Contemporary Authors

• Jagannath ( short stories) Cheeky Frawg Books 2012

1. Amatka https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043285 Tidbeck, Karin, 1977- author. Amatka. English Amatka / Karin Tidbeck. New York : Vintage Books, 2017. 216 pages ; 21 cm PT9877.3.I45 A6313 2017 ISBN: 9781101973950 (softcover)

• Jagannath: Stories - 2012 Cheeky Frawg Books, https://smile.amazon.com/Jagannath-Stories-Karin-Tidbeck/dp/0985790407/ref=sr_1_2_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1514004518&sr=8-2&keywords=Karin+Tidbeck+Jagannath

• Karin Tidbeck - http://www.karintidbeck.com/bio/

  Karin Tidbeck is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Malmö as a freelance writer, translator and creative writing teacher, and writes fiction in Swedish and English. She debuted in 2010 with the Swedish short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?. Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the Crawford Award 2013 and shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel debut, Amatka, will be out in English in 2017.

  She devotes her spare time to forteana, subversive cross-stitching and Nordic LARP.

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/ktidbeck

  Instagram: ktidbeck

• Rain Taxi - http://www.raintaxi.com/karin-tidbeck/

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I don’t consider genre while writing, and I honestly don’t know,” she told Rain Taxi online interviewer Matt Bell, who had asked her to categorize her writing. “I don’t go out of my way to write Weird Fiction, or in any other genre. Some of my stuff easily slips into the Weird slot. … I do love the weird, and I realize that I write much in that tradition (although like I said it’s unintentional), so I’m happy to be counted in among some of my favorite authors.”
  Taking the Consequences — An Interview with Karin Tidbeck

  Interviewed by Matt Bell

  Born in 1977 in Stockholm, Sweden, Karin Tidbeck lives and works in Malmö. An alumna of the 2010 Clarion San Diego writers’ workshop, she studied comparative religion and social anthropology at the University of Stockholm and creative writing at Skurups folkhögskola, where she also trained as a creative writing instructor.
  Karin Tidbeck

  photo by Rebecka Eriksson

  She has worked as a freelance writer for role-playing productions in schools and theatres, and has written articles and essays on gaming and interactive arts theory. Her short stories and poetry began appearing in Swedish around 2002, and she has been publishing in English since 2010. Her debut short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? awarded her the coveted one-year working grant from the Swedish Authors’ Fund. Her English publication history includes stories in Weird Tales, Shimmer Magazine, Unstuck Annual, and the anthology Odd?, as well as the collection Jagannath (Cheeky Frawg, $11.99). She recently sold her first novel to Sweden’s largest publisher.

  Matt Bell: The debut short story collection is a notoriously uneven form. I rarely read every story, much less in order, and even more rarely with the growing admiration and awe that I felt toward Jagannath. It starts strong with “Beatrice,” which is clever and funny and touching, and every story in the early part is equally enjoyable. But then, around the middle of the book, it swings into more elemental, mythic territory. I associate the way these stories got under my skin with things that frightened me as a kid. The deep paired weirdness of “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” and the closing title story stand out to me, but so do the stories that precede these—“Pyret” and “Cloudberry Jam,” and so on. I’m curious how you arrived at this exponentially pleasing order. How do you see the stories in the collection speaking to each other?

  JagannathKarin Tidbeck: The first half of Jagannath consists of translated stories from the Swedish collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?. The other half gathers both new stories in English and translations of Swedish originals previously unpublished in book form. We gave a lot of thought to the story order. The idea was to create a transition between themes and environments—from a world that resembles our own to worlds that don’t, from relatively mundane events to full-on weirdness. ”Beatrice” was chosen as an opener because it's both low-key but also makes a promise of more fantastic themes a little later on in the collection. The title story you could say is the crowning piece, the marzipan centipede on the cake.

  As for the stories speaking to each other, I'm not sure what to say about that. I wrote these over the course of a decade, so the themes and images have changed along with where I was in life and craft at the time, and any intertextuality (except for “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts”) is either coincidental or tied to when the story was written.

  MB: Thanks so much for sharing that organizing principle: “from a world that resembles our own to worlds that don’t, from relatively mundane events to full-on weirdness.” I can absolutely feel that while reading the book, and there’s a lot of strength in it—so many books wear down their mystery as the book progresses, where I think yours opens up, into greater and greater mystery. It hadn’t occurred to me that the stories might be written over such a long span, although of course that’s completely typical, especially for an early-career collection. Can you talk a little about how your goals for your stories have changed over that time, as you progressed through “life and craft”? What kind of stages did you move through?

  KT: My early stories revolved around reality and faith. I wrote a series of stories about the darker aspects of Christian myth: a woman who hides in the attic and watches the Apocalypse, a cult whose members preserve themselves in huge formalin tubs waiting for the Second Coming, and so on. “Rebecka” was the last of these stories and the only one to get published. “Who is Arvid Pekon?” was published around the same time, in 2002, and is quite representative of the other aspect I was working on, the breakdown of reality. After “Arvid,” I spent several years working on other types of text, such as LARP-related fiction and manuscripts, articles and essays, and copyediting. I wrote a poetry collection, too. All of these, especially LARP and poetry, changed how and what I write. When I returned to short stories, I’d started working on what is still central to much of what I try to do: putting myself in the place of the alien rather than describing it from an outside point of view. “Augusta Prima” (written in 2007) was one of the first ones in this vein. The same work that led to “Augusta Prima” also had me going deeper into Nordic folklore, something which really resonated with me. Many of the mid-collection stories have their roots here. But like everything else it’s not a straight progression: these are themes that show up every now and then and also overlap. What does seem to be a constant is that I write more emotional stories the older I get. I think a lot of that has to do with growing up in a patriarchal structure where unemotional intellect (male) is taken more seriously than delving into emotions (female), and gradually freeing myself from those expectations.

  MB: In “Aunts,” we begin the story in a place where “time is a weak and occasional phenomenon,” where “unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles,” in which there is an orangery that holds the titular Aunts, giant stretch-skinned creatures that have “one single holy task: to expand,” and the Nieces who feed them (and later butcher them, bake them, and serve them to new Aunts). There’s a cyclical nature to life in the orangery, but it is interrupted—and perhaps altered permanently—by what seems to be just a few beats of time introduced by an outsider. (I feel like I’m getting into touchy territory here—I hate to ruin any of the surprises in these stories.) In the story that precedes this one, “Augusta Prima,” the title character is told that to “measure time in a land that doesn’t want time” is to try to “map a floating country.” (But I’m also struck, looking back through the book, at how “Brita’s Holiday Village” has such a sure time structure, with its dates entries, how “Pyret” has its references and histories, a fairly sharp contrast to the timeless but time-sensitive spaces of “Aunts” and “Augusta Prima.) I wonder if you could talk about the way time works in “Aunts” and “Augusta Prima,” or in the collection as a whole: It seems like many of the stories deal with either irregular time or large expanses of it, and many of them contain a present that is affected by creatures or forces out of folkloric ages and places. What is the experience of time really like, in the Tidbeckian worldview?

  KT: I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of time. I really started working on ideas around time while organizing an experimental LARP which was set in the world of “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts.” Some of the played characters are actually present in “Augusta Prima” (Walpurgis, the twins, the page who explains time to Augusta. The croquet practice too, by the way, except it was played with lumps of meat instead of balls). In that world, Faerie -or whatever you call it- consisted of all the places where humans don't live. Time is built entirely on consensus: humans decide that they have linear time, so they do. In Faerie, in those human-free pockets, the rules are different—they have several competing concepts of time, if they acknowledge it at all. Some people from this kingdom dip in and out of the human time stream like wading birds. Get them too close to humans or human ideas, though, and they risk becoming infected with linear time. That's what happens to Augusta Prima.

  What happens in “Aunts” is that Augusta peeks in on them—so this story happens during the Augusta story—and by watching them, changes their reality. Up until then, the Aunts have lived in a bubble of circular time. Augusta calls that reality into question just by observing them. “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts,” I should mention, are the only stories tied into each other in the collection.

  MB: I love the idea of time by consensus, and it seems to me that “consensus” is at the heart of the kind of storytelling that must happen in a LARP setting, if I can infer from my own experiences playing pen-and-paper RPGs. I think there’s a lot of my own storytelling roots in my experiences with Dungeons & Dragons and the Choose Your Own Adventure books (and their variants like the Lone Wolf books by Joe Devers, which were my favorites), as well as computer games throughout my childhood. All of these differed from other kinds of books and movies by being malleable experiences, where I could direct plot and outcome, an experience intoxicating enough that it’s still, more or less, what my adult life is built on. I still occasionally play D&D in a game my brother hosts, but not too often, and I no longer DM. But you’re still actively involved in LARP, at least, and it obviously ties directly into your writing, which I find both admirable and impressive. Can you talk a bit about how you got into LARP, what an “experimental LARP” is, and how often it affects your writing or inspires it, as it did with “Augusta Prime” and “Aunts”?

  KT: You read Lone Wolf! I did, too. They were translated into Swedish fairly early on. I remember being around eight or nine and stealing my brother’s Lone Wolf books to cheat my way through them. So yeah, I’ve played computer games and tabletop RPGs since childhood, and I was always more interested in the story than anything else. (How I hated damage tables and boss fights. I still do.) Interactive storytelling was a natural part of fiction from early on, and the step into LARP was logical. I’ve used the term “experimental LARP” but it’s not very accurate. It is more descriptive to those who haven’t heard about Nordic LARP, which is the formal name for the style. Nordic LARP focuses on immersion and collaboration. It’s not a game you can win, it’s a story that you help each other tell. To an outsider it might look a bit like improv. It’s about immersing into and becoming affected by your character, getting new ideas and insights and perhaps even changing as a person. So this kind of immersion has definitely affected my writing, both when it comes to writing characters but also in creating environments and worlds.

  MB: You just had a new story published in English, as an eBook single from Tor, called “Sing”: it’s a fantastic read, and seems a continuation of the work you did in Jagannath, while also breaking new ground. Reading it this morning—and enjoying the story’s world of sound-snuffing moons and fraught parasitic ecosystems—it reminded be of one of my favorite aspects of your writing, which is the great confidence with which you approach the fantastical and the fabulist and the worldbuilding necessary to pull it all off. I recently read an essay by Karen Russell where she talked about her own inventions, which she said were grounded in a sort of “Kansas:Oz ratio,” in which a mix of real world specific detail needs to be mixed with the invented world of the story in order to create the “right sort of otherworldy cement,” and that seemed like a very sensible way of worldbuilding, but I think it’s hardly the only approach. How do you approach “creating environments and worlds,” as you say, in your own stories? What do you think it takes to make all the different kinds of fabulist writing we find in your work successful? Is there a single overarching theory at work, or is it something that varies story to story?

  KT: Worldbuilding to me is taking the consequences of an idea. All my stories and worlds spring from the basic principle of being a slave to the premise, to follow the consequences wherever they may lead without taking any easy or comfortable ways out.

  I think that the more alien and strange a world or situation is, the more concise you have to be if you want the reader to follow you. It depends on what effect you’re looking for. You have to be aware what the consequences are of the approach you take. If you want the reader to accept the premise as a given, then being specific is vital. This is what I’m after; I want the reader to accept the setting and the mindset of the characters, so we can get on with the story. So, what I do with the story itself varies of course, but what I want to do is to present the world so that the reader can access it without tripping over the details.

