Just a week to go. And then a leap across the earth to my other life. This morning I read interviews with two Croatian authors, Slavenka Drakulic and Dubravka Ugresic. Both live in excile, Drakulic divides her time between Vienna and Stockholm and a new home in Istria, Ugresic lives in Amsterdam. I admire these two women immensely. Not for their writing – I don’t know it – but for their ability to make a full life out of their imposed excile. I have chosen mine and still struggle to make it a coherent whole. Or perhaps this is why. I have a choice, so I constantly consider my situation instead of immersing myself in my life, such as it is. Drakulic says in the interview that she doesn’t mind the fact that she is not properly assimilated in any of the communities where she lives. ‘I like being on the fringe,’ she says. ‘Everything is more clearly observed from there.’ And Ugresic says: At this stage in my life (she is sixty) I am often content with being like an island. There is much that I escape. I don’t understand what people talk about on the bus, in shops, at the cafe, and I don’t need to respond, or take any responsbility. It is actually rather nice.’

I wish I could learn to apply such a perspective. Some days I believe I can. Yesterday was such a day. I spent hours wandering the streets in the rain, watching the city and the people who live here. It didn’t matter that I was on my own. I thought I saw it more clearly than ever. But then today, again I am overcome by a sense of dislodgement and loneliness. A longing to belong. To be inside.

Katarina Kyrka, Stockholm

When do things decide to leave our lives? And where do they go? Things that were once central to us that we suddenly realise are not there anymore. Where are they?

When I was a small child I kept all my treasures in a square box. Just as I don’t know when it left my life, I have no idea where it came from, and exactly when. I don’t think it was a gift, more like something handed down to me from someone else. It was approximately ten by ten centimetres and five centimetres high. The outside was covered in  a rather unattractive olive coloured material with little specks of a darker colour. If I let my hand run over the lid I could feel the rough texture of the surface. It lived in the small wardrobe in the room that I shared with my brother. The narrow space was mine only. A true luxury and I think a privilege allowed me as the older sister.

The box had no lock and no proper hinges. It looked a little like a sewing box – which it might have been in a previous life. It was an unsafe place for treasures. But at that time I lived in a safe world and my treasures were safe in the box. It contained my collection of film star pictures. My favourites were Pier Angeli (whatever was she famous for I never knew), Tony Curtis, Gina Lollobrigida and Brigitte Bardot. And then there were the gifts that Klaus, my first boyfriend, had presented me: a set of four minute dices that felt warm to the touch – I only discovered much later that they were made from ivory – and large book marks with pictures of Jesus and pink roses. My golden bracelet with little charms. My milk teeth… Important treasures.

It bothers me that it is only recently that I have thought about my box and wondered when it left my life. When did I lose it? What happened to it? I have no memory of it breaking. Or being consciously discarded. Why did I not take it with me when I left home?  One day it just wasn’t there. And of the contents only the dices remain. Three of them.

Sonata for Miriam has been nominated for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Award. My sincere gratitude to the New Zealand libraries who chose my novel! See the complete list here: IMPAC Dublin Award

A miracle has happened in Norway. ‘La meg synge deg stille sanger’ (Let me sing you gentle songs), my first novel, topped the national charts for months and for a time after the release of the second novel, ‘Taushetens konsekvenser’ (The consequence of silence) both books featured among the top ten.
It seems my novels have landed in the very best hands in Norway: a wonderful publisher, Vigmostad & Björke, wonderful book sellers and equally perceptive and wonderful readers.
The reviews have been extraordinary. One of the latest is by Finn Stenstad for Tönsberg Blad:
In this way is revealed step by step a tale that has connections with the nazis’ exterminationa of the Jews, a family chronicle related to the grand war novels with the inherent themes, while at the same time the pregnant meaning of the title develops into an existential central theme that concerns all aspects of the novel: the terrible consequences of silence. To sum up, a powerful, yes unforgettable novel.

Doors are pregnant with meaning. We use them to shut out, and to shut in. They represent security. And oppression.
On this little island in the Baltic I think they are also a means of expression.

