To Mervas by Elisabeth Rynell; trans by Victoria Haggblom

“Life must be a story, or else it will crush you.” Swedish novelist and poet Elisabeth Rynell’s To Mervas opens with this apt epigram, licensing the myth-making to come. The novel is the story of Marta, a woman on the edge of society who is just beginning to wake up and try to stop life from crushing her.

She is stirred by a letter from her long-lost love, Kosti. Together for nearly a decade in their youth, Marta and Kosti parted ways when she wanted a child and he did not. She got her wish after a one-night stand with a stranger, and after Kosti disappeared Marta spent her life raising a son with a severe mental handicap. The boy is intensely loved but he still becomes a weight on her life, wearing her down until she does the unthinkable.

In the aftermath of her son’s death, Marta wanders alone around her gray apartment, no longer working or staying in regular contact with her family. Kosti’s letter, which says little other than that he is in Mervas, wakes her from this trance and sets her writing. She keeps a diary, in one entry deciding she will rush to Mervas to find him, in the next changing her mind, but each time putting together another little piece of the story of her life.

Marta recognizes the diary as a labor of “assembling, comparing, sorting, and memorizing” her thoughts:

It has even struck me that there are similarities between the writing I’ve begun and an archaeological excavation. The carefulness. You have to be so incredibly careful with the things you find down there. They may for example be positioned in a specific order in relation to one another that mustn’t be changed. Or they may be fragile and crumble at the slightest touch. A sudden shift of the hand (or the brush, or the pen), and the entire story could literally dissolve into dust.

As Marta excavates, it falls to the reader to decipher the shards of her life and their relation to each other. Her memories are presented with clarity but without judgment or analysis. She recounts every word of her final argument with Kosti, describing her bitterness and his now-loveless expression, without commenting on whether the middle-aged Marta shares the anger of her younger self or finds her old rage unjustified.

She has another set of memories, too: of a father who beat his wife and children, calling Marta’s mother a “sow” who “refuses to bring children into this world.” Her battered mother would eventually die bearing a child conceived through rape. While Marta uncovers these painful memories, clearly related to her own desire for children, tendency to self-mutilation, and difficulty in relationships, she keeps her archeological processes to herself.

But ultimately those thoughts lead her to a decision “to respond to life in some way,” namely to go to Mervas. It’s a ghost village, abandoned by the mining company that ran it for decades. Unable to find it, Marta stops off in the far north of Sweden with a strange old couple. Here the diary ends, and an omniscient third-person narrator takes over Marta’s story while she is out living it rather than writing it. The diary will pick up again when Marta is once more alone with her thoughts, then leave off a second time when real life takes back over from the story.

The mirroring of Marta’s exploratory path in the narration is formally satisfying, but her diary provides such intimacy that the emotional distancing of the other sections feels sudden and wrenching. Until Kosti’s letter arrived, Marta had “lived according to [her] own order and taken refuge in it. …In this way, [she’d] been able to live inside [her] own mind.” The novel has lived inside her mind as well, and leaving that space is difficult—but then so is Marta’s decision to leave her apartment and seek out her lover.

The diary sections also feel claustrophobic at times, and digging through the memories can seem like so much navel-gazing. Marta’s journey is a self-centered one, and necessarily so. Her unusual and somewhat lurid psychological history, along with Rynell’s exact and painterly prose, are compelling. But the focus remains interior, with the action, such as it is, illuminating only Marta and her individual story. She’s able to rid herself of life’s weight by writing it, and then actually live.

Others will have to perform their own excavations.

Reviewed by Nicole Perrin

To Mervas by Elisabeth Rynell; trans by Victoria Haggblom
Archipelago Books, 2010
Paper, 225 pp, $15.00
ISBN-13: 9780981987378