Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Quicksand
WORK NOTES: trans by Rachel Willson-Broyles
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1969
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brussels
STATE:
COUNTRY: Belgium
NATIONALITY: Swedish
http://www.otherpress.com/authors/malin-persson-giolito/ * http://ahlanderagency.com/authors/malin-persson-giolito/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1969, in Stockholm, Sweden; married; children: three daughters.
EDUCATION:Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, law degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Lawyer and writer. European Commission in Brussels, Belgium, lawyer.
AWARDS:Swedish Crime Writers Academy, Best Swedish Crime Novel of the year, and Best Nordic Crime Novel of the year, both for Quicksand.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1969 in Stockholm, Swedish lawyer and writer Malin Persson Giolito is now based in Brussels, Belgium. Her novel, Quicksand about a mass shooting at a prep school received critical praise and was named both Best Swedish Crime Novel and Best Nordic Crime Novel of the year. Giolito earned a law degree from Uppsala University in Sweden and was a lawyer for large law firms in the Nordic region. She also served as an official for the European Commission in Brussels.
Translated into English by Rachel Willson-Broyles, Giolito’s book Quicksand is her English language debut. Set in a prep school in a wealthy Stockholm suburb, the story finds eighteen-year-old Maja Norberg on trial for her role in a school shooting perpetrated by her privileged boyfriend, Sebastian Fagerman. Maja admits she killed Sebastian, the son of a wealthy yet abusive father, and her best friend, Amanda. However, what is not so clear is whether Maja was coerced into the shooting by the manipulative Sebastian or if she participated willingly. The story is told in present tense as Maja sits in jail awaiting her trial and during her trial, and in past tense as she remembers and recounts what transpired on the day of the shooting.
Praising the book for its sharp social commentary and for its appropriate language and tone, a Kirkus Reviews writer declared that the author “gives us the unsettling monologue of a teenage girl as she works her way through her role in murder. It is a splendid work of fiction.” Giolito walks a fine line by not overdoing it making the narrator one of the school shooters, “developing a protagonist whom readers will remain intrigued by and ambivalent about, but whom they won’t necessarily like,” according to Booklist contributor Henrietta Verma.
Using the themes in the book, Giolito addresses the changes in Swedish society, privilege of the wealthy, effectiveness of the justice system, intrusiveness of the media, teen angst, and guilt. Despite the left leaning inclinations of Swedish society, Giolito addresses the racism surrounding refugees who have settled in Sweden. Writing in Washington Post, Patrick Anderson commented: “Her story examines the corrosive effects of vast wealth. Even the novel’s title, ‘Quicksand,’ suggests a world that will suck in, swallow and devour the unwary. Giolito always shows sympathy for Maja, who is variously brave, confused, self-destructive.” In her review in Library Journal, Nancy McNicol noted that Giolito has created a narrator who forces readers to search for the truth in Maja’s commentary of her life and decisions, adding: “Brilliantly conceived and executed, this [is an] extraordinary legal thriller.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Henrietta Verma, review of Quicksand, p. 31.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Quicksand.
Library Journal, January 1, 2016, Nancy McNicol, review of Quicksand, p. 88.
Washington Post, March 15, 2017, Patrick Anderson, review of Quicksand.
ONLINE
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com (March 26, 2017), review of Quicksand.
World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org (March 1, 2017), review of Quicksand.
Malin Persson Giolito was born in Stockholm in 1969, and grew up in Djursholm, Sweden. She holds a degree in law from Uppsala University and has worked as a lawyer for the biggest law firm in the Nordic region and as an official for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. She is now a full-time writer and has written four novels including Quicksand, her English debut. Persson Giolito lives with her husband and three daughters in Brussels.
Malin Persson Giolito is a lawyer and writer based in Brussels, Belgium. Her latest novel, Quicksand (2016), was published to a chorus of critical praise, and it was named both Best Swedish Crime Novel and Best Nordic Crime Novel of the year.
