Collected Works: A Novel: 'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble' (Telegraph)

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Op het tweede vertelspoor worden Martins kinderen door een toeval aangemoedigd op zoek te gaan naar een antwoord op de vraag waarom hun moeder Cecilia onverwacht haar gezin in de steek liet. De spanning wordt opgedreven: de eerste tijdlijn haalt de andere langzamerhand in en de enigmatische verdwijning van Cecilia blijft lang flikkeren, als een waakvlam die pas heel laat echt ontbrandt. Collected Works . . . is as insatiable in its read as it is insightful to modern challenges of family, memory, and finding purpose.”—Matthew Bedard, Flaunt Hij, Gustav en Cecilia zijn dan een drie-eenheid. Als geliefde van Martin, fungeert Cecilia ook als muze en model voor de boezemvriend, een kunstenaar in hart en nieren. Zij wordt Gustavs grote inspiratiebron voor de schilderijen uit zijn meest succesvolle periode. Samen vertrekken Martin en Gustav in hun studentenjaren naar Parijs waar Cecilia hen later vervoegt, om inspiratie op te doen voor hun culturele interesses. Martin jaagt dan nog steeds de droom na om een onnavolgbaar schrijver te worden terwijl Gustav al goed op weg is in het ontdekken van zijn kunst en kunnen. Martin heeft dan ook op dat moment een te romantisch beeld van een schrijversbestaan voor ogen.

It's a promising premise for a novel, a mystery that Sandgren builds her novel around from two sides: events leading up to it (albeit focused more on Martin than Cecilia) and then the situation fifteen years later. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.An] absorbing story . . . [ Collected Works] is a witty, toothy, family saga, unashamedly intellectual but rarely bogged down by the weight of its theories . . . It's refreshing to read such a confidently ambitious work that holds art, literature, and philosophy close to its heart . . . Collected Works is an assured, bittersweet novel that, like youth, seems to have it all—energy, aspiration, and self-delusion."

That was many years ago now, during a period when he’d spent a lot of time with a fairly pleasant graphic designer. She kept dragging him to open houses, possibly to demonstrate her independence. “I’ve been thinking about buying a flat,” she’d say, and Martin could never figure out whether she was trying to communicate something else. Either way, there was always something wrong with the flats they went to see. One was on the ground floor, one had a dark-green kitchen. Too expensive, too small, too new. While she talked to estate agents about pipes and balconies, Martin strolled around other people’s homes, staged to make them look like someone-lives-here-but-not-quite, amusing himself by trying to identify the algorithms of the open house. There were always pots of fresh herbs with the price tag still on in the kitchens. Certain kinds of cushions had always been placed just so on the sofas. A tealight always burned on the bathroom sink.Collected Works, like the recent excellent adaptation of Fleishman is in Trouble, is a study in how we make assumptions about those around us (and in our reading experiences), particularly when it comes to divorce or a separation. At the beginning, it is easy to side with Martin, who has been left to raise Cecilia’s and his three children single-handedly. But things are rarely so certain, and Sandgren has constructed a novel of deep suspicion, to the point at which we question our own capacity to ask the right question. If we are shown, for instance, a flawed version of Martin, we are not left to think that Cecilia herself is a victim in some way – she, too, is complex and difficult at times. Sandgren makes wry allusions to this construct, as when Frederikke, a therapist, discusses narratives which, when disrupted, cause chaos: “If your narrative deviates too far from reality, if it’s built on fundamental misconceptions and grave misinterpretations, then the narrative can be a problem in itself, of course. And yet, it may be that that particular construct is what makes life possible in that moment.” Offering a reader upward of a quarter of a million words is a big ask, not least in this attention-sapping, time-scarce epoch with countless distractions tugging constantly at our sleeves. A writer must be sure of themselves and sure-footed enough in their writing to pull off a book of this kind of length.