  MB: Of the many things that impress me in Jagannath, one of the most impressive was that you translated the book into English yourself. But then, on reading it again, I realized that wasn’t exactly what you said: In your afterword to the collection, you say, “Writing in Swedish and English are two very different experiences. Your native language resonates in your bones. Each spoken word reaffirms or changes the world as you see it, intellectually and emotionally. Because Swedish is my mother tongue, I can take enormous liberties with it because I know exactly and instinctively how it works. English doesn’t quite allow itself to be grabbed by the scruff of its neck in the same way. As a result, I’m more careful with the prose, perhaps less adventurous, because without that gut reaction it’s hard to know exactly how something will resonate with an English-speaking reader.” I was particularly struck by your note about being “less adventurous” in English, in part because it makes me curious about the process of writing these stories: You said you were “writing stories in both Swedish and English, creating translations in both languages,” which makes it sound like you’re often starting in one language or the other, but not necessarily always going in the same direction, say from a Swedish final draft to an English translation. Am I understanding that correctly? Does the process go both ways? Since you’ve started working in two languages in this way, have you noticed any new advantages or constraints in your process?

  KT: Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally. I want my voice to be consistent no matter if it's an original or a translation. So the advantage is of course that I have control of my own style. The disadvantage is that it's very time-consuming to make all these translations. As for being less adventurous—note that it only has to do with language and not storytelling. I'm just being honest about the fact that a second language won't resonate with you like the first does. I can write a story in working-class Stockholm Swedish, but I'm not going to assume I can perform the same feat with Cockney. I'll focus on adventures in story, themes and structure instead.

  MB: Your work has been championed by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, who in the past year or so published The Weird, an 1100+ page anthology of “strange and dark stories,” in addition to starting Weird Fiction Review, where your work has appeared. I know it’s sometimes easy to resist labels and groupings, but do you identify yourself with weird fiction or the New Weird? How do you see this area of speculative fiction developing right now, and where do you see your work in relation to it? I’m so curious to see what you publish next, and how the work continues to enstrange, to subvert, to build upon what’s come before, both in your own work and the work of others.

  KT: I don’t consider genre while writing, and I honestly don’t know. I don’t go out of my way to write Weird Fiction, or in any other genre. Some of my stuff easily slips into the Weird slot. On the other hand, the novel I published last year has been classified as dystopian science fiction. Some of my other stories are talked about as fantasy, some as horror, and some aren’t talked about as genre at all. And the same story will be labeled differently depending on country. I’m not comfortable with categorizing my own work, but I don’t mind if others talk about it in relation to genre as long as they don’t try to hold it up to some genre standard.

  But there’s a context here: I come from a nation where fantastic fiction has a very low status, unless it fits into some very specific categories or is written by already established authors. I don’t by any means try to hide what I write, but the way people think in categories here is pretty extreme: it blots out discussing the actual work on its own terms. That’s made me loath to talk about my own work in terms of genre, because once you get a label, it sticks and poof go a slew of potential readers and reviewers because eww, fantasy cooties. Although I think it’s too late for me. Happily, fantastic fiction is slowly gaining in status.

  I do love the weird, and I realize that I write much in that tradition (although like I said it’s unintentional), so I’m happy to be counted in among some of my favorite authors. As for where the area is going, analyzing these things isn’t really my area of expertise (boring answer, I know, but really—not my thing). I’m sure it’ll keep on creeping on.
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  Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013

• Locus - http://locusmag.com/2017/09/karin-tidbeck-language-matters/

  Karin Tidbeck: Language Matters
  September 10, 2017 Interviews

  Karin Margareta Tidbeck was born April 6, 1977, in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew up in the suburbs. She briefly attended university before dropping out. She worked at various jobs, including in a bookshop, and just before she turned 30, enrolled in a three-year arts program. She attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2010.

  Her debut collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? (2010) appeared in Sweden. First English-language collection Jagannath was published in 2012, including translated stories from Vem är Arvid Pekon? alongside newer material; it won the Crawford Award for best first fantasy, was a World Fantasy Award finalist, and made the Tiptree Award honor list. Debut novel Amatka was published in Sweden in 2012 and appeared in English in 2017.

  Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, where she works as a freelance writer, creative writing instructor, and translator.

  Excerpts from the interview:

  ‘‘My novel Amatka is about people colonizing a world that responds to language. Matter is literally controlled by language. It’s about what happens to a community when they try to survive in a world like this, what kind of order they build, how the situation controls their language, and what it does to their mindsets. It’s about revolt­ing against that order. It’s about the power of names, the power of language, and also about how poetry can upset the order of things.”

  *

  ‘‘The premise, to me, might not be science fiction at all. It may look like science fiction, but it might as well be portal fiction or weird fiction in a science fiction jumpsuit. But to be honest, I’m not too eager or bothered to categorize it as any genre. That’s up to the reader. I’m fine with them categorizing it as science fiction, or fantasy, or weird fiction, or surrealism.”

  *

  ‘‘I don’t think about the reader when I write. I tell the story that needs to be told. I don’t think about how the reader is going to react. I basically tell the stories that go on in my head. It’s a very organic process. I’ll find a scene, or a word, or a sentence, and explore that – sort of walk around it, sniff it, trying to figure out how it works. That’s how most of my stories develop. I do a lot of automatic writ­ing. I’ll just start writing nonsense. After a while something comes up – an image, a sentence, a scene, or the basic plot for a story. There’s only one instance where that didn’t happen, where I had a sentence pop up in my head unbid­den, which was the beginning of a story called ‘Beatrice’. I was walking down the street and a voice whispered in my head that a doctor fell in love with an airship. I had to go home and figure out what that was all about.

  ‘‘I don’t write metaphors. Swedish mainstream readers really want to see my work as a metaphor, because that’s how they learned to read speculative fiction. It has to be a metaphor for something else. But I don’t write metaphors. I write ideas. What you see is what you get, pretty much. I wonder if that’s a way for readers to keep their dignity. They can say, ‘I’m reading this because it’s a metaphor,’ because they can’t say, ‘I’m reading this because it’s science fiction.’ ”

  *

  ‘‘I worked at a science fiction bookstore in Stockholm, and I would read Locus during my lunch break. I read about Clarion at UC San Diego, and started fantasizing about going to Clarion, and about being published and seeing my books in the store. I decided to become better at English, and also took a creative writing course for one year. It was a mainstream writing course and they didn’t really understand speculative fiction, so they weren’t very encouraging. I abandoned that and took other day jobs and wrote some stuff on the side. I wrote a lot of characters and plot lines for various live-action roleplaying games. Then when I was 29, I realized that I had to make a serious attempt at becoming a writer. I moved to the south of Sweden, where I went to an arts college and studied creative writing for three years. They were very encouraging. I had one teacher who was a Lovecraft fan who helped me developed my skills.”

  *

  ‘‘One of the most important reading experiences I had was with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, which I started reading when I was 15. That was a formative experience, it really was. Him and Ursula K. Le Guin, obviously. I read Kafka when I was ten. I was the odd kid in the class. We were doing book presentations in the fourth grade, and I brought in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The other kids had no idea what that was. I didn’t read Borges a lot, because I thought he was too long-winded, and I had trouble parsing his sentences. I just didn’t get into his prose, but then I was reading Swedish translations of his work. I read a lot of Forteana, and also Robert Anton Wilson. I read a couple of books by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and The Divine Invasion. I also devoured H.P. Lovecraft’s works. Lovecraft is an extremely problematic writer, but what I think I took away from him was the concept of madness and reality, the sensation that our reality is just a thin shell, and behind that shell, things move, things that we cannot understand, that we cannot conceive of. I read Solaris, but that’s the only Lem I read, and I can’t say he’s a huge influence – I read it pretty late. I think what might have had more influ­ence on me was Tchaikovsky’s version of Solaris. Speaking of Tarkovsky, there’s also his adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ Stalker.”

  *

  ‘‘I just finished another novel, which is with my agent right now, so I can’t really talk about it. It has a multiverse, so let’s just call it a weird dark fantasy novel. You could call it portal fantasy, or you could call it weird fiction. I think that, much like Amatka, it’s difficult to categorize. I will not cater to the audience. I write what’s in my head and then it’s up to the reader to categorize it. I don’t own the text anymore. It belongs to the reader. That goes partly back to me writing for LARPs, because what you do there is create the story or the character and hand it over to someone who does what they want with it, they improvise and make it their own. I’m used to the idea of creating some­thing and giving it to someone else. It’s what I do in my fiction. Once I’ve create it, it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s graduated. It’s interesting when readers try to figure out what my motivations are, because, as far as I’m concerned, my motivations don’t matter anymore.’’

