Already the same year as "Samlade verk" gave Lydia Sandgren the August Prize, 2020, the seed to the next novel appeared. Five years later, she has written another brick, which also contains a kind of mystery.
I think an idea is good when it has something of a puzzle in it: how has it become like this? It becomes an object for knowledge-seeking, says Lydia Sandgren.
In the book, the author Kalle is to write his difficult second novel. But the enigmatic Alice Viera asks him to write a biography about her deceased husband, the renowned conductor Enzo Viera. At the same time, Lydia Sandgren wanted to write about how Kalle instead becomes more and more fascinated by Alice's story.
She is the one that no one is interested in. She does not have an outstanding life and is not an exceptional talent, she could really disappear into the mists of history, says Lydia Sandgren.
Raises education
Alice is just one in the book's wide range of characters. The reader meets her in Rome and in a collective in the 70s, where she surrounds herself with students who want to change the world. The men who lay out the text about big and small things get to take up a lot of space. But for Lydia Sandgren, Alice is the novel's center:
I think of her as perhaps the real conductor of this story.
Alice falls in love to avoid finding her own direction. The book is about leaving youth and becoming independent, according to Lydia Sandgren. The novel's most important puzzles are perhaps those that exist in everyone's life, she thinks.
Why do people do what they do and why do things go to hell? Such puzzles we all have, which one cannot understand and can become crazy trying to understand.
Imperfect
Lydia Sandgren herself is spurred on by constantly learning more. She advocates for education - but also criticizes institutions that do not cultivate their own thinking.
The book is critical of a contemporary university that has been watered down to become a bureaucratic formula machine, where intellectual thinking and broad education have a subordinate or almost negligible significance.
She appreciates the world of classical music, which plays a major role in the book, because classical musicians are always subject to someone who knows more - and must strive further. She approaches writing in the same way, and becomes "constantly exposed to her imperfection".
At the same time, she is happy to have readers who have been waiting for her book.
It overshadows the anguish of me possibly disappointing them.
Elin Swedenmark/TT
Fact: Lydia Sandgren
TT
Born: 1987
Lives: Johanneberg, Gothenburg
Family: Husband and a 3-year-old son.
Background: Educated psychologist. Made her debut in 2020 with "Samlade verk" which was awarded the August Prize. Is now a full-time author.
Literary inspiration: "I am inspired by almost everything I read, to read widely and a lot."
Plans: "Now the next novel is on the go, it appeared uninvited. I got one of those ideas that you get every other year in the spring, so we'll see what it develops into. Some kind of puzzle, I think it will be, there must be something I need to understand."