Giolito, Malin Persson: QUICKSAND
(Jan. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Giolito, Malin Persson QUICKSAND Other Press (Adult Fiction) $26.95 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-59051-857-1
Sharp social commentary through the tragic story of a young woman's trial for mass murder.Swedish novelist Giolito begins her English-language debut with a powerful view of a crime scene. To the narrator, 18-year-old Maja, her fellow classmates are still in the present tense, the horror not yet real. As she tells her tale we understand that she is at the center of a school shooting perpetrated by her boyfriend, Sebastian Fagerman, and the question is whether she is complicit. Both teenagers come from privileged backgrounds, she from a loving home she has no patience for, and he the son of "the richest man in Sweden," who verbally abuses him. Giolito keeps the narrative moving quickly, alternating between the present tense of Maja's jail cell and the courtroom and her memories of parties and travels with her jet-setting boyfriend, though as Maja says, "there are no chapters in this mess." That mess takes in the uneasy place of race in modern-day Sweden and the voracious press that amplifies the details of everything in Maja's young life. There is no suspense in the shooting of Amanda, Maja's best friend, or of Sebastian. She did it and admits to it. The literary anticipation here is in the telling of the tale, the facts that turn the story to something else, and yes, the verdict. The rhythm, tone, and language are just right, due in great part to the fine translation by Willson-Broyles. Giolito gives us the unsettling monologue of a teenage girl as she works her way through her role in murder. It is a splendid work of fiction.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Giolito, Malin Persson: QUICKSAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357437&it=r&asid=9185f942a0cc2b947c5fa35656343dc4. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357437
Giolito, Malin Persson. Quicksand
Nancy McNicol
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Giolito, Malin Persson. Quicksand. Other. Mar. 2017.432p. tr. from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles. ISBN 9781590518571. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9781590518588. F
This startling and compelling English-language debut by a Swedish novelist centers on the plight of 18-year old Maja Norberg, who stands accused in the mass shooting deaths of her teacher and several of her friends and classmates at the private school she attended. Is Maja truly responsible for this tragedy or was she coerced into participating by her boyfriend, who was among those who died? In a voice that deftly portrays teen bravado, distrust, and naivety, Maja narrates a tale that interweaves her daily life in jail, her experiences in the courtroom, and her drug-influenced memories of the shooting, its antecedents, and its aftermath. Giolito has created a superb unreliable narrator, one who forces readers to search for the truth within the emotionally charged commentary as Maya attempts to examine her situation objectively and prepare for a harrowing final outcome. VERDICT Brilliantly conceived and executed, this extraordinary legal thriller is not to be missed by fans of the genre. [Library marketing.]--Nancy McNicol, Hamden P.L., CT
McNicol, Nancy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McNicol, Nancy. "Giolito, Malin Persson. Quicksand." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 88. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562310&it=r&asid=cfca16aa9567a7d6117e0f58299328d9. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562310
Quicksand
Henrietta Verma
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Quicksand. By Malin Persson Giolito. Tr. by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Mar. 2017.432p. Other, $26.95 (9781590518571).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Giolito's astonishing English-language debut (she has published three other books in her native Sweden) is a dark exploration of the crumbling European social order and the psyches of rich Swedish teens. It alternates between courtroom and jailhouse scenes and life before a school shooting, telling the first-person story of Maja, a rich-girl-accused-shooter who is perfectly portrayed as obsessed with the actions of others and simultaneously jaded beyond belief by them. Maja is said to have shot classmates in a pact with her boyfriend, and the broad details of the crime aren't in dispute; rather the trial hinges on what exactly happened and why. In crafting a first-person narrative told by a school shooter, many authors would go too far, creating an overly likable character; Giolito masterfully walks this fine line, developing a protagonist whom readers will remain intrigued by and ambivalent about, but whom they won't necessarily like. Giolito's past as a lawyer and as a European Union official poke through the pages as she exposes the cutting racism that refugees in Europe endure, even in supposed left-wing-idyll Sweden. Praise must also go to translator Willson-Broyles, as the incisive language that's on display here surely involves translation precision that's second to none.--Henrietta Verma
YA: The complexly portrayed teen narrator will resonate with many YA readers. HV.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Verma, Henrietta. "Quicksand." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 31. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474718570&it=r&asid=58109fa0e89a10eec67e085430edc114. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474718570
Book World: 'Quicksand' by Malin Persson Giolito: Sweden's latest blockbuster thriller lives up to the hype
Patrick Anderson
(Mar. 15, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Patrick Anderson
Quicksand
By Malin Persson Giolito
Translated from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Other Press. 498 pp. $25.95
---
"Quicksand," a remarkable new novel from Sweden, takes us deep into the life of Maja Norburg, who is 18, blessed with beauty, brains and rich parents - and on trial for mass murder.
