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standing to the height of tall reeds and the stalks of the nettles growing to the thickness of the trunks of young trees. 34In the midst of these threatening transformations, the central character now finds herself alone but for the Kid, who suddenly appears as the embodiment of the adolescent’s sense of split and alienation, small and innocent and cosseted by the adults as long as they have remained, the Kid becomes the butt of the confusion and anger raging in the older girl. The torture and killing of the Kid, presented as prerequisites for the adult phase of the central character’s life, convey the extent of the plight of the adolescent girl in this powerful text.
Aliide, Aliide (1991), Mare Kandre’s most ambitious work to date, again focuses on a young girl and on processes that are necessarily and painfully private. The greater detail of this narrative makes for an unusual intensity, enhanced by the fact that the third-person narrator retains a perspective very close to that of Aliide herself.
Aliide is a young schoolgirl who has recently arrived from an English-speaking country to a Swedish seaport where she now lives with her family, including a younger brother. While they have a flat in a new high-rise block, much of the surrounding area towards the harbour consists of narrow streets with old, dilapidated houses whose gateways open on to dark courtyards and flights of creaking wooden stairs. In the first third of the book it is this dark and threatening environment that predominates as Aliide criss-crosses it with a friend from school, observing a prostitute and a battered woman and coping with the approaches of drunken men. Aliide’s perspective on life could be described as hypersensitive, and at one level the dark and frightening places to which she is drawn function as images, as substitutes for something else.
A routine medical examination at school brings Aliide’s suppressed trauma closer to the surface. Vivid dreams and images chart her journey into compulsive behaviour, self-hatred and guilt, the text overwhelmingly conveying the depth of her feelings as the necessity of covering up her situation splits her against herself. The sight of pregnant women reinforces her sense of fragmentation as she envisages that which has been forced into them and is now growing beyond control; 35 and for all her efforts to protect her family, her effective separation from them is confirmed by a nightmarish and perhaps visionary experience which shows up their passivity and helplessness as a drunken intruder frightens Aliide into hiding. 36
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Summer brings the traditional family visit to Aliide’s grandparents, in the mountains by a lake which is reputed to contain a monster, although the girl looks in vain for any sign that ‘something enormous and monstrous was living in their midst, year in and year out, in the best of health’. 37 In the oppressive atmosphere of this family circle, the surreal world of imagery is unleashed as Aliide is nauseated by a meal in which fish from the lake, netted by her grandfather, becomes the progeny of the monster and berries from the garden turn into clots of blood and pieces of internal organs. The immediate solution to Aliide’s riddle is of less interest than the psychological conviction and narrative control which Mare Kandre brings to bear on this text about a victim of child sexual abuse, the compulsive use of imagery in particular confronting the reader with the profound sense of alienation and fragmentation that is haunting the central character.
Aliide, Aliide claims, perhaps unconvincingly, that its central character is its fictitious author. In Deliria (Deliria, 1992), by contrast, an author who would seem to have much in common with Mare Kandre appears repeatedly, reinforcing the self-reflexivity of the text. With regard to form, this work is Mare Kandre’s most experimental yet mixing a sparse, poetic prose with more distinctive poems; Kerstin Ekman’s The Knife-Thrower’s Woman may well have served as a source of inspiration. The complexity and deliberate unsettledness of the text is reinforced by the structure, with sections contrasted against each other and left suspended by their mutual tensions.
Deliria is a book about writing perceived in the context of death, about the urge and need for creativity in a world bent on destruction. The text conveys a strong ecological consciousness; and it is most emphatically a text written by a woman, an on-going search for a new and more adequate language. Mare Kandre has described how both her subsequent books were born out of the sense of freedom she experienced when writing Deliria; 28 and bolder approaches to both subject matter and text certainly characterise her latest volumes.
Djävulen och Gud (The Devil and God, 1993) uses a sparse, poetic prose to tear apart the grandest of the grand narratives. In Mare Kandre’s version, the Devil is the complex and interesting character while God begins life as a spoilt little boy and soon loses interest in his creation. Depicting how humankind thoughtlessly depletes the resources of the earth and indulges in one war more destructive than the other, the text’s litany of
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