The Antarctica of Love

Stridsberg (Valerie) opens this ruminative, heartrending novel with the murder of its narrator, 24-year-old Kristina. A sex worker addicted to heroin who “never wanted to be saved,” she tells her story from the solitary nothingness of the afterlife, doling out how she came to be with the man who rapes, strangles, and dismembers her. Kristina watches her mother, Raksha, grieve her death and reconcile briefly with her father, Ivan. She recounts how her four-year-old brother’s drowning, when she was 11, devastated the family, and she remembers her marriage to Shane, which offered a promise of fulfillment but was ultimately sunk by their shared addiction to heroin. Their son, Valle, was put in foster care by the state, leading Kristina to surrender their daughter, Solveig, to social services at birth. Kristina repeatedly returns to her murder, adding overwhelmingly grievous details. Passages about her struggle to stay clean while pregnant with Solveig and about Valle’s struggle to adapt to the foster system, however, are sublime (“I think Solveig was trying to hide away from us in there, and I can understand why, we had nothing to offer her on the other side”). Despite the bleak story, readers will be moved by the dead narrator’s white-knuckled grip on life. (Oct.)