Review: The Details by Ia Genberg
The narrator of this novel makes discoveries about people from her past and about her past selves even as she writes
While scanning the International Booker list for my next read, The Details caught my eye. The plot promises an intense story; the unnamed narrator, in the grip of an intense fever, recounts her relationships with four different people. My mind immediately conjured up ways in which the fever might impinge upon the narration of the novel. I anticipated intense love stories with a roller coaster of emotions, the ups and downs mirroring the feverish state. Author Ia Genberg, perhaps deeply aware of these expectations, has decided to go the other way.
The plot of The Details, or lack thereof, hinges on the details rather than the narration of events. The narrator is observant; her personality is not revealed through the writer’s description but rather in the her own description of others. Her voice paints the people around her, and if the reader pays attention, they will notice that her personality ricochets off the people she is describing. Readers get to know her in bits and pieces; her gaze is never impersonal and through her very gentle portrayal of others, we understand her.
Genberg’s narrator is not merely etching out character sketches. It is evident that even during the process of writing, she is making discoveries about people from her past and about her past selves. Demonstrating a rare ability in the span of this small novel, the Swedish author nudges readers through powerful prose that is both evocative and lucid. On other occasions, she snatches the carpet from beneath the reader’s feet without prior intimation.
In the first account, Johanna (the narrator’s ex-partner) is presented as encouraging, loving, caring, and ambitious. Later, the tone changes with the narrator finding covert intentions behind Johanna’s subtle acts, like gift-giving; she even notices how Johanna is capable of swiftly changing her emotions. “At some point, probably right after it ended, 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”. Later, she acknowledges that her fever might have caused the shift in her gaze.
The characterization of the narrator as an unreliable one seems almost too easy. She is aware that the true nature of things remains elusive. The only way the world reveals itself to us is through the details, which require an eye to catch them and the patience to not demand grand narratives or total truths. Interpersonal relationships have multiple subjectivities.
Genberg fosters an intimate personal relationship with her readers through her evocative prose. Her writing is highly accessible and capable of evoking strong emotions. Some lines feel like an epiphany. Consider this: “I drifted between genres, imitated other writers and tried to wrestle with what I wrestle with: the stroll of the thought from head onto the paper”. This long sentence has a beautiful simplicity at its heart and anyone who engages in creative labour will be caught off guard by this visceral admission.
Genberg’s simplicity makes her work irresistible. This doesn’t mean her material doesn’t have unique complexities or nuance; just that her gaze penetrates the daily, mundane, and monotonous, giving voice to what cannot be explained in a simple yet profound way.
As the narrator dissects the four impactful relationships from her past, her attention is never on herself. It is about the others only. Genberg’s writing has the covert signature of the feminine gaze. She holds parallel truths, multiple emotions, and competing claims without letting the narrative descend into chaos. She is as empathetic as her narrator is. The characters from the narrator’s past are volatile and unstable if seen through a contemporary lens. But there is never any attempt to pathologize their idiosyncrasies; only an attempt to understand them and the events.
Here’s her description of a former roommate: “Today Nikki would likely have been given some type of diagnosis for her mental instability, but in the era when I knew her... it was up to each and every one to do their best to understand themselves and others.” Beyond the charm of binary oppositions, she sees Nikki as ‘an ocean of feelings’, burdened with nuances and gradients, “as if the full cast of Greek gods and all the emotions and states they represented had been crammed in behind her eyelids.” These simple yet cogent lines show that Genberg is not interested in theatrics; a distinct drama unfolds in the novel.
In the third account, the narrator takes us right to the beginning of the new millennium: the year 2000. An electrifying mystery surrounded the year with all the zeros, as if the other side of this new era promised the characters alternate selves and realities. As we know, the Y2K bug turned into a hoax, as did fantasies of rebirth. The new millennium was no gift. As this particular realisation creeps up on the reader, the futility of grand narratives is laid bare. Everything remains the same, and the details never escape us, nor do they escape the narrator.
She recounts: “We had the entirety of the twentieth century behind us and an unknown millennium in front of us, an epic split, and we still gave ourselves to small things, corrupt feelings. It is only in moments where we liberate ourselves to truly feel that our senses are forced wide open.” And this is what happens in the narrator’s passionate love affair with Alejandro. She disappears inside the desire she feels for him. Even though the relationship is extremely short-lived, it provides her with a chance for authenticity. She recounts it as: “to be permitted to wreck my life in peace once more”.
The character that hit me the most is Brigette, the strongest window through which to look into the narrator. The true nature of their relationship cannot be revealed here for fear of spoilers. Brigette’s anxiety parallels our narrator’s patient gaze. The latter understands the former by deeply and silently observing her. Brigette hides a painful secret, the trauma buried deep within manifests as neurotic anxiety. “She would sit on a flat rock with her face in the sun, and I’d notice that she didn’t close her eyes for more than a few seconds at a time before looking up, squinting quickly checking the surrounding, apparently involuntarily, as if compelled by something inside of her. She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things got out of hand.”
Ia Genberg’s description of pain, pleasure, and everything in between demands that the reader shun their expectations. There is no climax, no burning point. The fever did, in the end, impinge on the form. The whole of The Details feels like a fever dream with the narrator’s gaze inexorably ending up changing the reader.
Rutba Iqbal is a writer based in Delhi. She writes on books, art, culture, and movies.