Starred review from November 28, 2022
Sandgren debuts with a sweeping and complex drama of family, art, and sacrifice. Martin Berg and his two children live in contemporary Gothenburg, Sweden, haunted by the loss of Martin’s wife Cecilia, who disappeared after defending her PhD thesis in 1997. In the years since, Martin has worked at a niche publishing house, and his oldest child, Rakel, now 24, has grown up to resemble her mother and likewise to be serious, hyperdisciplined, and drawn to difficult academic work. Before the narrative locks in on the circumstances around Cecilia’s disappearance, Sandgren takes a long detour into Martin’s middle-class childhood, and how his life was changed after meeting the “fragile” and “unkempt” Gustav Becker. Their high school friendship, described in all its vagaries and nuance over the course of the book, is defined by their shared interest in creating art: Martin wants to write a novel, and Gustav wants to paint. When Martin meets Cecilia, Gustav is included in the relationship rather than left behind, and as Gustav’s star rises, his most successful paintings turn out to be portraits of Cecilia. Sandgren keeps up the intrigue as Rakel learns more about Gustav and Cecilia; and she brings a wry sense of humor to her portrayal of Martin, noting about his wistfulness that he’ll never be “remarkably young again.” Readers will be captivated.
January 1, 2023
In her debut novel--a literary sensation in Sweden--Sandgren contemplates the ""collected works"" that measure a life. We meet publisher Martin Berg, taking stock, lying on the floor, surrounded by stacks of paper ""from a box marked Martin, Writing." A story unwinds of friends who meet as students: Martin, an aspiring writer; his closest friend, Gustav, a talented, vulnerable painter; and scholarly, enigmatic Cecelia, the love of Martin's life and Gustav's muse. Now Gustav has died, Martin's career is languishing, and his children are off searching for Cecelia, who vanished, abandoning them fifteen years ago. Sandgren hooks the reader with an absorbing, multilayered plot that shifts between past and present, building slowly towards the emotional and narrative mystery at its heart: how could Cecilia leave them? Sandgren's well-realized characters are quirky and flawed. but fully human and sympathetically portrayed. Detail-rich descriptions reminiscent of cinematic establishing shots set the scene. Collected Works ends in suspense, outside a closed door in ""the pause, the quick breath just before something begins.
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Starred review from December 15, 2022
A young man, longing to become a writer, comes of age. As Martin Berg is growing up in Gothenburg, Sweden, he feels a certain restlessness. He is top of his class at school, but the other students bore him--that is, until he meets Gustav Becker, a precocious would-be artist with a similar taste for music and books. Together, they stay out all night, smoking cigarettes and drinking, while Martin dreams of becoming a writer. This debut novel by Sandgren is wonderfully evocative of late-1970s and early-'80s Sweden. The boys' stomping grounds--and dissatisfactions--are rendered in exquisite detail. Sandgren alternates between Martin's youth and his middle age. At 40, he co-owns a small, intellectual publishing house, and the promise of his youth seems to have been wasted: He spends almost every day counting down the hours. "And then came those hours," Sandgren writes. "When all the chores of the day were done but it was too early to go to bed." Martin's wife, Cecilia, disappeared more than a decade ago, leaving Martin with two children. With no word from her since, Martin has been unable to move on. Cecilia's disappearance makes this novel, in part, a mystery: Where has she gone, and why? Those questions provide the novel with a compelling throughline, but even without it, Sandgren's descriptions of Martin's earnest but slightly pretentious striving toward intellectual brilliance are witty, moving, and detailed enough on their own to carry the story forward. If the novel has any faults, it is that Sandgren occasionally hits the same note more than once. There are more than a few descriptions of decrepit student flats, for example, with dirty, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink. Descriptions like these could have been condensed, but even as they are, they don't constitute a major flaw. A richly evocative work from a major new talent.
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