The novel, arriving here after success in Europe, in some ways recalls "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," but because Maja narrates her own story, we come to know her more intimately than we do Lisbeth Salander. What we don't know is whether the story will end with Maja going to prison.
The book opens with Maja in court, charged with carrying out several murders with her lover, Sebastian Fagerman, the handsome and charismatic but unstable son of the richest man in Sweden. They are said to have killed Sebastian's father in his home and then moved on to their school to kill a teacher and several of their classmates. The outburst of violence ends with Maja fatally shooting Sebastian - possibly in self-defense - and left to face justice alone. Her high-priced lawyer expresses optimism that the reader may find difficult to share.
As the prosecution presents its case, Maja thinks disdainfully about almost everyone. She scorns the prosecutor for her "tacky earrings ... uneven bangs and eyebrows that look like they were drawn on with a ballpoint pen." She says the teacher who was shot to death "thought rock concerts could save the world from war, famine and disease." Her own mother "has always been inexplicably clueless," and her best friend, Amanda, another victim, is mocked for being superficial: "When she watched YouTube videos about the world's fattest man leaving his house for the first time in thirty years she would say 'Shh! Not now! I'm watching the news.'" Readers deficient in the milk of human kindness may warm to tart-tongued Maja.
The story alternates between courtroom scenes and Maja's richly detailed memories. She recalls losing her virginity at 15 to a boy who smoked hash, played bass and wrote poetry. But her great love is Sebastian, who gives the wildest parties, uses the coolest drugs and jets off to New York and Paris for weekends. Soon after they meet, she joins him for a voyage to Capri on his father's yacht. The author, Malin Persson Giolito, carries us deep into the lives of these star-crossed lovers and the decadent society that shaped them. Sebastian, whose mother was banished years earlier and whose truly nasty father despised him, was doomed from the start.
Once Sebastian is gone, Maja is left loving no one except her 5-year-old sister, whom she hasn't seen since she was sent to jail to await trial. Except for missing her sister, Maja doesn't mind jail, because it's quiet and private and she's safe from all the people who newspaper headlines have taught to hate her.
Giolito, who practiced law before she turned to fiction, writes with exceptional skill. She seems to know everything about Stockholm's rich and the ways of teenage girls. Her story examines the corrosive effects of vast wealth. Even the novel's title, "Quicksand," suggests a world that will suck in, swallow and devour the unwary.
Giolito always shows sympathy for Maja, who is variously brave, confused, self-destructive and beset by problems she doesn't understand: "Why did Sebastian choose me? There had to be a reason! Why did he come to me at the hotel that night? Why did he track me down in Nice? Why did he stay? Why did he try to kill himself when I broke up with him?" Of course, after he failed to kill himself she went back to him, to try to save him, and disaster followed.
It's a long novel, perhaps a little too long, but always smart and engrossing. We race along to learn whether Maja's lawyer can save her. Or whether, in fact, prison may be where she belongs. Giolito keeps us guessing a long time and the outcome, when it arrives, is just as it should be.
---
Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anderson, Patrick. "Book World: 'Quicksand' by Malin Persson Giolito: Sweden's latest blockbuster thriller lives up to the hype." Washington Post, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485574374&it=r&asid=fee35cdc4003d0ba38bf983cdbe6a300. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485574374
A Thriller Tracks the Aftermath of a Swedish School Shooting
By LIDIJA HAASMARCH 23, 2017
Continue reading the main story
Share This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
QUICKSAND
By Malin Persson Giolito
Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles
501 pp. Other Press. $25.95.
