Reading guide: The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson

The narrator

The narrator of The Details is unnamed, yet throughout the narrative, a picture emerges of an intelligent middle-aged woman. She has love affairs with both men and women, all of whom echo and impact upon her life. 

Johanna

Johanna is the narrator’s ex-girlfriend and first love, who goes on to become a famous TV host. During their relationship, Johanna gifts the narrator a copy of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy in 1996 when she is overcome with malaria after she had been on a trip to the Serengeti. Johanna and the narrator share a love of reading (‘Literature was our favourite game,’ she writes), introducing each other to authors and books, the divergent tastes fostering discussion and debate throughout their relationship.  

Niki

Niki was the narrator’s flatmate at university. She consequently disappeared, leaving a lasting impact on the narrator.

Alejandro

Alejandro, a Chilean-German dancer who appeared like a storm, and with whom the narrator had an intense love affair.

Birgitte

Birgitte is the narrator’s mother and her fourth memory. She is described as a woman adrift, with elusive qualities, all shaped by childhood trauma. Birgitte gave birth to the narrator during a ‘psychotic break’, and her behaviours during her childhood inform the narrator’s own cautionary approach to trust.

Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor and translator working between English and Swedish.

The recipient of a PEN/Heim grant, she translates some of the most interesting contemporary Swedish voices, like Hanna Johansson, Judith Kiros – and Ia Genberg. Based in Queens, New York, she serves on the editorial board of Glänta, a journal of arts and politics, and regularly writes on US events in the Swedish press. 

‘Ia Genberg writes with a remarkably sharp eye about a series of messy relationships between friends, family and lovers. Using, as she says, ‘details, rather than information’, she gives us not simply the ‘residue of life presented in a combination of letters’ but an evocation of contemporary Stockholm and a moving portrait of her narrator. She has at times a melancholic eye, but her wit and liveliness constantly break through.’

The Details is told in only four chapters, each centred on a pivotal person within the narrator’s life. Why do you think the author chose to adopt this structure? Does the focus of each section enhance the reading experience of the novel as a whole? 

The Details lacks a conventional plot, with arguably no beginning, middle or end. Many details emerge from a fever dream of the narrator’s memory in a fragmentary and non-linear manner. With its lack of chronology, what role does time play in the novel? How did it give you a sense of perspective throughout, and particularly at the end of your reading? 

The synopsis of The Details asks ‘Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?’ After reading the novel, what do you make of this query? Discuss the overarching impression you received of the narrator and whether Genberg intended to write one character study, or five.

During the novel, the narrator notes that we are all ‘traces of the people we rub up against’. To what extent do you agree that these encounters, be they fleeting or prolonged, echo upon us – are we all the sum of many parts?

‘By the time I was staring at the stoop of the brownstone where Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt lived their lives and wrote their books, I was in a serious relationship with a man who in that moment was eating pancakes with my daughter at a nearby café.’ The Details features an array of literary references, from the moment the narrator picks up The New York Trilogy on page one. ‘There’s not much I can recall from that summer – but I’ll never forget our apartment, the book, or her,’ she says. The author uses literature as a narrative device throughout the novel. What role does she intend it to play, and is she successful in this deployment?