Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! On October 15 we’ll be discussing Danish author Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, out now in translation by Martin Aitken from Archipelago.
Fine Gråbøl’s narrator dreams of furniture flickering to life; a chair that greets you; shiny tiles that follow a peculiar grammar; or a bookshelf that can be thrown on like an apron. Living in a temporary psychiatric care unit for young people in Copenhagen, she practices daily routines that take on the urgency of survival (peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice, listening through thin walls), and is obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives. A thoughtful critique on governmental treatment of the mentally ill, What Kingdom parses the culpability of psychiatric institutions, and poignantly explores the smallest meeting points between people — whether a pair of hands dyeing another’s hair, or removing the acupuncture needles.
“Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines . . . Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain” (The New Yorker).