One afternoon wandering the streets:

This small house in Visby is a gift. Not the house itself, of course, but this week when it belongs to me. Although it comes with no ties, it is provided by my Swedish publisher, Albert Bonniers Förlag, with the understanding that I should be writing. And everything here is conducive to this. It is so still and quiet that I find myself turning on the radio every now and then, just to check if the world is still there. The view is breathtakingly beatiful without being distracting. And just these last few days I have recieved two messages from readers prompting me to keep writing. One gift after the other, all pointing in the same direction. Towards my steadily shrinking manuscript.
What is it with me? How does my brain function? Or not, as the case may be. And, even more frightening, what will it take for me to focus and put in words what is already stored in my brain?

Today I bought myself a chair. It has a name: Non. It’s made of rubber and steel. It looks light, but it is very heavy. I suppose that what we all aspire to.

I am hoping my chair will help me get on with the writing of my third novel. I thought the second would be the hardest, but I am no longer sure.

Here is a short excerpt from what I am calling ‘The kindness of your nature’:

Lately I have been overcome by a sense of urgency. As if there is something I need to do. Not in a material sense. Just a need to put my life in order. Even though it will only be for me, it feels acutely urgent. Why, I don’t quite understand. My life is at it has been for years now, and I don’t expect any dramatic changes to come. Nothing has happened to bring about this shift. This sense of urgency.
But something has changed. I have changed. Perhaps it’s just aging, a growing awareness of the limit of my time. And in the same way it feels impossible to resist. As if I am facing an inevitable process that I cannot escape. Not that I feel a need to. In fact, I am embracing it with something that feels close to anticipation.
The mental space where I exist now is different from all the others that I have inhabited. Perhaps this urge has something to do with that. There is a change in my perception and though this is the result of a long process, it is only lately that I have come to realise that there is a view from here, while all the places where I have lived before have offered no perspective, no view. Not from the inside looking out, nor from the outside looking in. In that sense I should feel exposed now, I suppose. Strangely, I don’t. Instead, I am filled with this inexplicable anticipation. As if the opening of doors will be helpful. Perhaps I am hoping that it will help me to put my life in some kind of chronological order. I don’t know why it now feels so important to open the doors to the spaces where why memories are kept, while before the ability to close them, one after other, seemed essential to survival.
It might very well prove to be a futile exercise. I am not sure there is order in anybody’s life. Life is irrational and illogical. And we have to accept that, try and arrange our lives around it.
But there is a timeline to our lives. One event leads to another one. One act leads to a result, which becomes the basis for our next action. That is how we make some semblance of order: we put the events that make up our lives along a timeline. And that way we think that we can also see some kind of causality. I am not sure that it is true, but I can understand that it is helpful. And now I want it for me.
There are so many story lines, though. So many characters acting independently in the spectacle that is my life. And they all influence each other in ways that are impossible to fully control or even grasp. There is no absolute certainty about anything. I once believed that science offered certainty. That there were scientific rules that were irrevocable. I think this might have been the reason for my love of science at school. And the reason why I chose to study medicine. I believed that science would offer a world with absolute truths. But the deeper I delved, the less absolute it appeared. There were inconstancies there, too. New research made previous truths obsolete. And always, beyond every answer and every explanation, there was another, yet unanswered question. It was like plotting your way through gradually familiar territories, but with a constant awareness of another, unknown, or unknowable reality beyond the known. Every answer was followed by a question mark. Every step took me further into the unknown. And the unknowable grew, while what I knew seemed to shrink in quantity as well as value.
I have lived here almost ten years now. It is a lonely existence, mostly. I don’t mind, but isolation aggravates uncertainty, I think. Life takes on a surreal quality. Lately, I have found myself wishing for a way of corroborating an event, a memory. I have been overwhelmed by a longing to have some confirmation that my memories are still intact.
I like to think that I take good care of my important memories. I’m careful not to wear them down or alter them in any way. I try to keep them safe. But again, they are not kept in order. I know where each one is and what it contains, but it exists in a kind of vacuum, and with no connection to the others. I have no explanation as to why this is how I experience it. But I think that if I were able to take them out, one by one and place them in the right sequence, then perhaps they would be easier to carry. The painful ones might become more acceptable if I could see each one as belonging to what came before and after. I guess I am hoping for some understanding. Just for me. And forgiveness, perhaps. Not from others, but my own forgiveness, so that somehow perhaps I will finally be able to regard myself with a measure of compassion. Not love, I don’t expect that. Not pity, I don’t want that. But empathy, perhaps. For the little girl that was me. For the young woman I became. And for the middle aged person I am now.
What I am hoping for is for the memories to merge, to become an understandable whole. And ultimately make me whole.