Quoted in Sidelights: “tense plotting, as well as the questions she raises about language, control, and human limits make this a very welcome speculative fiction novel.”
Amatka
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p46. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Amatka
Karin Tidbeck, trans. from the Swedish by the author. Vintage, $15.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-101-97395-0
Tidbeck reimagines reality and the power of language in her dystopian sci-fi novel. Vanja lives in a world of small colonies where all produced objects revert back to primordial sludge if people do not constantly name them; the failure of one colony in this duty resulted in catastrophic loss of life. To avert similar chaos and destruction, a highly regimented communist collective tightly controls every activity (including recreation, job placement, and child-rearing) and encourages citizens to report any lapse in naming or other inappropriate behavior. The regime, however, has recently allowed some private enterprise, including Vanja's employer, a producer of hygiene products. Despite her shyness, Vanja is sent to interview the inhabitants of the outer colony Amatka about what products would help them and their underground mushroom farms withstand the harsh tundra climate. In this new environment, Vanja encounters the small subversions of the local librarian trying to save history, her retired-doctor housemate whose questions rattle Vanja, and a famous poet who mysteriously disappeared years before. Emboldened by their actions, Vanja starts to doubt the commune's motives and rapidly learns that there is more going on than anyone is willing to admit. Tidbeck introduces the mysteries and mechanics of her world slowly while leaving the origins of these pioneers opaque. Her ending takes a turn into much weirder territory, but her tense plotting, as well as the questions she raises about language, control, and human limits make this a very welcome speculative fiction novel. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Amatka." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 46. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A490319225/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=429ffbee. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319225
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Jagannath
Publishers Weekly.
259.39 (Sept. 24, 2012): p57. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: Jagannath
Karin Tidbeck. Cheeky Frawg (www.cheekyfrawg.com), $11.99 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-9857904-0-0
A man in a troubled romantic relationship with an airship and the horror of being suicidally depressed in the presence of a merciful and loving God are just two of the intensely memorable stories in the English-language debut of Swedish fanrasist Tidbeck (Vem ar Arvid Pekon?). The title story explores a society of symbiotes living inside a vast, nurturing "mother." An ordinary family with a history of mental illness struggles with the influence of the Vittra, strange elflike beings who may be their ancestors, in "Reindeer Mountain." A woman creates a vegetable child only to lose him to the lure of the earth in "Cloudberry Jam." Not all of Tidbeck's stories have that same quiet, elusive magic--"Herr Cederberg," for example, gradually loses its way--but all are impressively brave literary experiments. By turns brilliant and indecipherably cryptic, this book will capture the imaginations of fans of experimental fantasy and science fiction and is a fine launch for Cheeky Frawg, a new press dedicated to international and translated fiction. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jagannath." Publishers Weekly, 24 Sept. 2012, p. 57. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A303755663/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=faa5808a. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|A303755663
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Quoted in Sidelights: “singular” and marked by “deadpan strangeness.” He continued: “Tidbeck’s style is simple, almost minimalist … lest the slightest adornment destroy her stories’ delicate, subtle balance of weirdness and melancholy.”
“a marvel” that “whets the appetite for more.”
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Karin Tidbeck. Jagannath
Michael A. Morrison
World Literature Today.
87.4 (July-August 2013): p66+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Oklahoma http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Karin Tidbeck. Jagannath . Tallahassee, Florida. Cheeky Frawg. 2012. ISBN 9780985790400 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
After reading the singular stories in Swedish author Karin Tidbeck's first collection, what lingers in the mind is their deadpan strangeness. Tidbeck establishes this peculiar tonality in her stories' first sentences and then never falters. "Beatrice" opens: "Franz Hiller, a physician, fell in love with an airship." "Reindeer Mountain," with "Cilia was twelve years old the summer Sara put on her great-grandmother's wedding dress and disappeared up the mountain." And "Cloudberry Jam" with "I made you in a tin can." How could anyone not want to read on?
Tidbeck began publishing in Swedish in 2002. Since 2010 she has translated her work, including
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these thirteen stories, into English. Jagannath won the 2013 Crawford Memorial Award, given annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts to a new writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. Her one novel, Amatka (2012; Mix), awaits publication in English.
Tidbeck's style is simple, almost minimalist ... lest the slightest adornment destroy her stories' delicate, subtle balance of weirdness and melancholy. But when she uses a figure of speech, it's perfect: in a park, office workers on their lunch break "stretched out on the lawns, drinking the first summer sun like pale lizards." In most stories, this stripped-down quality extends to characters: she rarely provides background about their acquaintances, hobbies, family ... in some we don't even know their names. Unemployed, with few if any friends, none close, they subsist in a social and cultural vacuum, their reality "a thin veneer behind which strange creatures move." Yet some authorial magic brings them to life, and the often-tragic outcomes of their encounters with the weird are deeply affecting.
Tidbeck seems able to adopt any storytelling mode. "Miss Nyberg and I," "Herr Bederberg," and "Cloudberry Jam" are slight vignettes. "Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom" consists solely of letters a bereft daughter writes to her dead father; "Brita's Holiday Village" is the diary of the lonely, thirty-two-year-old would-be writer who finds that by entering the village she has crossed a boundary between reality and dreams. "Pyret" is a pastiche of an academic essay about "a mysterious life form ... that likes to get close, cuddle, and sometimes even mate with [an] animal or person." The title story--named, curiously, after a Hindu deity--is a richly detailed, straightforward, science-fiction adventure-cum-biomechanical nightmare.
For all their diversity, many stories resonate via shared imagery, events, and themes: family, birth, and the inexplicable appearance and/or disappearance of a mother. Tidbeck often links the latter to folkloric beings such as the vittra of northern Sweden, which appear at the shattering climax of "Reindeer Mountain."
Except for the sardonic, visceral "Augusta Prima," "Aunts," and "Jaganath," Tidbeck's stories whisper. They offer hints at realities behind appearances bur leave it to the reader to assimilate, to interpret. Careful manipulation of point of view compounds their controlled ambiguity and deeply estranging effect. If read slowly, one at a time, her stories reveal disquieting marvels unlike those of any other writer I've read. This collection is itself a marvel and whets the appetite for more.
Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Morrison, Michael A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morrison, Michael A. "Karin Tidbeck. Jagannath." World Literature Today, vol. 87, no. 4, 2013,
p. 66+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A335627521/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=7037066b. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “Most of these stories are quite weird, but good weird,” Alan Cheuse said on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. “They make you sit up and pay attention to every little git and turn in the dark around you.”
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Book Review: 'Jagannath'
All Things Considered.
2012. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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To listen to this broadcast, click here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story /story.php?storyId=164055676
CORNISH: It's time now for a bit of Halloween for grownups, courtesy of our own Alan Cheuse. He recommends "Jagannath," a debut story collection from Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck.
CHEUSE: Reindeer Mountain, one of the many rather weird and chilling stories in this collection opens in this fashion: Cilla was 12 years old the summer Sara put on her great grandmother's wedding dress and disappeared up the mountain. You can tell from this and many of the stories in the book that Karin Tidbeck grew up in the dark tradition of Scandinavian folklore on what must have been a succession of moonless nights filled with the comings and goings of strange and menacing, often quite weird, forest creatures.
Most of these stores are quite weird, but good weird. They make you sit up and pay attention to every little git and turn in the dark around you. Things get even stranger in "Cloudberry Jam," the story of a woman who grows in a tin can, an amalgam of a creature out of her own blood, spit, some fresh water, a half teaspoon of salt and a garden variety vegetable.
And later on in the end of that Reindeer Mountain story, the girl Cilla sits up in bed, pulls aside the curtain and looks out at the town lying quiet on the shore of a lake with, as Tidbeck tells us, the mountain beyond backlit by the eerie glow of the sun skimming just below the horizon. This sight brings with it a sensation Cilla can neither name nor explain. It was like a longing worse than anything she had ever experienced.
But for what, she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen and she was terrified that she would miss it. Yes, something wonderful and frightening is going to happen if you pick up and open this book. Happy Halloween.
CORNISH: That was our own Alan Cheuse reviewing Karin Tidbeck's short story collection, "Jagannath."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Book Review: 'Jagannath'." All Things Considered, 31 Oct. 2012. PowerSearch,
7 of 8 12/22/17, 10:44 PM

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http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A308970923/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=42e7c570. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A308970923
8 of 8 12/22/17, 10:44 PM

"Amatka." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 46. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319225/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=429ffbee. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017. "Jagannath." Publishers Weekly, 24 Sept. 2012, p. 57. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A303755663/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=faa5808a. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017. Morrison, Michael A. "Karin Tidbeck. Jagannath." World Literature Today, vol. 87, no. 4, 2013, p. 66+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A335627521/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7037066b. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017. "Book Review: 'Jagannath'." All Things Considered, 31 Oct. 2012. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A308970923/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=42e7c570. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2012/10/31/164055676/book-review-jagannath
  Word count: 671

  NOTE FROM TRUDY: THIS IS A DUPLICATE OF A REVIEW IN GALE REVIEWS 'Jagannath' Stories Are Weird In A Good Way
  2:18

  Download

  Transcript

  October 31, 20123:00 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  Alan Cheuse

  Alan Cheuse
  Jagannath
  Jagannath: Stories

  by Karin Tidbeck

  Paperback, 142
  purchase

  How weird can short fiction get and still find an audience among mainstream readers? Judging from the stories in the first book by Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, the answer is: pretty weird.

  Several fast-moving literary currents, national and international, propel Tidbeck's highly imaginative fiction along. As a Swede, she grew up in the dark tradition of Scandinavian folklore, a succession of moonless nights filled with the comings and goings of strange and menacing forest creatures. As part of her literary education she has read Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula Le Guin. She has also drawn from the well of the American weird, from H.P. Lovecraft and others, as part of her stint as a student at the Clarion West Writer's Workshop at the University of California, Irvine, where many of the best science fiction and fantasy writers in America have taught.

  Given such a background, the strengths and idiosyncrasies of Tidbeck's first collection of short fiction should not seem all that strange. Except that, given her background, the actual stories themselves can turn quite weird — good weird, that is, meaning successful if sometimes odd. No story illustrates this better than the title piece, fiction about the reproductive facilities in the belly of — we might assume, though it could be other — some kind of interstellar spacecraft of the far future, beginning with the birth of an infant named Rak: "Rak's earliest memories were of rocking movement, of Papa's voice whispering to her as she sucked her sustenance, the background gurgle of Mother's abdominal walls."

  Weird angles in the telling of it, weird creatures being born, weird effects throughout the story, with Tidbeck's imagination standing as close to, say, the images from David Lynch's Eraserhead as much as to horror writers like Warren Fahy and others.

  Jagannath is Karin Tidbeck's first collection of stories.
  Rebecka Eriksson

  No less odd and disconcerting is "Pyret [Py:ret]," a brilliant, if more traditional, fantasy story disguised, in the Borgesian tradition, as mock history. Introduced in the form of an academic paper about mysterious creatures called Pyret who live in the Swedish countryside, the story opens into a personal account on the part of the writer of the paper, which builds to some rather terrifying anecdotal material about the writer's family.

  Other families also appear in these stories, or at least the beginnings of families. In "Cloudberry Jam," one woman grows in a tin can an amalgam of a creature, made out of her menstrual blood, spit, fresh water, a half teaspoon of salt and a garden-variety vegetable. Another evocative tale, "Reindeer Mountain," gives us a third-person rendering of a family gathering in a remote northern lakeside town, and a pair of sisters attempting to deal with dark fairylike creatures called "vittra," to whose attractions one of them eventually succumbs.

  One midnight in winter this girl — her name is Cilla — sits up in bed, pulls aside the curtain and looks out at the town lying quiet on the shore of the lake, with "the mountain beyond backlit by the eerie glow of the sun skimming just below the horizon." The sight brings with it a sensation "Cilla could neither name nor explain. It was like a longing, worse than anything she had ever experienced, but for what she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen, and she was terrified that she would miss it."

  For you, dear reader, something wonderful — and weird — is going to happen if you open this book.

  It's waiting for you.

• Wired
  https://www.wired.com/2012/11/jagannath-tidbeck-review/
  Word count: 1327

  Karin Tidbeck's Jagannath: Weird in All the Right Ways
  Image: Cheeky Frawg

  Yesterday, Karin Tidbeck’s short story collection Jagannath officially released. The book is being published by Cheeky Frawg, the joint project of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Considering the book has been blurbed by the likes of China Mieville and Ursula K. Le Guin, you could say it’s making some waves. But I think it’s NPR that put it best:

  This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

  For you, dear reader, something wonderful — and weird — is going to happen if you open this book.

  It’s waiting for you.

  My humble verdict? Jagannath is a collection of stories that will keep you up at night, both while reading and days later, that blends the fantastic and the weird in a perfect concoction. One that will make you return again and again to the images and stories within its pages. You can get it online at Amazon. (And really, you ought to.)

  I was lucky to catch Karin before she went off to World Fantasy last week, and she was kind enough to answer some of my more curious questions. But for a writer of the weird, as you might expect, it was hardly a challenge.

  GeekMom: First tell us a little bit about yourself and your collection of short stories, Jagannath.

  Karin Tidbeck: I live in Malmö, Sweden, where I divide my time between writing, working for a writers’ organization and do some freelance work as creative writing instructor. I’ve published short stories for about 10 years and started translating them into English a couple of years ago, because I found the publishing possibilities in Swedish too few. That has since changed, and I’ve ended up with handling two simultaneous book releases this autumn – one in Swedish and one in English. In Swedish, I’ve published a short story collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?, and the recent novel Amatka. Jagannath contains translated stories from Vem är Arvid Pekon? and lots of new material, some of which has appeared in magazines like Weird Tales and Unstuck Annual, and some that’s previously unpublished.

  GeekMom: When did you first start writing speculative fiction?

  Tidbeck: I was eight years old when I wrote what would now be called fan fiction, that is, stories about the characters in Elfquest. I’ve also found some horror stories from when I was 10 – zombies, horrible death, bags that are portals to outer space.

  GeekMom: As a woman writing speculative fiction, have you run into any unusual challenges?

  Tidbeck: There’s the established fact that female authors have access to a smaller readership: Female readers read both male and female writers, while male readers read male writers. There’s also the established fact that in Sweden, speculative fiction has long been looked down on by mainstream and highbrow readers (unless it’s by the right writers, of course). The latter isn’t an issue of gender, but both of these factors combined make a challenge.

  I haven’t faced overt sexism as a writer, but it’s obviously hard to say if I’d had more readers and an easier time reaching out had I been a man. I don’t dwell on it. What is difficult is talking about sexism in speculative fiction and in geek culture; there’s a good discussion going on but also a lot of resistance and an unwillingness to acknowledge obvious issues, even in a country that’s supposed to be ahead in feminism and equal rights. The overt sexism I’ve run into has been as a geek in the gaming and fandom circuits – it’s the usual objectification, ridicule and/or being ignored – although I’ve gotten off easy compared to other women I know.

  GeekMom: What were your most treasured books as a child? What are your most treasured books now?

  Tidbeck: As a child I loved everything by Astrid Lindgren, especially The Brothers Lionheart and the illustrated story Most Beloved Sister. Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Jansson made a huge impression, although it was very scary. I read Eva Ibbotson’s The Great Ghost Rescue, Roald Dahl’s The Witches and of course Lord of the Rings again and again.

