A System so Magnificent it is Blinding by Amanda Svensson

Swedish Fiction

Original title – Ett system så magnifikt att det bländar

Translator – Nichola Smalley

Source – Personal copy

There are always one or two books on the Booker longlist that are new to me. There is so many books coming out it is hard to follow everything that comes out in Translation every year.  I had Read Nichola’s other book she had translated on the Booker longlist. SO knew this, like her other translation, would be a  complex book. Amanda Svensson won two large book prizes in Sweden with this book. She has written four novels. This is her last to be published in Swedish but is the first to be translated into English. The book follows a set of triplets. It is a complex book of many layers and narratives.

Like his own to Violetta, from the day she came into the picture until what happened finally happened.

During his years with Violetta, Sebastian had spent more and more time with her family, and less and less with his own. Perhaps it was easier to belong in a context where belonging was less a matter of course.

Violetta was also an only child. Shed learned at an early age to demand the love Sebastian had taken for granted – to stop at nothing to get

As I say her death is a void in this family

The book follows the Isaksson triplets, that have spread themselves all around the world. When an event draws them all back to their Homeland Sweden the Father has gone missing, but as this happens, their mother throws them a curve ball over the origins alongside the father disappearing. The main Triplet is Sebastian he is settled in London a leading scientist in his field, and has joined the strange London Institute of Cognitive Science. He has a patient he is working with that only sees the world in two dimensions (this made me remember the scene in  Supermen where the villains are sent into exile in a 2d world). Then Clara visits Easter Island to join a Doomsday cult, but as she visits the island a few times, she bumps into someone related to Sebastian’s boss. This is how the stories cross over. Then there is the final triplet. Matilda has escaped Berlin to her Hokmeland as she is on the run from a colour. These stories cross and intersect at times this is a complex book then we have a space well what may have been the space filled by Sebastian’s girlfriend that committed suicide and has often left a void in those she touched with in the family.

He got off at Mornington Crescent. A Dalmatian peed on a lamppost, the tiles on the Tube station opposite shone blood-red in the sunshine. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and caramelised almonds and expensive perfume evaporating from the sweaty skin of women, it smelled of marijuana. Sebastian was, by nature, a very honest person, he rarely lied to anyone, not even to himself – naturally, he knew why hed come here. He wanted to see her house, her door, her windows, he wanted to see the magnolia in her garden that she’d spoken about with a kind of tenderness in her vocal cords. He wanted to see her child, perhaps. Her husband, her shopping bags, her pot plants, if she had any. He tried to convince himself that this wasn’t pathological behaviour, but he wasnt sure. Was it really so strange, to want to know everything about another person? Wasnt that the very essence of love?

I like the locations in London and Mornington Crescent always makes me smile.

I must admit I struggled with this one I think more than it not being a great book, it was the wrong time for me to read the book; its reading spanned the House move. I had read about 35%  before we moved and then hadn’t returned to it till last week, so I maybe should restart the book, but the book follows the triplets. The part of the book I connected with the most top was the bits in London; it made me wonder if she had spent a much time in London. Especially mention of Mornington Crescent made me wonder if she was a radio four fan, as well as it is a game on I’m Sorry, I haven’t a clue. This is part family saga, part road movie sprinkled with some magic realism. I could picture Wim Wenders in his prime making this a world-shaking road movie film with the triplets at its heart. It has humour at times, but to me, I wonder if it needed unpicking and would make a striking quartet of books the triplets and then the space left by Violetta’s death, it is a book brimming with ideas and stories, but m,e as a reader would like a few things tied up better at times. Also felt it could be a book double the size to fill the bits I maybe want to know about but didn’t get answers for, if that makes sense; she seems like a writer full of great ideas to write about. But this is one of those sprawling books that maybe needs to be read few times to fully get the sense of all that happens. It is hard. I want to love this one, but I felt it just missed the mark for me.,

Winstons score – -B I just maybe read it at the wrong time. I may reread it at some point and see if I feel better about it.