Collected Works: A Novel: 'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble' (Telegraph)

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An] absorbing story . . . [ Collected Works] is a witty, toothy, family saga, unashamedly intellectual but rarely bogged down by the weight of its theories . . . It’s refreshing to read such a confidently ambitious work that holds art, literature, and philosophy close to its heart . . . Collected Works is an assured, bittersweet novel that, like youth, seems to have it all—energy, aspiration, and self-delusion.” The Swedish debut author Lydia Sandgren has written a highly recommended novel, which is as smart as a funny and perfect parody on the sagacious. It is impactful, fundamentally captivating and begs to be read.”

A sweeping and complex drama of family, art and sacrifice… Readers will be captivated’ Publishers Weekly Neat as in a perfectly composed pop song – catchy, bombastic, irresistable…What’s left to say, therefore, is just that we hope that it doesn’t take another ten years for Sandgren to write her next book.” It all makes for a good read -- though, despite its length, one can be left feeling there's less there than one would have wished. Gustav, meanwhile, is hurting too. His obsession with Cecilia’s inexplicable disappearance had made his art hagiographic, fixated on her image. When posters for Gustav’s retrospective plaster Cecilia’s face on major billboards across the city, Martin’s daughter Rakel learns a haunting fact that points toward her mother’s whereabouts. She and her brother chase this clue across time, memory, and Europe, to discover why their beloved mother abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person can ever be answered. So who was Cecilia? Martin’s eccentric wife, Gustav’s enigmatic muse, an absent mother – a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Martin’s daughter Rakel stumbles across a clue about what happened to her mother, she becomes determined to fill in the gaps in her family’s story. But she can’t escape the simple question at the heart of it all: How can anyone leave someone they love?

One thing I wouldn’t call this book, though, is propulsive. It proceeds at a leisurely, unhurried – some might even say self-indulgent – pace. It’s a novel to savour, not to tear through, and for this reason alone, I can’t honestly say that I loved it. Scene after scene draws to a close just when it felt as though an ­integral moment was approaching, which can be frustrating – but it’s also rather fitting, since Sandgren faithfully replicates this on a macro level, too.

Instead, Collected Works is a kind of assemblage of (connected-)character portraits, or indeed a collective portrait of a family in the largest sense of the word -- shaped, in no small part by Cecilia's presence and then absence, but hardly only so. At times I wondered whether Jonathan Franzen had transplanted his relentless but futile quest to write the Great American Novel to Europe instead, but Sandgren has far more about her than Franzen, including a lightness of touch that means you don’t feel the constant presence of the author looking over your shoulder. The book’s length gives the characters and scenes space to breathe until you’re entirely immersed in the world Sandgren creates. Curiously, despite the characters being exactly the kind of people you’d skip parties altogether to avoid, and possibly even move house, this long immersion in their lives means you find yourself caring about what happens to them in a manner reminiscent of the work of Sally Rooney. Every sentence has been constructed with immense care. Every scene has been honed and polished until it sings. There is not a word that hasn’t been carefully considered before its inclusion, then reconsidered with each redrafting. […] It is without doubt one of the most meticulously built works of fiction I’ve read in a long time.” This book grabs me, pulls me along, dances with me and shouts, ’Come a little further! Come on! Immerse yourself! Hold me all night!”the astounding detail Sandgren injects into each of her characters, any one of whom could be the protagonist of their own story”[…] “A remarkable, addictive and quietly subversive work” This kind of self-centredness is hardly the exception in Collected Works, which pulls no punches when it comes to skewering the preening, posturing, down-punching Swedish intellectual elite. (...) Wittgenstein is just one of many philosophers and artists invoked, but the author doesn’t allow big ideas to overburden the plot: explosive revelations arrive with a slap whenever things begin to drag. Schrödinger also appears, and the novel’s interest in impish paradoxicality even attains a formal expression: this is a book that manages to be both far too long and, somehow, pretty much exactly the right length." - David Annand, Times Literary Supplement Sandgren strikes a nice balance between comedy and coming-of-age […] A lovely atmosphere to lose yourself in […] Gorgeous and heightened” Philosophers, on the other hand, were solitary creatures of the mind, soaring high above the mishmash of family in a celestial craft built of thought alone: by default, a philosopher worked alone. His failure as a writer show his limitations -- but also make him the man he is: a good family man, a good boss.

That was many years ago now, during a period when he’d spent a lot of time with a fairly pleasant graphic designer. She kept dragging him to open houses, possibly to demonstrate her independence. “I’ve been thinking about buying a flat,” she’d say, and Martin could never figure out whether she was trying to communicate something else. Either way, there was always something wrong with the flats they went to see. One was on the ground floor, one had a dark-green kitchen. Too expensive, too small, too new. While she talked to estate agents about pipes and balconies, Martin strolled around other people’s homes, staged to make them look like someone-lives-here-but-not-quite, amusing himself by trying to identify the algorithms of the open house. There were always pots of fresh herbs with the price tag still on in the kitchens. Certain kinds of cushions had always been placed just so on the sofas. A tealight always burned on the bathroom sink.There is also a book that Martin gives Rakel, which he asks her to prepare a readers report on, so that he can decide whether or not he wants to buy the Swedish rights for it. Hoewel de Zweedse meer een verhalenverteller dan een woordkunstenaar is, kan ze de zaken met weinig opsmuk (een nacht is ‘intens Van Gogh-blauw’, een vrouw heeft ‘een Da Vinci- It makes me ecstatic that literature can be this too: a doorstopper of narrative joy, cultivation, and linguistic delight.”