#one potential half sister whose relationship to me is more than speculation (due to my dad’s affair) but less than dna evidence

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Karen Tidbeck, Weird Writer

I recently finished Amatka, the debut novel of Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, first published in Swedish in 2012, and published in English earlier this year in the author’s own translation. Previously I had read Jagannath, her debut collection of short stories.

Tidbeck is often described as a writer of “weird” fiction. This is not an inaccurate label; her fiction is indeed weird. In “Beatrice,” the first story in Jagannath, a man falls in love with an airship (not in an abstract way—in a “they have sex” kind of way), and later a woman gives birth to a child who is half steam engine, for example.

“Weird fiction,” as a genre, is not easy to define. Its history predates H.P. Lovecraft, though he is credited with popularizing the term, and his particular blend of science fiction and horror has been associated with the genre ever since. It is a sort of liminal genre, overlapping other genres; stories usually considered horror, science fiction, fantasy, or surrealism could also be considered weird. The weird also appears in many stories that blur genre distinctions: weirdness tends to defy classification. In recent years Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have made noble if doomed attempts, with their anthologies The Weird and The New Weird, to impose order on a mind-boggling array of stories which often don’t share much beyond a fascination with and terror of the unknowable nature of reality. This terror is certainly an identifiable trait, and an interesting one; whether it constitutes a coherent genre is up to you.

I tend to think that “weirdness,” in the broadest possible sense, is an essential quality of all good fiction. If a story is not in some fashion weird, it can say nothing new. Of course I have made many dubious aesthetic judgements in leaping to this conclusion: that fiction must say something “new” to be “good,” that fiction must “say” something, that “weirdness” and “newness” are intrinsically related qualities, etc. Suffice to say there’s a lot of nuance I am willfully ignoring here. My point is this: Stories have the power to unsettle reality. By offering new ways of looking at our experience as human beings, they can make us question our deepest assumptions about what is true. The best fiction (in my opinion) generally achieves this effect, or something like it, even if it’s not the main point. In weird fiction, often this unsettling effect is the main point.

The less successful stories in Jagannath have a bit of this “weird for weird’s sake” vibe, feeling slightly flimsy as a result. Take the aforementioned “Beatrice.” Why exactly does Franz Hiller fall in love with an airship? Why does Anna Goldberg enter into a relationship with a steam engine (named Hercules, no less)? I don’t honestly know. Tidbeck’s intent with the story is a mystery to me. It is not, I want to emphasize, a poorly executed story. Tidbeck is a great writer; her language is controlled and precise, and she skillfully sustains a distinct deadpan tone. I simply don’t get what she is doing. She succeeds in showing the world from a new and surprising angle, but where does this angle intersect with reality? What does it illuminate or reveal?

Speaking as a non-fan, I think the reason H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction endures—despite its many well-known shortcomings—is that, fundamentally, he is trying to communicate what he believes to be true about the world. Lovecraft believed that human beings were the insignificant playthings of a malignant universe full of incomprehensible terrors. It’s this bleak vision of reality, rather than the winged bipedal squid-aliens, that makes his writing truly weird.

Jagannath doesn’t immediately assert such a vision, but feels at times like a series of exercises and experiments; it’s hard to tell at first what, if anything, Tidbeck believes to be true. (Although, to have written these stories, she must believe in the power of her own imagination and in her talent as a writer—beliefs she quickly proves justified.) It’s not that the stories lack style. They’re unified by a habit of dry understatement and a certain emotional remoteness, a frigidity some have identified as characteristically Scandinavian. (I don’t know how she would feel about that.) It’s a technique with mixed results. While she successfully avoids the frothy melodrama of Lovecraft, at times her subject matter seems to demand language a little more...heightened?

In “Brita’s Holiday Village,” for example, the narrator stays at a relative’s resort over the summer while struggling to finish a novel. Suddenly an enormous extended family moves into the cabins, having apparently rented the resort. The family’s behavior is eerily artificial; it is implied that they may not be human. Then:

“Last night and the night before last, it happened several times that I walked into a house and people were having sex. On all surfaces, like kitchen tables or sofas. [...] And it’s everyone on everyone: man and wife, father and daughter, mother and son, sister and brother. But always in heterosexual configurations. I asked Sigvard what they were doing.”

Here Tidbeck’s matter-of-fact attitude toward the weird feels more like an affectation or quirk than an expression of personal truth, the insistent flatness of tone a stylistic limitation.

Jagannath gathers strength, however, as it goes along. You can almost feel Tidbeck’s confidence building, her vision solidifying, as the stories grow longer, stranger, more intricate. The second half is generally better than the first, and two stories in particular near the end, “Aunts” and “Augusta Prima,” made me reconsider the whole collection; reading these stories, you feel that she has been working toward them from the very beginning, and is finally hitting her stride. Set in a rococo world of spectacular cruelty, “Augusta Prima” is a tale of demented courtiers playing an endless sadistic game of croquet in a mysterious garden beyond the reach of time. Every aspect of the story is alien, including the mind of the protagonist, who, in one scene, cuts out the tongue of her page without hesitation or remorse. Tidbeck’s subdued prose is at its most creepily dissonant here, and her exploration of time is fascinating; the story feels weighted with purpose in a way the earlier stories often do not. “Aunts,” set in the same universe, revolves around three women who ritually gorge themselves until they split open, at which point another generation of aunts takes their place, beginning the cycle by feasting on the dead women’s mammoth corpses. It is unsettling beyond belief—but here again, Tidbeck seems to want to unsettle you for a reason, and the story raises troubling questions about life and death, tradition, and (once again) time.

Amatka, Tidbeck’s only novel to date, is the equal of her best short stories, a very good queer speculative dystopian mystery thriller that doesn’t quite, in the end, coalesce into a great one—but dang, does it come close. It benefits from a greater emotional range than Jagannath—there is, of all things, a touching love story—and a sharper thematic focus, though I can’t help but feel that Tidbeck stops just short of saying anything truly new or remarkable about the relationship between order and chaos, individual and society, language and reality.

The nature of the setting is shrouded in mystery for most of the book, and much of the fun of reading it is trying to figure out where Amatka is. It’s a human settlement, one of four (though, ominously, there used to be five), somewhere in the middle of a vast and snowy waste. Another planet? Another dimension? Tidbeck has a great deal of fun teasing you with the possibilities. The thing about this place, wherever it is, is that all objects here—pencils, suitcases, filing cabinets, and so on—must be labeled and named aloud in order to continue existing. If you go too long without reinforcing your pencil, for example, by calling it “pencil,” or if you accidentally name it the wrong thing, it will lose its shape and dissolve into formless ooze. Due to the fragile nature of reality in this world, a kind of totalitarian bureaucracy imposes strict control. 

I am in love with the ideas in this novel, particularly the idea of reality as a kind of societal consensus enforced by language: this is a “pencil” only because we all agree it’s a pencil and call it a pencil—so what happens if I disagree? However, the ending is a bit of a letdown. I don’t mind that it’s ambiguous, but in this case, the ambiguity feels like a cop-out, a kind of evasion, as if Tidbeck is retreating from the implications of her premise. She turns away from the questions at the heart of her narrative right when she should be grappling with them head-on, and the book ends abruptly when it should be kicking into high gear.

Karin Tidbeck is a gifted writer whose primary weakness is a certain monotony of affect. If she can learn to vary the intensity of her style, or to find new effective uses for the style she’s already mastered (as she does in her best stories), I think she has the potential to become one of the great modern weird writers.