“Quicksand” is a novel that begins like a parlor game gone awry: On its first page, a little cross-section of contemporary Swedish society — a right-on homeroom teacher, a Ugandan foster child, a cashmere-clad blonde, a son of Middle Eastern immigrants — lies on the floor, spattered with blood, as if darkly satirizing the country’s self-image of civilized multiculturalism. A few pages later, 18-year-old Maria Norberg is on trial for her involvement in the school shooting instigated by her boyfriend, Sebastian. The extent of her complicity remains unclear, but Sebastian, the son of a billionaire described as Sweden’s richest man, died at the scene, leaving Maria as the sole focus of the media’s frothing fever dream about the case. (Bear in mind that this is Scandinavia, where such massacres are not the increasingly common occurrence they’ve become in the United States.) She is now a totemic hate figure, with the press gleefully encouraging the spoiled-brat view of her shared by her guards in jail, “a chick who’s never even been camping without a down pillow and the latest-generation phone.”
The first of Malin Persson Giolito’s four novels to be translated into English, “Quicksand” is also the first to be told from the perspective of a defendant rather than a lawyer. Her earlier books are not all courtroom dramas, though they do draw on her years of experience working for a major law firm. What we’re reading here is not so much Maria’s unfiltered thoughts as her speech to an imaginary audience: Mostly we listen in as she tries to make sense of what happened, but she occasionally addresses us directly, speculating as to what assumptions we might make about her and what comfy delusions we may be harboring about ourselves. The voice is uneven, unpredictable in a way that feels characteristic of a teenager — Maria is scathing in her dissection of other people’s clothes, habits and pretensions, yet she also sometimes slips into sentimental reveries about her 5-year-old sister: “I dream that she places her little hand, light as a birch leaf, on my arm, looks at me, and asks why.”
Photo
Malin Persson Giolito
Credit
Viktor Fremling
Though often numb after so many months of isolation and interrogation, Maria remains sensitive to the nuances of performance required of her and everyone else, both in daily life and in court. We don’t usually hear her addressed as Maria, except by the prosecutor: She goes by the younger-sounding “Maja,” and when asked on the stand where she lives, instead of naming her upscale neighborhood, Djursholm, she must simply say, “With my mom and dad and little sister.” She notes that her mother, in a new blouse for the hearing, is “dressed up as a mom who had done everything right, a mom who couldn’t be blamed for anything,” while her expensive lawyers evidently think they’re “part of an American TV show where you eat Chinese food from takeout cartons in an I’m-so-busy-and-important sort of way.” It’s a P.R. disaster (in the vein of Amanda Knox’s infamous cartwheel or yoga stretch) when, asked by a journalist shortly after the killings how she’s doing, she reflexively says, “Fine, thanks.”
The novel is structured as a courtroom procedural, yet it clearly has ambitions beyond that, addressing Sweden’s underlying economic and racial tensions. Characters often conform to social as well as narrative type, and we can’t ignore the connections between the two: There’s Sebastian the rich, troubled boy with daddy issues and a drug problem; Samir Said, the gifted student living in a bad neighborhood who irons his jeans and nurses his resentments; Maja’s parents, with their knife rack and wine cooler, and their diplomas displayed in the guest bathroom of their McMansion, who can’t conceal their delight when Maja begins dating the billionaire’s son.
The facts of the case are revealed gradually, and along the way Maja continually dwells on the kinds of questions that are, as her celebrity lawyer puts it, “not judicially relevant” — such as why she and Sebastian did what they did. One answer the novel offers is that we shouldn’t be so interested either way. People who commit horrific crimes usually have the same more or less banal feelings and motivations as anyone else: They couldn’t meet their needs or control their anger; they were loved too little or indulged too much. (You could say that this very ordinariness helps explain why mass shootings occur more frequently in countries with laxer gun laws.) This seems both true and intriguing, but it does raise the question of why Persson Giolito spends so long on the weakest sections of her story, in which Maja recalls a series of lurid parties, tearful breakups and tense family dinners, and explores the ins and outs of Sebastian’s dime-store psychology.