  It’s really hard to say what books I treasure most now, there are so many! But books I keep coming back to are Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series, The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin, Babel-17 by Samuel Delany and Keith Johnstone’s Impro.

  GeekMom: You’ve mentioned in other interviews that Tolkien was a big influence early on in your reading life. What are your thoughts on the new films coming out?

  Tidbeck: I think I should make a distinction between impression and influence, if that makes sense. Tolkien’s books don’t seem to have made much impression on style or themes, but it was my first encounter with a three-dimensional, hyper-detailed world. As for the films, if you mean The Hobbit — it was never my favorite (which means that I only read it about five times and not 20, like LOTR), and I could never identify with the characters, but Jackson knows his stuff so I’m sure it’ll be a very well crafted and loving tribute to the book. I loved the Lord of the Rings films unreservedly; there was nothing to do but capitulate to the 12-year-old in me that had waited for that moment for so many years.

  GeekMom: Is there a particular subject you consider yourself a geek about? How does it impact your writing?

  Tidbeck: I fluctuate between a number of geek areas, but a big one is folklore. I studied comparative religion and social anthropology early on, which got me interested in modern paranormal phenomena and how they follow the principles of folklore. I’ve loved and collected various Forteana for years, especially cryptozoology and phenomena like Mothman or Men in Black (not Will Smith, more like John Keel and Robert Anton Wilson).

  I’m also an old gamer — everything from board games and computer games (currently in horrible Mass Effect 3 withdrawal) to table-top RPGs and Nordic avant-garde LARP. Roleplaying especially has had a huge impact on my writing, both because I’ve worked with developing characters for games and because of the experience of seeing a character from the inside. My stories have been described as very character-driven, and I think doing the kind of method acting I did as a roleplayer has a lot to do with it.

  GeekMom: Is there a particular story in Jagannath that you’re most proud of, or particularly attached to, that you’d like to talk about?

  Tidbeck: The title story, “Jagannath,” because it was hellishly difficult to write. I was at Clarion (SF & Fantasy writers’ workshop), it was in the last week, and I was so out of my head from fatigue that some invisible wall just broke … and out crawled “Jagannath” with its alien characters that I had to understand completely in order to write. That story represents a new level in my craft.

  GeekMom: If you could have any super power, what would it be? (Or, if you happen to have a super power, please tell us what it is!)

  Tidbeck: I tried to come up with something witty, but really, what I dream of is a Professor X ability to mind-control the asshole politicians and corporate giants who are doing their very best to send the planet to hell.

• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/jagannath-by-karin-tidbeck/
  Word count: 1710

  Quoted in Sidelights: Her prose is remarkably strong and uncluttered, resting not only in the space between genre and literary fiction, but at the interstices between further ill-defined generic subdivisions like science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, and the rapidly growing fungal bud of weird fiction.”
  what ultimately defines literary value is good writing,”
  Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
  Indrapramit Das
  Issue: 31 December 2012
  Jaganath cover

  In the afterword to Jagannath, her first English-language short story collection, Karin Tidbeck writes about learning both American and British English (along with her native Swedish) through various sources, from "The Beatles and the rituals of tea time" to "MTV and the movies, and . . . science fiction paperbacks" (p. 129). It's clear that Tidbeck, who translates her own work, has let this diversity of influence seep into her writing. Her prose is remarkably strong and uncluttered, resting not only in the space between genre and literary fiction, but at the interstices between further ill-defined generic subdivisions like science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, and the rapidly growing fungal bud of weird fiction. Jagannath proves that under all the pontificating and arguing about genres and their hierarchical worth, what ultimately defines literary value is good writing. Whether an example of good writing fits into predefined marketing slots or is a more slippery thing is a different conversation. There is no attempt on Tidbeck's part to cater to "markets"; this is a series of songs from the heart, mysterious and beautiful, sometimes impenetrable and dark as winter-cooled obsidian, sometimes light and effervescent as sunlit spring clouds.

  One sees in the title story the lurid shadings of those science fiction paperbacks of Tidbeck's childhood, mingled with the intimate sadness of losing a mother (whether through the departures of adulthood or death) and growing up. It's a vivid evocation of the weirdly fantastic—evolved humans living as symbiotes in a giant biomechanical creature that conceives and protects them from the hazards of what one assumes is post-apocalyptic Earth—and the personal—protagonist Rak's moving coming-of-age as she discovers for herself that resident midwife Papa’s fatalistic comment "We only live if Mother lives" (p. 118) need not be true. In its intricately sensory yet metaphoric imagery of bodies in transition, birth, death, and decay, the story also illustrates Tidbeck's recurring concern with the cyclical nature of life and how it necessitates the paradoxical dualism of existence, be it in the coexistence of staggering beauty and great ugliness, love and violence, life and death.

  It's telling that Tidbeck chose to title that story and the collection "Jagannath," which is the name of a Hindu deity, and the Sanskrit root for the English word "juggernaut." A juggernaut is, of course, something that crushes everything in its inexorable path. In this group of stories, that crushing, god-like entity might well be time, which both destroys and replenishes (gestation and maturation, aging and death), which spares nothing as it rolls over human creation but leaves everything in its wake touched by the smouldering glow of magic. The past is, after all, forever romanticized and narrativized by us, eternally slipping into the numinous realms of myth as the present solidifies into what is perceived as real. So it is in Tidbeck's stories, where nostalgia and recall hold an implacable power, and time itself is an awful force that both gives and takes with no regard for frail human considerations.

  In "Aunts," we see the ritualized lives of a trinity of corpulent women in a "floating" world beyond time, the impossibility of their grotesque, self-sustaining cannibalistic life cycles interrupted and ruined by the stain of time left on their home by an unseen visitor. In the dream-like yet emotionally honest "Brita's Holiday Village," a writer spends a cool Swedish summer at a remote holiday retreat and witnesses what is possibly the brief life cycle (again time rearing its head) of an entire village that feeds off her presence, her imagination, and her familial past, to exist. The latter story shows how Tidbeck sometimes, to ominous effect, personifies magical beings as leaching off human life in desperation as they begin to fade in the face of cyclical time, just as we in turn cling to myth and old stories as everything around us changes. She also does this in "Pyret," a pseudo-nonfiction profile of a shapeshifting creature from Nordic folklore that starts out like a fascinating essay on an elusive animal and eventually takes on the disturbing atmosphere of a magical version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (recalling Tidbeck's comment about her various influences). "Beatrice," "Miss Nyberg and I," and "Cloudberry Jam" deal with the birth and growth of children, made fantastical within the contexts of steampunk and magic realism, grounded in the pride and pain of seeing offspring grow further and further from the parent. All are bittersweet pleasures, but "Cloudberry Jam" is especially touching in its exploration of the life of a single mother with an extraordinary, and difficult, child in the form of a vegetative homunculus she "made . . . in a tin can" (p. 83).

  Sometimes Tidbeck skews closer to reality, with as much success. "Some Letters For Ove Lindström" is a lovely ode to a dead father and a vanished mother that wouldn't seem out place in Granta or The New Yorker, never explaining whether its narrator's hints that her mother might not have been human are the fantasia of nostalgia. It's a portrait, again, of what is gone, imparting memory and the mundane with incandescent power.

  "Reindeer Mountain," the one original story written for the collection, gives the reader a haunting glimpse of the "vittra," a folkloric Scandinavian race that shares similarities with the Faerie. The fantasy is elegantly grounded in the family life of two young sisters, Sara and Cilla, who respond to the magical call of these beings differently. It's a story that sees the generational narrative of family as inherently enchanted, though not always positively—bloodlines picking up the strains of folklore and myth as they transmute along the years. Tidbeck returns here to the call of nostalgia and history, of passing time weighing down on the souls of humans and heightening their awareness of what has passed and what’s to come. Sara sees the magic that surrounds their family's soon-to-be-torn-down country house as portentous, while Cilla sees "what she had been pining for, that wonderful something waiting out there" (p. 80).

  Some of the pieces stand apart as their own literary experiments, and are arguably the weakest of the crop, though not to the extent that they are less than good stories. For example, the sinister, Kafkaesque satire "Who is Arvid Pekon?" turns a government switchboard operator's dreary, depersonalizing job into a literal hell as he becomes aware that he's little more than a pawn for higher powers. It's a broader, less fascinating piece than the rest. "Rebecka" is reminiscent of Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God" in its vision of a world where a paternalistic God has manifested and turns out to be more Big Brother than benevolent savior. "Herr Cederberg" is a light piece that is essentially an extended metaphor for transcending the pettiness of human cruelty.

  Tidbeck is at her best when she delves into humanity's enduring fascination with loss, and how compelling that loss can be. Loss defines our lives, representing as it can a fearful ideal of the unattainable. What is gone or never existed takes on an unbearable grace. Tidbeck mentions that the Swedish even have a specific name for this existential ache that can never be fulfilled in the face of reality’s brutal demands and gentle sorrows—"svårmod," which she roughly translates to "hardship mood."

  Tidbeck recognizes that much mythology and magical thinking arises from that ache in the human heart, reflecting both our fears and hopes for something beyond what we perceive with our senses. It's an ache that speculative fiction can directly indulge or ease, if temporarily, and she knows this all too well. Her stories tap into the universality of magic as an underlying presence in even a reality defined by rational paradigm, if only because rationalism is the counterweight to magical thinking and thus casts the latter in a bittersweet light of remembrance. And that light is present in the motif of twilight, which is ever-present in the stories, as it is in Tidbeck's native Sweden. "Augusta Prima" directly addresses this metaphorical throughline, giving us a thesis statement of sorts. In it Augusta, an immortal being who lives in the same realm as the grotesque women in "Aunts," accidentally slips into the human experience of time when she finds a stopwatch and finds out the "nature of the world[s]" from a visiting "djinneya":

  There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk. . . . Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. (p. 106)

  In the fading, liminal glimmer of twilight Karin Tidbeck sees past, present, and future, and weaves stories out of all three, standing between magical and rational realities, Heart and Thought. She knows they stand closer together than we often expect. As the juggernaut of time barrels onward, we are constantly losing magic. But in Jagannath Tidbeck humbly suggests that magic is never truly lost, just waiting, always, to return.

  Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines including Asimov's, Apex Magazine, and Redstone Science Fiction. He has written reviews for Slant Magazine, Vancouver Weekly, and Tangent Online. For more, visit his website, or follow him on Twitter (@IndrapramitDas).

  © Copyright 2013 Indrapramit Das
  About Indrapramit Das
  Indrapramit Das is a writer from Kolkata, India. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and The Year's Best Science Fiction, among others. He is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar, and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012 and the University of British Columbia's MFA program. Follow him @IndrapramitDas

• World Literature Today
  https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/july/jagannath-karin-tidbeck
  Word count: 573

  NOTE FROM TRUDY: ALXO DUPLICATE OF A REVIEW IN GALE REVIEWS
  Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
  FICTION
  Author:
  Karin Tidbeck

  Tallahassee, Florida. Cheeky Frawg. 2012. ISBN 9780985790400

  JagannathAfter reading the singular stories in Swedish author Karin Tidbeck’s first collection, what lingers in the mind is their deadpan strangeness. Tidbeck establishes this peculiar tonality in her stories’ first sentences and then never falters. “Beatrice” opens: “Franz Hiller, a physician, fell in love with an airship.” “Reindeer Mountain,” with “Cilla was twelve years old the summer Sara put on her great-grandmother’s wedding dress and disappeared up the mountain.” And “Cloudberry Jam” with “I made you in a tin can.” How could anyone not want to read on?

  Tidbeck began publishing in Swedish in 2002. Since 2010 she has translated her work, including these thirteen stories, into English. Jagannath won the 2013 Crawford Memorial Award, given annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts to a new writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. Her one novel, Amatka (2012; Mix), awaits publication in English.

