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.’ 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

This is a novel about friendship and loss in which the narrator quickly becomes a companion whose voice you want to continue listening to until the very end. 

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

The attention to detail is such that the complex sentences and long paragraphs flow effortlessly without being showy. The use of four separate portraits to reflect the narrator’s life is a remarkable achievement.  

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

Ia Genberg casts a spell in this novel through a quiet but determined voice that pulls you into a world of close and difficult relationships that will feel like your own. 

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

All four main characters — Johanna, Niki, Alejandro, Birgitte — who have been important in the narrator’s life, are given the space to become individuals we can connect with and get to know much as we do in real life. 

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

It is a delicately written novel that speaks to our contemporary experience of connection and isolation. How quickly people move in and out of our lives. It does so with meticulous attention. 

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why?   

The opening of the Niki section which takes us back into the world before social media, where everyday items like the phone directories of landlines were so important, is beautifully described and remarkably effective. The book is full of such minute observations, done with care and clarity.

‘Part of what’s fun about translation is getting to push and stretch linguistic conventions of the language you’re translating into, but of course it needs to be done elegantly or at least interestingly to work; it needs to make sense. In thinking about how to do that for this particular novel I looked, in particular, at Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Robert Walser’s Microscripts, a work very different in tone and concept but great for thinking about how a sentence can unfurl.’

Read the full interview here.

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?

‘I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would be able to walk my way to it between the tall pines, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outwards, and I mean truly outwards. That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another’ (Page 124). Linking to the title of the novel, this quote from the narrator says that the sense of being alive can be found looking outwards, in the details around us. Do you believe this to be true and what sort of specific ‘details’ do you think the narrator might be referring to?

A sense of nostalgia encapsulates the novel as the narrator reminisces about past relationships with lovers, friends and family members. Do you think the author has included snippets from her own relationships to have been able to include so much detail about each person?

The narrator claims that, ‘in contrast to most people I’ve known in my life she (Niki) rarely told anecdotes with herself as the main character, or anecdotes she’d already told before, or anecdotes in general, since the nature of an anecdote – ­beginning, middle and finale – contradicted Niki’s demand for complete authenticity.’ Niki claims that anecdotes were intellectually dishonest. Why do you think Niki had such a strong view on storytelling and why might telling an anecdote be construed as being inauthentic? 

After the narrator travels to Ireland to look for Niki to tell her that her mother is sick, Niki tells the narrator to ‘get her shit and to get out of her life’ (Page 82). Why do you think Niki gets angry about the narrator telling her about her mother? Is it because she betrayed Niki’s trust in speaking to Niki’s parents or possibly something else?

While on a radio show, Johanna claims, unprompted, that she never liked Paul Auster even though both her and the narrator enjoyed his books. Why do you think Johanna changed her opinion on the author, or claimed to at this point in the novel?