapes, strangles, and dismembers her. Kristina watches her mother, Raksha, grieve her death and reconcile briefly with her father, Ivan. She recounts how her four-year-old brother's drowning, when she was 11, devastated the family, and she remembers her marriage to Shane, which offered a promise of fulfillment but was ultimately sunk by their shared addiction to heroin. Their son, Valle, was put in foster care by the state, leading Kristina to surrender their daughter, Solveig, to social services at birth. Kristina repeatedly returns to her murder, adding overwhelmingly grievous details. Passages about her struggle to stay clean while pregnant with Solveig and about Valle's struggle to adapt to the foster system, however, are sublime ("I think Solveig was trying to hide away from us in there, and I can understand why, we had nothing to offer her on the other side"). Despite the bleak story, readers will be moved by the dead narrator's white-knuckled grip on life. (Oct.)

A young Swedish woman who has been brutally murdered spends her afterlife looking down on the Earth she has left behind. Kristina is only 24 when she dies. She leaves behind her estranged parents, Raksha and Ivan, her dying husband, Shane, and her two children, Valle and Solveig, the elder taken by the state when he was 3 and the younger given up at birth to an adoptive family. Kristina also leaves behind the heroin addiction that gave her days immediate purpose and her murderer, an unnamed man who remembers her with more specific passion than anyone else in her abbreviated life. From her formless position in the afterlife, Kristina looks in on the people she left behind, both as their lives continue and as they existed in the significant moments she revisits as she drifts through a suddenly nonlinear experience of time. Yet, as cruel as the facts of Kristina's life were--suffused with abandonment, abuse, sorrow, and death--the way she sees the world as it progresses without her is articulated with a kind of pragmatic hope. Nothing will change the facts of death or the bleakness that often precedes it, but what Kristina sees in Raksha as she struggles to live on as the mother of a murdered child; in Valle as he fights his own demons, so similar to his mother's; in Solveig as she grows into the adult Kristina never had the chance to become are as real as the wasteland that spreads inside the mind of the murderer who chose Kristina to kill precisely because she seemed unafraid to die. In fragmented sections that echo with longing, loss, unutterable sorrow, and yet also a species of joy and light, Stridsberg explores the mind of a woman who gave up her life long before it was taken from her. There is a familiar tradition of dead-girl media in which "the only person of interest…is the murderer, and [the victim] is just a brief glimpse, a blur of green body, and then she is gone, out of the picture, disappearing into the depths of nothingness whence she came." This book is the antidote to that kind of brutal anonymizing--a novel in which both the wicked and the sublime are scrutinized with the same care by the watchful eyes of the dead. A stunning book which paints the portrait of a broken life with honesty and compassion. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.