  Tidbeck’s style is simple, almost minimalist . . . lest the slightest adornment destroy her stories’ delicate, subtle balance of weirdness and melancholy. But when she uses a figure of speech, it’s perfect: in a park, office workers on their lunch break “stretched out on the lawns, drinking the first summer sun like pale lizards.” In most stories, this stripped-down quality extends to characters: she rarely provides background about their acquaintances, hobbies, family . . . in some we don’t even know their names. Unemployed, with few if any friends, none close, they subsist in a social and cultural vacuum, their reality “a thin veneer behind which strange creatures move.” Yet some authorial magic brings them to life, and the often-

  tragic outcomes of their encounters with the weird are deeply affecting.

  Tidbeck seems able to adopt any storytelling mode. “Miss Nyberg and I,” “Herr Bederberg,” and “Cloudberry Jam” are slight vignettes. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” consists solely of letters a bereft daughter writes to her dead father; “Brita’s Holiday Village” is the diary of the lonely, thirty-two-year-old would-be writer who finds that by entering the village she has crossed a boundary between reality and dreams. “Pyret” is a pastiche of an academic essay about “a mysterious life form . . . that likes to get close, cuddle, and sometimes even mate with [an] animal or person.” The title story—named, curiously, after a Hindu deity—is a richly detailed, straightforward, science-fiction adventure-cum-biomechanical nightmare.

  For all their diversity, many stories resonate via shared imagery, events, and themes: family, birth, and the inexplicable appearance and/or disappearance of a mother. Tidbeck often links the latter to folkloric beings such as the vittra of northern Sweden, which appear at the shattering climax of “Reindeer Mountain.”

  Except for the sardonic, visceral “Augusta Prima,” “Aunts,” and “Jaganath,” Tidbeck’s stories whisper. They offer hints at realities behind appearances but leave it to the reader to assimilate, to interpret. Careful manipulation of point of view compounds their controlled ambiguity and deeply estranging effect. If read slowly, one at a time, her stories reveal disquieting marvels unlike those of any other writer I’ve read. This collection is itself a marvel and whets the appetite for more.

  Michael A. Morrison
  University of Oklahoma

• The World SF Blog
  https://worldsf.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/review-jagannath-stories-by-karin-tidbeck-reviewed-by-sofia-samatar-author-week-5/
  Word count: 797

  Review: Jagannath: Stories by Karin Tidbeck, reviewed by Sofia Samatar (Author Week #5)
  [Review: Jagannath: Stories by Karin Tidbeck, reviewed by Sofia Samatar (Author Week #5)]

  Illegal Mingling: Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath: Stories

  Reviewed by Sofia Samatar

  In a long twilight, the sound of tiny bells hangs in the air: a young woman’s mother is coming for her from the forest. Elsewhere, by the side of a lake, a family reunion is in progress, merry aunts and cousins hatching from cocoons. And in a tin can provided by charity, a tiny creature made of spit, salt, menstrual blood and a carrot kicks its legs, while the first October snow begins to fall. These are some of the strange, seductive images you’ll find in Karin Tidbeck’s stories.

  Jagannath: Stories (Cheeky Frawg, 2012) is Tidbeck’s English-language book debut. It brings together works previously published in English, the author’s translations of her own stories—most of them from her Swedish collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?—and original material. On the strength of Vem är Arvid Pekon?, Tidbeck won a grant from the Swedish Authors’ Fund; her first novel, Amatka, is forthcoming this fall from Sweden’s largest publisher. Jagannath gives English-language readers the chance to enter the shifting territory of Tidbeck’s marvelous multiple worlds.

  The stories in Jagannath are fascinating, frightening, and above all, tender. There’s an intimacy to them that’s immediately enchanting: several take the form of diaries or letters, or words exchanged with a close friend. “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” is written to the narrator’s dead father. I first read this story in Shimmer Magazine earlier this year: that’s when the name “Karin Tidbeck” stuck in my mind, along with the haunting melancholy of this story of a broken family, lost hope, and magic. “Some Letters” concerns a young woman, Viveka, who returns to the place she grew up, an old schoolhouse where her parents lived with the other members of a commune: the loss of Viveka’s nuclear family (her mother disappeared when she was three; she lost her father to alcoholism and then death) is mingled with the loss of the commune, which was both an extended family and a vision of a utopian future. Loss fills every line of the story, like Viveka’s last memory of her mother: a red dress and the sound of tiny bells. Who was Viveka’s mother? That question both deepens the sadness of the story, and expands it outward toward mystery, toward the forest.

  The red dress returns in “Reindeer Mountain,” where it becomes the sign of the vittra: tall, handsome, magical people who live inside the mountain, and like to wear red. Two sisters struggle with fear of madness and envy of each other in this story of a family with mixed human-vittra blood. The theme of human contact with other species, subtle in “Some Letters from Ove Lindström” and explicit in “Reindeer Mountain,” runs through the collection. “Pyret,” a sly gem in the form of an encyclopedia entry, details the habits of vittra cattle. A footnote informs us that the most common crime among those accused of witchcraft in medieval times was “illegal mingling”: humans consorting with non-human beings.

  Many of the stories in Jagannath play with this theme: in “Beatrice,” a woman’s love affair with a steam engine produces a whistle-voiced, coal-chewing child; in both “Miss Nyberg and I” and “Cloudberry Jam,” children are grown like plants. The narrator of “Brita’s Holiday Village” discovers two families at once: while her memories of her relatives begin to emerge in her writing, she dreams the life of a second, insect-like family. And in the collection’s title story, the mother of a family carries her brood inside her.

  Other themes include transformation, the nature of time, and the judgments of God. The stories “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” take place in the same world, a fairyland of the actual fairytale type, where games are bloody and casual torture is the order of the day. The stories show two different perspectives on what happens when time enters this timeless realm. These stories—like “Rebecka,” in which torture leads to salvation—explore different types of illegal mingling, mixing transgression with law and cannibalism with comfort. The intimate tone of so many of Tidbeck’s tales invites the reader to blend in as well, to imagine a personal shift into something slightly different. The words of “Some Letters for Ove Lindström” are ostensibly written to a dead man, but when you read them, you’ll know better. Like all of the stories in Jagannath, these letters are for us.

• Locus
  http://locusmag.com/2012/11/gary-k-wolfe-reviews-karin-tidbeck/
  Word count: 1165

  Gary K. Wolfe reviews Karin Tidbeck
  November 14, 2012 Gary K. Wolfe

  For the past few years, there have been a number of salutary efforts to bring international SF to the attention of the wider community (by which I mean monolingual English-language readers) – a new translation award, recent Japa­nese and Latin American anthologies, sterling reviews for Angelica Gorodischer, Johanna Sinisalo, and Hannu Rajaniemi, etc. Now Cheeky Frawg books, the latest imprint by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, is introducing us to the work of Karin Tidbeck, a young Swedish au­thor, who like Rajaniemi also writes in English, and who promises to be one of the most dis­tinctive new voices in short fiction since Margo Lanagan. Her collection Jagannath includes eleven stories, mostly translated from the Swedish (presumably by the author, since no translator is given), seven of which originally appeared in her 2010 collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?, though a few have appeared in Eng­lish, and one is original to the collection. It’s a slim volume, and some of the stories are only a few pages long, but it’s not quite like anything you’ve seen, even though you may hear vague echoes of everyone from Kafka to Borges to Tove Jansson.

  The Borges echo is most notable in a story-disguised-as-essay called ‘‘Pyret (Py:Ret)’’, which would hardly be out of place in The Book of Imaginary Beings. It describes a be­nign creature called a Pyret, persisting in Swed­ish folklore from the time of the Icelandic sa­gas, sometimes mimicking other animals. What appear to be genuine scholarly citations lead to an anecdotal account from the 1860s and anoth­er from the 1970s, finally to the narrator’s own efforts to investigate the latter, which in turn leads to a surprising epiphany about the nature of her own research. There’s a Kafkaesque feel to ‘‘Arvid Pekon’’, in which a bureaucrat work­ing in a government employment office begins receiving odd calls from a Miss Sycorax, at first wanting to speak to her dead mother, then to the Beetle King. Beetles and cockroaches be­gin to invade his life, possibly hallucinatorily, until his own reality is called into question. It’s governed by the same sort of horror-story dream logic that haunts Kafka’s characters, and to much the same effect. Another story, with an almost conventional but effective horror twist, is ‘‘Rebecka’’, in which the title character re­peatedly attempts suicide, only to be foiled by what she believes to be acts of God, until she comes up with a chilling scheme to ‘‘do some­thing he can’t ignore.’’

  But most of Tidbeck’s stories lie firmly in her own territory, a half-mythical region most emblematically represented by the strange and brutal world shared by two stories, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’ and ‘‘Aunts’’. The former opens with what appears to be a refined game of croquet, but im­mediately starts going weird when we learn that the host is Mnemosyne, the pages who serve the drinks are changelings, and the goal seems to be to smash the balls into the faces of the pages. Au­gusta finds a putrefying corpse in a nearby wood and steals a watch from it, but needs to consult a page to even find out what it is – she and her decadent friends, not quite human, live in a twi­light world outside of time, but by discovering time she learns she has fallen into it. Also on this estate is an orangery, which houses the title char­acters of ‘‘Aunts’’, three enormous women, tended by ‘‘nieces,’’ who ‘‘had one single holy task: to expand.’’ At a certain point, the Aunts split open from sheer enormity, and the nieces scoop out the organs, which will feed the next generation of Aunts, who begin life as fetal creatures clinging to and devouring their dead Aunts’ hearts. It’s a bizarre world, with some of the grotesque ambi­ence of a Heinrich Kley drawing or a John Bauer painting (Bauer is alluded to in another story), that seems to leave room for additional stories – we’re told it’s only one of eight worlds, but ‘‘the most perfect one.’’

  But the Aunts aren’t the most remarkable moth­er figures in the book; in the title story ‘‘Jagan­nath’’ (a name presumably drawn from the Hindu deity), survivors of an unspecified catastrophe sur­vive by working inside an enormous biomechani­cal ‘‘great Mother,’’ keeping her organs function­ing as she nurtures and protects them from ‘‘the horrible place’’ outside. Vaguely recalling Kit Reed’s ‘‘Perpetua’’, it’s one of the more recog­nizably SFnal tales in the book. So, in a way, is ‘‘Beatrice’’, which is Tidbeck’s surreal take on a steampunk romance, as a physician who has fallen in unrequited love with an airship meets a printer’s assistant who has fallen in love with a steam en­gine. Tidbeck has the discipline to follow such absurdist premises with a kind of fierce plot logic that almost makes them seem inevitable.

  As should be apparent by now, Tidbeck often uses character names as titles – ‘‘Beatrice’’, ‘‘Au­gusta Prima’’, ‘‘Rebecka’’ – and this suggests her primary concern with character; even in the brief­est and most elliptical of her tales, the motivations that drive her figures through these strange land­scapes seem credible. She seems to view families as inherently fantastical, not only with those my­thologized mother figures, but with children who might be imaged as tiny, gnarled creatures (‘‘Miss Nyberg and I’’ or ‘‘Cloudberry Jam’’, which opens with the line ‘‘I made you in a tin can’’) or parents who are remote, alienated, and in the case of ‘‘Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom’’, dead (the story is a series of letters to a dead father, which again echoes Kafka). The fullest portrayals of families are ‘‘Brita’s Holiday Village’’, in the form of the diary entries of a writer trying to com­plete a novel drawing on her family history, and ‘‘Reindeer Mountain’’, the collection’s one origi­nal story and possibly its best. Twelve-year-old Cilla and her sister Sara are visiting the family vil­lage, where an aging great-uncle is being moved out of a cottage he has lived alone in for decades. Cilla’s discoveries about her family, and her fam­ily’s possible involvement with the vittra, elf-like nature spirits of Swedish folklore, sets up a series of mysteries that are both emotionally authentic and genuinely eerie. It’s a gorgeously shaped tale that may not be Tidbeck’s most bizarre, but which demonstrates as well as any how her various oddi­ties are grounded in an absolutely authentic sense of place, and a keen understanding of how the heart works, even when it isn’t assisted by shift workers inside the body.