In the end, the novel’s emotional logic keeps it on a fairly conventional path, but it nonetheless points to issues beyond its own frame. The best-known mass killing in the Nordic region is still that perpetrated by Anders Breivik, who left behind copious documentation of his white-supremacist ideology. Sebastian’s motives seem far smaller, more personal, but then there’s the scene in which he humiliates Samir in front of friends, suggesting Samir must be lying about his parents’ original professions: “How is it that all the immigrants who come here and start working as metro drivers and maids,” he asks, “are really doctors and civil engineers and nuclear physicists back in their home countries? . . . Did anyone work as a grocery store cashier in Syria or walk around parks in Iran picking up empty bottles?” While Sebastian’s cruel dad undermines him, Maja’s account makes clear that everyone and everything else around him confirms his importance and superiority. It’s a commonplace by now that if someone of Middle Eastern extraction commits a violent crime, the press is quick to attribute it to fanaticism, to a violent ideology. When a white person is responsible for a shooting, there tends to be more interest in his emotions, his personal history. Here, Persson Giolito implies that rich white people’s feelings may have their ideological underpinnings too.
Lidija Haas is a senior editor at Bookforum.
A version of this review appears in print on March 26, 2017, on Page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: First-Person Shooter. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Continue
Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito
FICTION
Author:
Malin Persson Giolito
Translator:
Rachel Willson-Broyles
New York. Other Press. 2017. 432 pages.
Truth be told, Malin Persson Giolito’s fourth novel, Quicksand, is an indictment of the zeitgeist.
Victor Hugo called quicksand “a pit of mire in a cavern of night” in Les Misérables. Appearing safe, a bog pulls you down—deeper if you struggle, as the protagonist does figuratively in this English-language debut. A Swedish author based in Belgium, Persson Giolito puts a teenage girl on trial for involvement in a mass shooting at a Stockholm prep school. The Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy named Quicksand 2016 Best Crime Novel of the Year.
Maria (“Maja”) Norberg gets the whole volume as a forum, but her flippant first-person voice prevents it from becoming a tearjerker. She paints a sweltering global landscape with prophetic condemnation.
Quicksand opens in a classroom with six people: five shot, one not—Maja Norberg. Shot are the teacher and four students: Maja’s boyfriend (Sebastian, son of Sweden’s richest man), Maja’s best friend (Amanda), Samir (in a special program in international economics and social sciences), and a trade-school pupil from Uganda.
Forty-four short chapters cover three weeks of daily court proceedings plus Maja’s relationships with her parents, lawyers, teachers, and peers. Section titles set scenes: The Classroom, The Ambulance, The Hospital, The Women’s Jail, Sebastian, and Samir.
Quicksand is a whydunit, not a whodunit. What exactly did Maja do—or not do? Seeking that answer, Persson Giolito employs the young woman in broader queries. What is “truth”? Or “justice”? How unequal can a society become while remaining stable? Let’s examine prejudice, refugees, deportation, class, immigrants, the American Dream, economics, parenting, race, and human news value. The author scrutinizes gender issues—the liability of being a smart girl and the Bechdel Test of a movie’s sexism.
Maja’s lawyer debates the semantic criminality of teenagers expressing themselves “carelessly, but inappropriately” à la psychologist B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior: “What is said by a sentence is something more than what the words in it mean.” Maja notes a “fresh new wrinkle in the Narrative.” The references range from David Bowie to the Bible.
Quicksand corresponds to Les Misérables. As Jean Valjean literally carried Marius above his head through the Paris sewer quicksand, Maja Norberg metaphorically carries Sebastian until his weight pushes her down—leaving us with Inspector Javert’s quandary of “the human heart inadmissible” as evidence.
Quicksand will pull you in, to wonder at the end if it’s over.
Lanie Tankard
Austin, Texas