ANDROMEDA

A young woman’s platonic but passionate relationship with her mentor affords her insight into both the past and her own possible futures.

When we meet the main narrator of this languid novel of ideas, she’s a young woman fulfilling an unpaid internship at Rydéns, a prestigious publishing house in Stockholm. A woman from a stolid middle-class Swedish family whose parents “dutifully went off to work without any particular career ambitions,” the narrator is overwhelmed by her own inexperience. She has to learn “from scratch: what to wear, how to use the printer and the photocopier…” Also, how to navigate the standard interpersonal politics of any office, which, in this particularly heady profession, also include entrenched positions on the nature of art, the function of publishing, and the ideology of commerce, as Rydéns struggles to place itself at the forefront of modern Swedish culture while still maintaining the prestige of a past steeped in traditional publishing values. Introverted and serious in nature, the narrator feels more kinship with literature of “genuine purpose” than she does with the sort of books her contemporaries are more likely to champion—easily marketable novels with “a clear message” but written in “dull prose, lying heavy and dead on every single page…as if the authors had followed a template for significant depictions of contemporary society.” The narrator’s iconoclasm soon catches the eye of Gunnar, Rydéns powerful editor-in-chief, whose own sensibilities are a reliquary of a rapidly vanishing age. Gunnar takes the narrator under his wing, grooming her to take over his position running Andromeda, the avant-garde imprint he founded. Over the next many years, the two form an enduring bond, centered around their love for ideas and the glimmering impossibility of something more they both feel developing between them. But when Gunnar’s ill health forces him into retirement, the narrator is left alone to examine the true nature of their relationship, of her identity within the systems she has helped to preserve, and of the art she celebrates. A confident, erudite novel, comfortable with developing at its own pace, Bohman’s latest adds to her growing cavalcade of young women with old, enduring ideals.

Deeply provocative in its quiet contemplation.