  Jagannath

  Karin Tidbeck
  (Cheeky Frawg 978-0-9857904-0-0, $11.99, 160pp, tp) No­vember 2012.

• The Quarterly Conversation
  http://quarterlyconversation.com/jagannath-by-karin-tidbeck
  Word count: 1074

  Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck

  Review by John Domini — Published on March 4, 2013
  Tags: cheeky frawg press
  REVIEWED:
  Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. Cheeky Frawg Press. 160pp, $11.99.
  Published in Issue 31

  How describe the vision of the Swedish fantasist Karin Tidbeck, as distilled in her American debut Jagannath, which culls 13 of her fictions? Each presents a nightmare, yet each feels strangely justified, in a perfect, painful balance. The critic’s knocked sideways, flailing for any handhold he can find. One might be H.P. Lovecraft.

  Tidbeck herself acknowledges a debt to the horrormeister of Rhode Island, in Jagannath’s sharp-witted yet understated “Afterword.” She declares that a teenage immersion in Lovecraft has left her with “a bit of a wobble,” and these stories often imbue the present with haunts out of a monstrous, immemorial past, things that go bump in the night as they re-emerge:

  [T]he vittra . . . came out from between the pine trees, walking in pairs, all dressed in red and white: the women wore red skirts and shawls and the men long red coats. Two of them were playing the fiddle, a slow and eerie melody in a minor key.

  These “vittra,” like Cthulu demons in better clothes, mean harm: they’ve come to claim a changeling. Yet even these few lines demonstrate how Tidbeck gives us Lovecraft without the baroque. What’s “eerie,” under the Scandinavian pines, never peacocks around as “eldritch,” the way it would along the Miskatonic River. Tidbeck’s title may derive from a Hindu deity, one with a mythology vaguer than most, but whatever looms out of this author’s nether realm is handled matter-of-factly, with journalistic terseness. In the best stories (like “Reindeer Mountain,” above), the result is an unlikely, insidious chill. It leaves you rereading in search of what scared you.

  Perhaps, instead, Tidbeck’s speculative fiction might be best appreciated as something more up-to-the-minute, a woman’s take on the urbane, postmodern fantasia of writers like Donald Barthelme. The Jagannath stories all deserve the name, they’re stories, with suspense, event, and surprise, but their teller knows how to leave a gap: to elide, to imply. She can play fast and loose with chronology, too, and throughout, she never lacks for sophistication. Several pieces prove savvy about strange bedfellows and fend off shopworn images—a great relief, among writers going for horror or working with the occult.

  One thinks of Barthelme especially while reading Tidbeck’s opener, “Beatrice.” The title of course recalls a far older writer, Dante, and the story does feature an otherworldly lover-muse like his. But Tidbeck pairs a couple of romances between humans and machines, a conjoining that can’t help but suggest Barthelme, who likewise gave love some very strange bounces (in particular, on a giant balloon). In “Beatrice,” though, a bizarre intervention allows both love objects, and I do mean “objects,” to become part of a feminist parable. Both, at cost, gain their freedom, and the story’s impact deepens for its unpredictability.

  Or then again, maybe the best handle on Jagannath is provided by how unapologetically it claims the SF/F genre. The publisher is Cheeky Frawg, run by the Jeff and Ann VanderMeeer, the couple behind the New Weird anthologies (and much else), the introduction is by Elizabeth Hand, another writer who blends horror, magic, and love, and the blurbs come from the likes of Ursula Le Guin and China Mieville. With this posse in mind, the collection might be understood as putting in place the first pieces of an alternative universe. Essential to nearly all literature of the fantastic, after all, is the creation of some berserk reality that holds a mirror to our own. Tidbeck’s three final pieces indeed set up such Otherworlds, and these suggest, again, a feminist project. All feature a matriarchy, and two bring off scarifying gelatinous scenes of alien birth.

  Yet the story closest to fairytale, “Augusta Prima,” reverses the mirror. We don’t see ourselves in these phatasms; rather it’s they who must face the ordinary. As for the book’s closer, the title piece and one of the longest, it depends on a symbiosis of human, machine, and a vast insect-mother, and so calls to mind, especially, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. Yet “Jagannath” winds up far from Butler, just as “Reindeer Mountain” felt finally nothing like Lovecraft. Butler’s imagination was fired by social critique, a denunciation of the master-slave relationship, whereas the final imaginative twists in Tidbeck revel in apocalypse, as the alternative way of life breaks down irrevocably. The disquiet does resonate with our experience, but what matters more is how it plain sets us shivering.

  Which leaves the critic flailing, struggling for purchase. In “Pyret,” Lovecraft’s Elder Magick trope combines improbably with academic fussiness and still succeeds in raising the back-hairs. In “Herr Cederberg,” Tidbeck starts a simple game of get-the-nerd, a fallback dramatic device if there ever were one, and then blows it up, taking her office drone over the rainbow. Every story provides a wild ride, a whee out of nowhere, and as for the poor reviewer stumbling behind—isn’t there an old piece of speculative fiction about blind men and an elephant?

  Indeed, if one were to quibble with Jagannath (with a nervous joke about arguing with a god), it would be for the overall brevity. One or two surprises depend an awful lot on the sketchiness of what came before, and this author may benefit by being in less of a rush to unveil her next Caliban. Prospero too can fascinate, as he talks through his betrayal, his parenting, his struggle to forgive—his psychology, that is. Tidbeck’s a formidable magician indeed, and so skilled a technician she did her own translations. She deserves the acclaim she’s won at home, and more of the same here in the US, but one hopes her next book in English will be a novel. It’d be fascinating to see what she’s capable of in longer narrative, with its longer lingering on the interior life.

  The Sea-God’s Herb, a selection of John Domini’s essays and reviews (including a piece or two from The Quarterly Conversation) will appear soon on Dzanc Books. See johndomini.com.
  Published in Issue 31

• The Ontological Geek
  http://ontologicalgeek.com/bills-thoughts-on-jagannath/
  Word count: 1410

  Bill’s Thoughts On: Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath
  19 Feb, 2015 in Reviews by Bill Coberly

  tidbeck-jagannath-coverIf noth­ing else, Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath taught me exact­ly what is meant by the phrase “weird fiction.”
  I’ve read a lot of books that could be described as “weird,” but most of them are not “weird fic­tion.” “Weird” is a more or less mean­ing­less word, as it’s com­mon­ly used: it just means “unex­pect­ed.” I’m read­ing Gone Girl right now with my wife, and there’s a moment when Nick says that the word “sur­re­al” is now most­ly used to “describe moments that are mere­ly unusu­al.” People use “weird” in exact­ly the same way, and that’s fine, but it’s not exact­ly what “weird fic­tion” means.

  I think peo­ple use “weird” to mean “unusu­al,” or “ran­dom,” or “absurd.” It’s unusu­al if it’s out of the ordi­nary, it’s “ran­dom” the way 15-year-olds who have just dis­cov­ered Monty Python are “ran­dom,” and/or it’s “absurd” in the Waiting for Godot sense. But while Waiting for Godot is cer­tain­ly a weird play, is not a “weird fic­tion” play. Similarly, sev­er­al of my friends told me that Birdman was a “weird” movie, and they’re right. It’s unusu­al and a bit unset­tling: the long takes, the sud­den diver­sions into fan­ta­sy when­ev­er Riggan is alone, the bizarre things Edward Norton’s char­ac­ter does. But it’s not a “weird fic­tion” movie.

  “Weird,” in “weird fic­tion,” isn’t “Weird Al” Yankovic or Birdman or “that weird kid in my Chemistry class.” It’s the Weird, more than just unusu­al: strange, bizarre, unex­pect­ed and unset­tling, maybe “uncan­ny.”1 An encounter with the Weird leaves you shak­en, makes you look at the world as though every­thing has tilt­ed slight­ly to the left.

  I guess in a more for­mal sense, Weird Fiction is a term that is pri­mar­i­ly applied retroac­tive­ly, to the ‘30s and ‘40s and such, Lovecraft and Smith and Chambers and some oth­ers. But it seems like some newer writ­ers are appro­pri­at­ing the term, and hey, they seem to know more than I do about it, so I’ll let them.
  I gen­er­al­ly appre­ci­ate “weird fic­tion,” though I real­ly haven’t read very much of it other than Lovecraft’s work, so I felt like I should brush up on what was going on in the field. Accordingly, I bought the StoryBundle of “weird fic­tion” put togeth­er by the VanderMeers a few months ago, and then picked a book more or less at ran­dom. That’s a lie. I picked Jagannath because it was the short­est book, and I was tired. But my lazi­ness was well-rewarded.

  Jagannath is a col­lec­tion of 13 short sto­ries writ­ten by Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck and pub­lished in English in 2012. Some of the sto­ries were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in Swedish and then trans­lat­ed (by the author) into English later, and some were writ­ten in English orig­i­nal­ly, and I can­not tell the dif­fer­ence between the two, which is a feat in and of itself. Some of the sto­ries (Augusta Prima and Aunts) are Dunsanian faerie-stories part­ly about dreamy fey courts filled with strange and ter­ri­ble courtiers. Others (Some Letters for Ove Lindström, Reindeer Mountain) are as much about grow­ing up in Sweden in par­tic­u­lar times and places as they are about what­ev­er bizarre things are lurk­ing in the back­ground. Still more (Miss Nyberg and I, Herr Cederberg, Who is Arvid Pekon?) are short and slight­ly funny even as they itch at the base of your skull. One (Pyret) is a Borgesian cat­a­logue of a nonex­is­tent crea­ture, com­plete with aca­d­e­m­ic cita­tions to essays that never exist­ed. The sto­ries are about a lot of dif­fer­ent things, but they are all Weird, in the prop­er sense.

  Tidbeck’s writ­ing gets under your skin and sets up shop there, for bet­ter or for worse. She man­ages this whether in first or third-person, whether she’s writ­ing about ordi­nary peo­ple thrust into bizarre sit­u­a­tions or about bizarre peo­ple treat­ing their lives as though they were per­fect­ly ordinary.
  Many of the sto­ries are at least part­ly about fam­i­lies and chil­dren. One woman grows a strange, veg­e­tal child in a tin can. Two young girls find their great-grandmother’s wed­ding dress and real­ize she might not have been human. A young woman moves into her father’s house after he dies and writes let­ters to him, slow­ly real­iz­ing her moth­er was far stranger than she remembered.

  These play out dif­fer­ent­ly than they do in Lovecraft, though. Several of Lovecraft’s sto­ries (The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family, The Dunwich Horror and maybe parts of At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu among oth­ers) worry about humans inter­breed­ing with strange and ter­ri­fy­ing crea­tures. But Lovecraft’s sto­ries inevitably paint that as a hor­ri­fy­ing, revolt­ing thing: when Arthur Jermyn finds out his true lin­eage, he lights him­self on fire. Many crit­ics have rea­son­ably used this recur­ring theme to point to Lovecraft’s fear of mis­ce­gena­tion as maybe chief amongst his gen­er­al arma­da of racist worries.