All photos by Kathrin Simon

The first workshop done. There is now something to show of that which has only lived in our heads and our hearts. ‘let me sing you gentle songs’, the ballet now exists in its embryonic first stage.
The result of the initial four day workshop was presented 27 June.

There are moments when you feel like the heavens are smiling upon you. This was such an event for me.
Turid Revfiem has made my text her own when she has created the movements that give life to my characters.

In Kilda Northcott she has found the most susceptible artist to present the choreography. Kilda does more than dance. She embodies my character Astrid totally. It was utterly moving to watch.

Adriana Harper and Rory Fairweather-Neylan rose to the challenge of merging the choreography that they had rehearsed in advance of the workshop with the new music. An extraordinary achievement.

Sensitive to the pre-existing folk music and the Brahms sonata that forms part of the score, Peter Scholes has composed new music that is so beautiful and so moving that it was decided to have one piece performed with no dancing on stage.

The next workshop is scheduled for  22-25 September. I will be in Europe then, participating only electronically. It will be hard, though I trust the artists implicitly. Can’t wait to see the results. And be part of the process to take ithis work to completion.

 

 

 

 

Each time I return to Singapore a little of what I associate with the place has disappeared. I suppose this is inevitable, it happens to all places. But in the case of Singapore the process is faster and the effect startling. I have lived in Singapore for two short spells: in 1987-1988 and in 1999-2001. The changes seem to escalate over time. Now, I come back once a year or so, on a brief stopover travelling between my two home-countries.
Buildings and whole blocks vanish at a frightening speed, and both buildings where we once lived have ended their short lives and been replaced by new ones, three or four times as high.
But it is the food that I miss the most. Today, you can have almost any international culinary experience imaginable: French, Italian, Mexican. There are hamburger places, steakhouses and olde English pubs. But where is the essence of Singaporean food? I don’t mean sanitized hotel versions of it, but the real thing. The little street vendors selling satays in the streets. The roti parata joints. The sweaty market stalls with carrot cake and Poh pia? A hunt for the latter, the wonderfully spicy, tender Singaporean version of a burrito. An unfried soft spring roll asembled while you wait, filled with yams, eggs, pork belly and chilli.
I found construction sites, overbuilt markets and closed food courts. But no poh pia. On my last day I was ready to give up and went for a last foot massage (Fuji, best in town, though Sam is no longer there). I asked the girl who was working away on my feet if there was anywhere in town still selling poh pia. She said very few. But told me that there is now a food court at Wisma Artrium in Orchard Road, on the fourth floor. And in the farthermost corner there is a stand selling all the old foods.
So, I took myself there. And eventually I found the little stand, hidden in the far courner, as she had said. And there it was, my poh pia. And carrot cake (not the Western kind, this is savoury dish). And satays and chicken wings grilled over an old fashion coal fire.
It should be protected!

People go to Prague to enjoy the beautiful city. There are tourists everywhere. So, for me it was interesting to be there for business – The Prague Book Fair. Walk the surprisingly empty streets just off the main tourist tracks. I stayed in a wonderful small hotel, Cerny Slon – the Black Elephant – just off the busy main square in the Old Town, yet quaint and quiet. And smelling of cooking, the old kind of real cooking that has never seen a microwave or a freezer. The kind of cooking my grandmother used to make: overcooked meat, slightly stale bread, gravy.

It was a strange experience to walk into a book store and ask for ‘Astrid a Veronika’ and be told by an excited girl behind the desk that the novel by ‘Olssonová’ was almost sold out and was ‘very, very good’. I held one of the two remaining copies in my hand with a sense of excitement. As if it has nothing to do with me.

I suppose book fairs are more or less the same the world over. The venue for the Prague Book Fair, The Pr?myslový palác, the central building of the Prague Exhibition Grounds, is an impressive Art Noveau building. Sadly the left wing was destroyed by fire last year and the part of the book fair in this part of the building this year has to cope with rather difficult conditions. In spite of this there are lots of visitors and queues to many stands. I have no idea what to expect for my stage appearance, but discover that it is a very well organized interview on stage. My interpreter, Linda Kaprová, speaks flawless Swedish and also proves to be both professional and sensitive. The audience is surprisingly large and includes the Swedish Ambassador. I come away very grateful and very impressed.
This visit made it possible for me to meet my publisher Metafora, and the people there who have made my book such a success. Often, my publishers remain rather anonymous. Now I have a face to the name of the people here.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!