Linda Örtenblad

Linda Örtenblad’s second book, Kartotek över döda och öppernståndna (Index of the dead and resurrected, not translated into English) is a collection of short stories that also forms a larger story about life and death and much of what is found in between. 

The author takes us to places that we recognise, but which we soon discover that we have never actually been to. There are cemeteries, attic-based offices, beaches, streets where a hearse is expected to pass at any moment, cellars. She holds our hand throughout our slow journey and carefully introduces us to those she wants us to meet, until we finally meet ourselves. 

There is a desolation in these inner monologues that stop is dead in our tracks, there is a cooling coffee, there are power cuts, but there are also people who are their own sources of energy. All these temperatures give new life to what has solidified. Something new is knocking on our door; something we must let in and listen to. 

We are close to nature, the realistic borders the supernatural, we empty the apartment when someone dies so that new life can move in. We are in all kinds of light, perhaps most of all in the dim light. Örtenblad illuminates life so accurately and carefully that she also re-writes life. As if she needs to remind us of the question: Who says that what has been must remain so? 

Everything takes its time, it slows down, but never becomes slow. 

Through all these fates scattered to the wind, there is a fear that one thought could only be felt as a child. But no, these are no horror stories, no simple effects, nothing that turns everything upside down and that has a simple explanation. It is more of a skilfully crafted narrative, one that is so confident in its knowledge that we can handle the digressions; that we can, for example, listen to what the narrator’s mother says, while learning to wait for more and for what is to be said. This is now. That was then. And what now?  

Örtenblad is not like any other Swedish short story writer. She alienates the world, to make it – not understandable – but perhaps just more real. There is a feverish and nervous mood in the short stories that alludes to Kafka and Poe; she is not interested in neatly putting matters right, rather in causing confusion and trouble. Exactly what literature should do, in other words. 

If Linda Örtenblad never writes a single book, Kartotek över döda och återuppståndna is a complete catalogue of works in its own right.

Linda Örtenblad (born 1972) made her debut in 2004 with Den anatomiska teatern. This acclaimed debut consisted of a few stories about what can happen on a beach, or in the forest, or in a winter garden, or in new-yet-old memories that wash over us.