  But no one sets them­selves on fire in Tidbeck’s sto­ries. If some­one dis­cov­ers that she might have oth­er­world­ly ances­tors, she reacts with shock or won­der or amaze­ment, but not usu­al­ly with dis­gust or hor­ror the way Lovecraft’s char­ac­ters do. All of the sto­ries are unset­tling and some of them fea­ture strange bod­i­ly trans­for­ma­tions or phys­i­cal revul­sion, but most of them prob­a­bly could not real­ly be called “hor­ror.” The point of these sto­ries is not to make you gasp or fear or re-evaluate your exis­tence, quak­ing and silent in a “placid island of igno­rance in the midst of black seas of infin­i­ty.” Most of them just twist some ele­ment of the real world and see what hap­pens. Tidbeck’s sto­ries about fam­i­lies with strange his­to­ries are still about families.

  The story I enjoyed the most is, appro­pri­ate­ly, the title story, Jagannath. It’s a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to tell you what it’s about with­out sum­ma­riz­ing it, and since it’s not very long, I think it would make more sense for you to read it your­self. But Jagannath, both the story and the col­lec­tion of sto­ries, show­cased one of my favorite parts of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion as a whole and “weird fic­tion” in par­tic­u­lar. Short “weird fic­tion” feels almost like poet­ry, in that it’s less about plot or char­ac­ter than about per­fect­ly describ­ing some bizarre vision, cap­tur­ing in deft words some strange­ness that res­onates and shrieks and doesn’t want to be pinned down.
  Notes:

  I haven’t read near­ly enough Freud or Kristeva to talk about the uncan­ny or the abject with any con­fi­dence, but I think they’re all relat­ed to the Weird. [↩

• Monster Librarian
  http://www.monsterlibrarian.com/TheCirculationDesk/book-review-jagannath-by-karin-tidbeck/
  Word count: 331

  Book Review: Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
  Posted on November 3, 2014 by Kirsten Posted in Uncategorized

  Jagannath:Stories by Karin Tidbeck

  Cheeky Frawg Books, 2012

  Kindle Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9857904-2-4

  Available: New

  Jagannath is a collection of short stories by Swedish author Karin Tidbeck. Several of the stories were collected in the original Swedish in Vem är Arvid Pekon?, and some have appeared in translation in magazines and anthologies, but this is Tidbeck’s first full-length collection in English. It’s no surprise that the collection is published by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s imprint.

  The stories in Jagannath are a little hard to categorize, but are best described as “weird tales”. ”Who is Arvid Pekon? ”, evokes a Philip K. Dick-like feeling of empty, absurd bureaucracy (and the resulting existential anxieties). Elsewhere, stories such as “Augusta Prima” and “Aunts” use a warped fairy tale landscape to unsettle the reader. “Aunts”, particularly, is a rather disturbing tale that uses grotesque imagery to great effect.

  My favorite stories in the book are the ones that make clever use of Swedish geography and tradition. “Brita’s Holiday Village” and “Reindeer Mountain” are the clearest examples of this. However, in my opinion, the strongest story of the entire book is “Pyret”, which blends unsettling, weird, fictional folklore with an unconventional narrative technique. Interestingly, Tidbeck translated her stories herself, and the book includes an afterword by the author on the process of translation. This is an added bonus and enhances enjoyment of the collection. Highly recommended for fans of the weird tale, ages 12 to adult.

  Contains: some sexual references, some violence, cannibalism

  Reviewed by Hannah Kate
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• LA Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dystopian-surrealism-for-our-times-karin-tidbecks-amatka/
  Word count: 1740

  Quoted in Sidelights: “unique narrative that unsettles the social structures and ideologies underpinning European democratic socialism, in particular liberal humanism,” Morrison related. She noted that while “at first the novel appears as a straightforward critique of communism … Amatka is not reducible to this; rather, its commitment to several artistic and generic traditions with a long history of nuanced political engagement makes it a fascinating read.” Morrison also called it a feminist tale, although she thought that description alone “doesn’t fully capture the novel’s strengths.”
  Dystopian Surrealism for Our Times: Karin Tidbeck’s “Amatka”

  By Irene Morrison

  OCTOBER 14, 2017

  NOW IS THE TIME for dystopia, and Swedish author Karin Tidbeck offers a surrealist, distinctly European addition to the genre with her debut novel, Amatka. The novel is based on a now-common science fictional premise in the age of climate crisis: when Earth becomes unlivable for reasons not fully explained, some find a way to escape and settle on a hostile alien planet. From this basic premise, Tidbeck launches a unique narrative that unsettles the social structures and ideologies underpinning European democratic socialism, in particular liberal humanism.

  The setting is the city of Amatka, one of four cities in a colony, connected tenuously to the others by dangerous train routes through an alien landscape. Its economy is agriculturally based, a sort of country backwater in comparison to the city of Essre, from which Vanja, the main character, comes on a business trip. Her mission is ostensibly to infuse a regulated but distinctly capitalist-spirited competition into a tightly restricted, scarcity-plagued economy. Restriction is rampant in social life; the principles of communist egalitarianism on which the colony was founded have been whittled away in the name of societal survival, such that at first the novel appears as a straightforward critique of communism, one more appropriate to the Cold War era. But while an element of such a critique may be present, Amatka is not reducible to this; rather, its commitment to several artistic and generic traditions with a long history of nuanced political engagement makes it a fascinating read.

  In many ways, Amatka is a novel out of time and place. This is, with one major exception, deliberate, as the novel participates in the utopian/dystopian tradition that such societies exist in “no-place.” Time and place become distorted in large part because of Tidbeck’s commitment to the principles of Surrealism, the early 20th-century artistic movement that took everyday objects and depicted them in illogical ways in an attempt to better understand the unconscious and express various left-revolutionary ideologies. In a clear nod to Dalí, inanimate objects that are mislabeled literally melt into gloop. But what is the gloop made of? Is it sentient? Part of the alien earth? Here and elsewhere, Tidbeck is deliberately enigmatic. Surrealism is meant to unsettle, making the novel at home with the kinds of cognitive estrangement so vital to speculative fiction. Rather than the more contemporary light-touch of surrealism found elsewhere in SF, surreal events drive the plot of the novel, first as strange pipes begin appearing, and then even stranger objects pepper the novel’s climax, which takes a turn to a sort of sublime horror when formerly missing colonists return as monsters.

  Advance reviews categorize Amatka as feminist science fiction, invoking Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood. While this is true, it doesn’t fully capture the novel’s strengths. Northern European politics are brought to the fore from a feminist perspective: women of the colony are expected to bear children — and forced if they do not do so willingly — in order to combat the colonies’ declining birth rate. This applies even to lesbians, who resort to turkey basters for the act. Vanja argues that children shouldn’t be brought into such an ailing society, and she articulates a criticism of the rhetoric of Europe’s declining birth rates in the process. How long before social pressures and incentives to reproduce become obligations?

  Tidbeck’s concern with how language shapes social reality productively compares with Le Guin’s work, especially The Dispossessed, reviving the linguistic debates that Le Guin ignited in feminist SF in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the concept of permanent revolution to avoid stagnation in anti-authoritarian communist societies. In Amatka, to allow an object to melt into gloop is to commit an affront to the community, and children are taught early how precarious their reality is, to label and re-label all inanimate objects regularly. To the question of the ways language restricts individual consciousness, and therefore interactions, and the fabric of the social body, the labeling process can be read as a metaphor for the intense psychological efforts expended in convincing oneself that the framework of an oppressive society is the only way to survive. Language confines thought, but the psyche can break free of it with effort. The surreal — the indescribable — offers the promise that rational language and the too-perfect ordering of society can be breached.

  However, Amatka is not reducible to any one subgenre, as Tidbeck draws on several rich traditions of SF. Its surrealist and psychological-thriller elements also put it in line with Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, especially given that Lem was concerned with communication beyond the bounds of the human or obviously living organisms. There are additional elements aligned with the dystopia-as-fascism of 1984, elements that might initially grab readers outside Europe.

  There is a lot to unpack in this novel, and it will surely be enticing to those of an academic bent. Even from this side of the Atlantic, it is clear that Tidbeck is taking the crippling bureaucracy of European socialism to task, and she is doing so — as is hinted if not outright stated — from a position to its left, one that does not reduce freedom to that of economic pursuit as one could expect from a more conservative critique. Vanja after all abandons her market-expanding project when she realizes its irrelevance to Amatka’s downtrodden workers. Amatka then could productively be read alongside Mark Fisher’s work, in particular his work on hauntology and lost futures, and his final book, The Weird and the Eerie. Tidbeck incorporates elements of both the weird — what Fisher describes as an object from the “outside” of the familiar intruding upon the inside, as with the pipes that begin to appear in the town, and the eerie — defined in part as “landscapes partially emptied of the human,” as we see in Vanja’s many treks outside the city. For Fisher, the concepts are politically useful when engaging with questions of agency in the era of capitalism, and clearly Tidbeck is making an intervention along these lines. What becomes of human agency when liberal humanism attempts to ameliorate the ills of capitalism under democratic socialism and fails?

  As a sort of dark feminist satire that questions fundamental relations of power in Europe, we might also compare Amatka to a now relatively obscure work of Norwegian SF, Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes (1977). Flipping gendered power relations on their head — “wim” run society while “menwim” perform the unpaid labor of social reproduction — Egalia’s Daughters questioned in the early days of democratic socialism whether women simply attaining equality in European society would end oppression. Similarly, Amatka asks if democratic socialism has succeeded in the creation of a free society, holding a distorted and surrealistic mirror to its bureaucracy and perceived decline in the age of neoliberal capitalism. In both novels, the reader feels trapped in society along with the narrator. However, Amatka ends more hopefully, with an abandonment of not only social structure but a surreal abandonment of what it means to be human for the sake of survival, an unsustainable concept on an alien planet — perhaps a nod to abandoning liberal humanism itself in favor of some as-yet-unknown, more liberatory politics.

  Amatka is an idea-driven novel, not a character-driven one, and as such this novel may not end up on any best seller lists. Characters are generally quite flat, even when they are falling in love with each other — romantic feelings ring hollow from within a society where no one can be trusted, everyone is depressed, and language must be chosen carefully to avoid serious physical and social consequences brought on by paranoid social oversight committees. That said, Amatka is incredibly sophisticated as a debut. Perhaps this is due in part to the mentors Tidbeck mentions in her acknowledgments, among them masters of the weird, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. But Tidbeck’s commitment to ideas at the expense of plot and a sense of vibrant adventurousness would arguably separate her from other contemporary authors of the weird. Colors are drab; one imagines Tidbeck’s characters in much the same way US audiences are taught to imagine Soviet Russia.

  There is another way, however, that the novel is out of time and place that is problematic rather than refreshing. This book is decidedly European; in an age of so much science fiction that addresses head-on issues of race and colonialism — issues that today cannot be ignored when thinking about a better world or understanding the ills of the current world — such topics are largely absent. However, they can be read into the novel to a degree, considering that the “pioneers” of the novel seem to be failing at their attempt to colonize the planet because they are not trying to understand their place in it, but rather to continue on with European socialism as a societal model.

  Yet in a time where our own social reality seems increasingly incomprehensible in the cacophony of posthuman technologies, when our responsibilities to the words we use become increasingly untethered from standards of human compassion (where freedom of speech is the rallying cry and justification for speaking words that harm), and as dystopia and/or climate apocalypse creeps ever closer — in this sense, Amatka firmly belongs in the present time and place. Europeans and those of European descent need to engage with and sit uncomfortably in the knowledge of their monstrous humanity; this is certainly a novel for such engagements.

