A review by booklywookly
Hunter in Huskvarna by Sara Stridsberg

4.0

An assorted box of eclectic pessimism gift wrapped in rainbow colored depression, left at the snowy entranceway to your cold cold stone cold heart. Is that a genre? Coz this is that. 

11 short stories, mostly set in Sweden, written in a very fairy tale-esque style - a whimsical blend of reality and fantasy, illuminating strange and mundane, balancing the ethereal and the visceral, and then gut punching you with a sense of wonder, leaving you with this weird nostalgia for something you never had. Time flows through these narratives like water, ebbing and flowing, revealing hidden depths, and coming to a screeching halt. 

Throughout the collection, the theme of longing resonates. The stories explore the longing for escape from prescribed lives, the pull of an undiscovered future, this urge to runaway from home in search for a place that feels like home. 

The surroundings and the atmosphere play such a huge role, for me they were the bigger characters than the more traditional sense of characters. Like religion, which has a very strong and commanding presence in the background throughout the book. Parents, who would have been a quintessential presence (right?), they are almost non existent or negligent of their parental obligations. On the other hand, the place of dwelling - a ghost town, maximum security prison, spooky forests, the inside of a rotting whale’s belly - in itself becomes a character on its own. An in-between space where past and future intersect. Where our characters inhabit a space between reality and dreams, mundane and the magical. Where their lives are touched by the inexplicable, the surreal, and the hauntingly beautiful. Yet where the ordinary remains astoundingly frustratingly suffocatingly ordinary.

Loved this book. Take your time with each story. This isn’t the one to be rushed through.