“The dispensable” by Sigrid Combüchen – Swedish Radio

Sigrid Combüchen got Augustpriset other year for the novel “Spill”. In his new book, she has immersed himself in a woman who has the Swedish literary history’s worst reputation. Ida Brooks Mann, who lived between 1867 and 1950, is best known for being a millstone around the necks snillens. Catherine Wikars have read “The dispensable.”

An obituary can be like a thick blanket over a poor person’s life. And Sigrid Combüchen has written a sort of lurching biography rather than a novel, quote, it carried me forward to wallpaper the wallpaper.

And it is hard, in two minutes or so dealing with this. Both Ida Backmann as if one is neither well-read on Frödings or Selma Lagerlof’s biographies may not even know now. Ida Backmann has said that given the reputation as pushy person around berömdheters throats, but traveled alone across continents and wrote in a time when most women most sat at home and embroidered.

And Combüchen tells of her not chronologically but in one kind of loop, begins in the bad reputation and ends approximately at the same place but then the reader got several entrances to this woman, psychological models, positive contemporary reviews and even more quotes from the literary canon as determined to legitimizing contempt when they touched the topic Ida Backmann.

After the first reading of the book I am most annoyed at Combüchens own opinions about Backmann which I think adds another blanket over an unknown to me author’s legacy, it becomes another layer of speculation about her possible tactics and tokbesattheten in Frödingshöjd.

At second reading intrudes Ida Backmann through and past those learnings and leave Frödingshöjd and paradoxically also Combüchen behind. Here it goes fast. She actually traveled to the utopian ecological communities in the Netherlands for over a hundred years ago, was in Russia during the Revolution of 1905, when the oil wells in Baku and in Argentina several years before Evert Taube. Although now she monomant revisited his memories of Frödingshöjd during the trips.

But much to be held in this biography. And the book require a second reading to the entrance is so steep. And the circular drama feels most messy first time. And you have to get through the layers of layers of views, including Combüchens to expose a small section of the assembled complex person Ida Brooks Mann seems to have been.

Right now I’m more interested in her car driving than the relationship to Frödingshöjd.

Catherine Wikars
katarina.wikars@sverigesradio.se