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Swedish Women's writing 1850 - 1995

Experimentation and Innovation

MARE KANDRE (1962 - 2005)

Mare Kandre’s 1991 novel, Aliide, Aliide, contains a striking depiction of the creative urge that a clean sheet of paper and a crayon can unleash in the central character:

  ”Sometimes the power was such that she couldn’t control her hand but it moved by itself, or was conducted by the picture itself, by what she was in the process of drawing; by the tree or the strange dog with three eyes or the lonely dead little girl whose face could be glimpsed behind the window of the locked house. And it was glowing and aching with all that which now, at once, had to get out before it was too late! Her arm grew numb almost up to her elbow, and the outside world with its people, all its life, she could no longer take in. 30”
The powerful imagery, conveyed by a vivid, rhythmical language which, as her writing develops, becomes increasingly prone to challenging the conventions of genre and style, is one of Mare Kandre’s hallmarks. And it is no accident that the artist portrayed above is female: in almost all her books to date, the central character is a young girl or a woman who, moreover, reflects a growing awareness of the restrictions imposed by patriarchal society on female creativity. But the exclusion of the outside world, referred to at the end of the passage above, is con-spicuous only in Mare Kandre’s early books, as the perspective of the young girl confronted by adulthood gradually expands to allow more wide-ranging investigations into human existence.
  Mare Kandre was born in 1962 into a family of Estonian origin (Editor’s note: her mother was of Estonian origin, her father of Swedish). As a child she spent some years in Canada, but the family then returned to Sweden and settled in Gothen- burg. Both milieux are reflected in her early books. Having decided in her early teens to become a writer, Mare Kandre left school at the age of 16 and her first book published when she was 22. 31



 

 

 At the time of her debut, she was a member of a punk band; she has also had paintings
exhibited in Stockholm, where she now lives. Gradually, however, her writing has taken over, and to date she has published eight books. She is generally regarded as one of Sweden’s most promising young writers.
  I ett annat land (In a Different Country), the book which Mare Kandre published in 1984, is a series of prose texts exploring the identity via the experiences of a young girl. There is little plot in the conventional sense: the focus is on the first-person narrator’s relations with the surrounding world and with her self. The strongly atmospheric language with its evocative imagery endows the setting with dimensions that are both physical and psychological, making the young girl emerge as so many reflections of her environment.
  The prose poems in Bebådelsen (The Annunciation, 1986), explore the experiences of a girl at the age of puberty, again developing original imagery and a language that made one reviewer discern parallels with Sylvia Plath as well as Birgitta Trotzig. 32 To some extent, the book can be seen to anticipate Bübins unge (Bübin’s Kid, 1987), the novel which came to mark Mare Kandre’s breakthrough.
  Here the first-person narrator is again a young girl. She is living with a woman and a man known as Bübin and Uncle, but these characters fade away as the central character’s physical growth and development begin to command all attention. The sparse and highly charged language depict her as of a piece with nature, for worse rather than for better:
 

I cannot venture out, I am not big enough, I cannot hang on, I am disappearing into this fiarious growing! “I am sitting far in, deep inside my body, listening to the bushes scratching the walls of the house, the grass turning white again, the hard earth beneath the stones softening, and it cannot resist any longer, there is nothing left: no one escapes it, no one finds a way out!
I am holding on to Uncle’s chair with my eyes closed.
Outside the world is falling apart with this growing.
Bit by bit. 33
As the central character begins to menstruate, the landscape becomes increasingly surreal, the grass
 
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