Sandgren’s book’s definitely fluid and well-crafted, although her style is a little too conventional for me. As an author she’s been compared to Knausgaard and, like him, her writing is incredibly detailed, here she meticulously recreates the literary and artistic subculture of her native Gothenburg from the 1970s, and the height of punk, onwards. But for me that was a mixed blessing, there were a number of points where the detail threatens to overwhelm the story itself. The numerous descriptions of the interiors of the characters’ various homes, the parties they attend, the artists and writers they revere, the films they watch, take up a great deal of space, submerging any underlying plot and sometimes impeding any clear sense of its progression. Along the way Sandgren pauses to explore issues of communication, the nature of bonds between lovers or friends, generational divides, lost dreams, and broader cultural and social shifts. Admittedly I found a lot of her material fascinating - although her characters sometimes tipped towards cliché - but at the same time I found myself longing for a more brutal edit. So, for me, this is extremely promising rather than entirely satisfying. However, for readers who enjoy lengthy, immersive, character-driven pieces – or Knausgaard - it may well be very appealing. Translated by Agnes Broome. If the trappings of a kind of mystery are all elaborately there, Sandgren isn't all that interested in simple (re)solutions. In Verzamelde werken leren we de vijftiger Martin Berg kennen. Aan het begin van het boek vinden we hem terug, op de vloer gelegen, te midden een berg ooit begonnen manuscripten en notities uit de 25 voorbije jaren, van toen hij nog een veelbelovende auteur wenste te worden. Hij is nu uitgeblust en op een keerpunt beland: zijn kinderen zijn uitgevlogen, zijn vrouw is jaren geleden verdwenen. In de rest van het boek overlopen we zijn leven tot dat bepaalde punt.

First night reviews

This book grabs me, pulls me along, dances with me and shouts, ’Come a little further! Come on! Immerse yourself! Hold me all night!” The novel rambles along agreeably enough with its cast of quite interesting characters, for the most part contrasting past and present in an intriguing fashion. Martin Berg is a Swedish publisher living in the aftermath of tragedy. More than a decade ago, his wife, a writer and academic named Cecilia, vanished one morning, leaving behind Martin and their two young children, Rakel and Elis. In her outstanding debut novel, Collected Works, translated into propulsive English by Agnes Broomé, Lydia Sandgren tells Martin’s story across two narrative timelines. The novel interweaves his youth and the progress of his life up to Cecilia’s disappearance with events in the present day, where Rakel, his daughter, is preparing a reader’s report on a German novel to which Martin has been offered the rights. It seems, astonishingly, to be about her missing mother. One expects the novel to be slowly building to a mighty revelation, whether it’s the return of the prodigal wife and mother, or merely the disclosure of a definitive piece in the riddle of Cecilia’s desertion. But Sandgren doesn’t seem interested in such kinds of fictional artifice. Instead, she embraces the mess, misunderstandings and inscrutabilities that constitute real people living real lives – which makes a lot of sense, since her day job is as a practising psychologist.

She translated Wittgenstein's diaries, and published two books of her own before she disappeared (more than Martin ...).With her Collected Works, the author has cemented her love for literature – and we hope she does it again.” Collected Works stretches over a 30-year time period and appears as a filigree tale with luminous characters. Through the novel Lydia Sandgren expresses an homage to the love of literature, art and philosophy.” Gustav, meanwhile, is hurting too. His obsession with Cecilia’s inexplicable disappearance had made his art hagiographic, fixated on her image. When posters for Gustav’s retrospective plaster Cecilia’s face on major billboards across the city, Martin’s daughter Rakel learns a haunting fact that points toward her mother’s whereabouts. She and her brother chase this clue across time, memory, and Europe, to discover why their beloved mother abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person can ever be answered. And her face was a stranger’s, as he’d known it would be. She had sharp eyes and determined creases between her nose and her mouth. She was holding a pair of powder-blue suede gloves and carrying a handbag in the crook of her arm, and was probably about to go home to her family in Askim or Billdal where she would sit down with a glass of wine, feel annoyed at her husband clattering in the kitchen—he was always so loud, no matter how she tried to explain that it hurt her ears, that it was painful—and ask her children about school without listening to their answers.