After finishing Small Comfort and absolutely loving it, I knew I had to explore more of Ia Genberg’s work. So when The Details crossed my radar, I picked it up without hesitation.

The Details takes place in Sweden, and reading it transported me back to the years I spent there, a lovely bit of nostalgia lies through the pages.

The story opens with a woman battling malaria. As fever consumes her, her mind drifts backward through time, landing on four people who’ve shaped her in ways both obvious and invisible. She describes one, Johanna, as her “main character,” which tells you everything about the weight that one person can carry in another’s story.

It all begins when she opens a book from a former lover. From there, we move to a friend, then to another lover, and eventually to the person who created her entirely: her mother. Each section is a portrait, a careful study of someone specific. But here’s where Genberg’s brilliance kicks in: these four sketches aren’t really separate at all. They overlap and blur together until you realize you’re looking at the narrator herself, reflected in each of them.

The novel asks you to abandon the typical story structure. Instead of sweeping narrative arcs, Genberg zooms in on small things: the habits that reveal character, the tiny preferences and quirks that make someone unmistakably them. Well, it lives up the title: The Details. You start to see how a person isn’t one coherent story. They’re actually made up of all the people they’ve known, each one leaving fingerprints on who they become.

Life, as the title suggests, lives in these small moments. Not in the headline events, but in everything that fills the spaces between.

My Favorite Bits

• I preferred books with a pull so strong I couldn’t get out. It was the same way with most things in life and as a result my responsibilities were few, perhaps too few. In fact I’d rarely encountered a responsibility I didn’t reject.

• Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

• TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.

• .. she was an ocean of feelings, with more gradients and nuances than she could handle, as if the full cast of Greek gods and all the emotions and states they represented had been crammed in behind her eyelids.

• We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame. But whenever I’m in the grips of a fever or infatuation there is no confusion; my ‘self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable and distinct, next to one another. Afterwards I always remember this state as one of grace. That might be one way of describing the whole, people filing in and out of my face in no particular order. No ‘beginning” and no ‘end’, no chronology, only each and every moment and what transpires therein.

• When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people 1 meet when I allow my gaze to linger.

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Author: Ia Genberg
Publication date: 7 January 2022
Number of pages: 144 pages

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