  ¤

  Irene Morrison is a PhD Candidate in English at UC Riverside, with an emphasis in Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science.
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dystopian-surrealism-for-our-times-karin-tidbecks-amatka/

• Weird Fiction Review
  http://weirdfictionreview.com/2017/07/dystopic-nordic-weird-review-amatka-karin-tidbeck/
  Word count: 2142

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The degree to which a reader may enjoy Amatka depends on their desire to speculate on linguistic power.” Schenstead-Harris’s enjoyment was apparent in his summation of the book. “Amatka possesses the qualities of a fable and the febrile brilliance of weird fiction at its most inventive and self-questioning” he wrote. “The novel reminds readers of Karin Tidbeck’s powers just as it marks out further ground in the Nordic Weird.”
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  # Jul 31, 2017
  Books • Nonfiction
  Dystopic Nordic Weird: Review of “Amatka” by Karin Tidbeck
  Leif Schenstead-Harris

  Karin Tidbeck. Photo by Charlotte Frantzdatter.

  Weird fiction is increasingly international even as it returns to traditional themes and concerns. It was not so long ago that Finnish fiction from authors such as Leena Krohn, Johanna Sinisalo, and Jyrki Vainonen became prominent in English-language discussions of the weird. WorldCon 75 is being held this August in Helsinki. There exists a palpable sense of excitement about the Nordic twist on weird writing. As Sinisalo wrote here at the WFR in 2012, where others might see and write about the world in straight lines, the Finnish weird is premised on “diagonal” relationships. In the hands of writers such as Sinisalo, fiction’s promise to readers is that, “when they open the book, anything could happen.”

  At just about the same time as Sinisalo was advocating the diagonal properties of the Finnish weird, Karin Tidbeck’s startling and highly original collection of short stories Jagganath (Cheeky Frawg, 2012) emerged in English translation. The stories in Jagganath mark out Swedish territory in the Nordic weird tradition. Wintry and wise, they incorporate myths, mysteries, and familial histories. The recent English translation of Amatka follows on this early promise, although Swedish readers will know that Amatka was in fact released in its original language in 2012. Anglophone readers have had to wait some time for this book.

  The novel we know of as Amatka originated as a shifting possibility of genres as long ago as 2007. At first it was a group of poems. Then it was a set of dream notes, a collection of flash fiction, and, finally, a long-form narrative. A set of simple yet profound questions oriented the novel’s transformation during its composition: “What is a world like that is ruled by language? How does a society survive in such a world? And what happens to the individual people who live in it?” Here, language holds a premier relationship with the construction of social, political, and individual visions of the world. Consequent on this contention is the power that something might have if it does not have a name.

  In philosophy, a long tradition of investigating the central powers of language exists. Most recently, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben or Daniel Heller-Roazen have forwarded similar constructivist theses about language in texts such as The Fire and the Tale (Stanford 2017) or No One’s Ways (MIT 2017). In Tidbeck’s Amakta, however, the thesis is posed in the sinuous shape of fiction’s eternal question to its reader. Language is gradually, unsettlingly slanted, made diagonal, and put to question. Reading the novel is a remarkable exercise in which the borders of perception and communication fluctuate and bend.

  ***

  Like so many other weird stories, Amatka begins with its central character on a train to the unknown. Commercial researcher Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, or Vanja for short, has been tasked with travel to an agricultural commune to do research about hygiene product. The novel presents its grey world as a desolate and repressive place. A centralized committee governs most social arrangements, relationships seem secondary to productive work assignments, and goods are generally rationed. The known world is made up of four specialized colonial settlements: one for administration, another for science, a third for industrial production and the fourth, Amatka, for agriculture. It only gradually becomes apparent that not much exists other than the colonists, their settlements, and the mushrooms from which most goods are made.

  Once Vanja is in Amatka, many of the colonists find her research risible. Inevitably, however, the inquiry into hygiene becomes only the tip of the investigation in which Vanja finds herself engaged. Cunningly, the investigation is doubled: while Vanja is discovering truths about the community of Amatka, her world’s history, and herself, readers are learning the ostensible and strange facts of Vanja’s world. As it turns out, much of what the world is made of is not as substantial as it first appears.

  Throughout the novel, readers are limited to seeing Amatka’s strange world through Vanja’s increasingly disillusioned but also tremulously uncomprehending eyes. While this makes for a gradual reveal of the lurking strangeness that anchors the plot’s explosive final turns, it also leaves gaps in the conceptual origins of how things came to be. The novel never reveals much information about the old world; nor is it clear how the colonists’ arrived in the timeless nowhere of their new world where few crops grow and animals are nowhere to be seen. Some hushed secrets remain unanswered by the novel’s end, including that of the collapse of a fifth. For these reasons, and given the spare prose that conveys mysteries as efficiently as it does information, the novel at times resembles a parable like those of Franz Kafka.

  At the same time, weird elements make the story something much more unsettling than a straightforward fable or dystopia. One of the signature behaviors of characters is the activity of “marking”: most items seem to be labelled with their name. At first, this does not seem odd: items on the train are marked as “washbasin, pantry, table.” Society itself is set up to reinforce these markings, with a song sung by children and adults alike to remind them of the importance and implementation of such a textual inscription on the world. This naming of the world’s things even takes precedence over the regulated social relationships between people. For instance, at one point two girls sing “Bed! Chair! Cabinet! Lamp!” to themselves, even as their parents worry that the children may have forgotten them in the social housing that they required to live in.

  Not all objects are created equal. Readers discover that “real” objects such as paper taken from the old world do not need to be marked. Those items remain themselves without repeated linguistic prompting. Other objects, however, dissolve into a viscous material that horrifies the colonists with its abject strangeness. Leaving an old suitcase too long turns it to a contagious unknown, a material with disquieting fluidity that Vanja describes as “whitish gloop” and a substance that may “spread to other objects if she didn’t ask fast.” Yet everything else is made from the same material — including the hygiene products Vanja means to catalogue and herself use. Ulla, an older woman whose presence is predictably catalytic for some of the story’s stranger turns, comments on this cognitive dissonance. Ulla’s words trigger Vanja’s perception of the world to mimic the discussion “almost as though the shape of the cup was starting to melt, as though the table was suddenly sagging.” Do words follow or proceed the illusion of material dissolution? And is it in fact an illusion only, this linguistic force?

  ***

  In a radical charge, Amatka speculates on two distinct ways that language might construct the world: as an ossified and necessarily limited bureaucratic operation of textual power or, more speculatively, as a fluid and perhaps even disturbing interchange of desire and material. The more that the fundamental relationship between language and materiality becomes a pronounced element of Amatka’s world, the more strange and self-possessed that world becomes, both narratively and in terms of its own fulfillment. Much of the story’s intensity is generated by the affective relationship that this material possesses and from the sparks that fly from characters’ changing understandings sludge. Everything seems to be made from this abject ooze. The full extent of this “everything” develop a line of speculative horror as its characters dance with understanding, sanity, and social acceptance. The commune’s political organization is not only material but epistemological as well.

  In general, one of Amatka’s most impressive features is how it melds social relationships, political organization, and the formative powers of linguistic making and unmaking. Tidbeck’s world depends on no outright forces of evil, no external animosities or sources of clear certainty for characters. Instead, the narrative treats the things that disturb it with complexity and thoughtfulness about how the ties that bind people together may be both more and less than they are thought to be. In an interesting strand of the story, Vanja sometimes finds poetry from a disappeared dissident named Berols’ Anna whose words seem to most beautifully give shape to reality. One private, handwritten fragment reads

  we speak of new worlds
  we speak of new lives
  we speak to give ourselves
  to become

  Simple and yet eerily profound in the context of the novel’s vision of power and transformation, the novel’s use of poetry makes efficient use of its particular linguistic intensity.

  If there is one area where the novel is not always convincing, however, it is in the characters’ fullness. Nina, Ivar, Ulla, and Evgen, the most prominent of the Amatka residents, have specific relationships with the plot and with Vanja. They do not always emerge from the shadows of their roles. This holds true for minor characters as well, but the effect is more muted in their cases. The novel’s fabulist qualities in part militate against the “thickness” of character absent that is largely absent here. It is equally possible that something else is in play, more deftly associated with how possibilities of the un-named and the unknown play out emotionally. Connections between characters are clear but emotionally restrained

  Readers will have to evaluate for themselves the novel’s final twists that depend on almost inhuman sympathies. If humanity is in part defined as the capacity for language, a “speaking animal,” Amatka generates its peculiar sense of deep disquiet as it questions the power and limitations of that definition.

  ***

  There are significant precedents for the kind of story that Tidbeck is telling here. Such novels that delve into language are often the best that science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction has to offer. At times, I was reminded by the linguistic focus of China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011). Further back in the speculative tradition, the arid commune of Amatka and Vanja’s spare use of language reminded me of a strange half-dream of Anarres in The Dispossessed if Ged from the Earthsea novels somehow stumbled into that failing communal society. (Those novels too obsess over the political and existential elements of communication.) Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) pursued something similar in militarized space. These comparisons of fiction after the linguistic turn are only partially relevant, of course, and other influences could be discerned. It is unsurprising that Tidbeck has written about how LARPing was formative to her writing habits – in this kind of role playing, language most nakedly argues for its ability to transform the world.

  Ultimately unique to itself, Amatka builds of its central fascination with the powers of language a world in which things are exactly as they seem. In its most cunning twist of all, the horror with which characters register the “sludge” from which their worlds are built reveals itself as an antagonistic relationship with the pure elements of material potential. But such antagonism is not necessary; it is consequent on the social traditions that shape the colonists’ perceptions of their environments. Language exerts an inhuman machinic force. The colonists have constructed homes in more than just the material world.

  Stripped of language, the world’s constitutive things may be too abject to consider — or, just maybe, they might not. Perception is a fickle space in which to construct relationships, concepts, homes. The degree to which a reader may enjoy Amatka depends on their desire to speculate on linguistic power, to read in the textual capacity to create and hold intensities across the shape of the world — and the desire to decreate and permit those intensities to alleviate and disappear. Amatka possesses the qualities of a fable and the febrile brilliance of weird fiction at its most inventive and self-questioning. The novel reminds readers of Karin Tidbeck’s powers just as it marks out further ground in the Nordic Weird.

• SF Book Review
  https://sfbook.com/amatka.htm
  Word count: 573

  Quoted in Sidelights: “unique, with a strong and compelling voice,” commented Antony Jones, writing online at SF Book Review. “A dystopian fantasy where the nature of reality is shaped by the spoken and written word.”
  Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

  a review by Ant, in the genre(s) Science Fiction, Dystopian . Book published by Vintage Books in June 2017

  Karin Tidbeck has written a number of short-stories, her first english Language collection (firmly rooted in Weird Fiction), Jagannath, was nominated for the World Fantasy award and short-listed for the James Tiptree Junior award. It also received wide-spread critical acclaim. Amatka is her first novel length story.

  Set in a world where the fabric of reality is shaped by language, Amatka tells the story of information assistant Vanja who is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere and wintry colony of Amatka to collect intelligence for the government. Vanja only intends a brief visit but while there falls in love with her housemate, Nina. People are acting oddly in this small town and are constantly monitored for signs of subversion. Then she stumbles upon a growing threat to the colony and a cover-up by it's administration, a discovery that puts her at serious risk.

  Amatka is quite different to anything I've read before. It leans heavily towards weird fiction and draws some parallels to China Meiville's work. It is however unique, with a strong and compelling voice. A dystopian fantasy where the nature of reality is shaped by the spoken and written word. This way that objects are kept in working condition is to write the word on the object and to recite the word verbally. As the writing deteriorates so does the object, eventually if left un-described reverting to a pool of goo that can spread and damage other objects. The only exception to this rule appears to be items that are clearly trace-able to the world before, such as the paper used for labelling items, which is called "good paper".

  As far as backstory is concerned we get small glimpses and nothing more. It's clear that most of these objects are left-over from a different time and world (perhaps our own). But it isn't clear how anything got to the present world where Amatka is based. This world is a grey one, devoid of sun or stars, a world where the population are strictly controlled. Failure to follow the rules leads to reconditioning.

  This is very clever fiction, it asks some big questions about society and the repression of creativity to keep control. About social conditioning and the seeds of rebellion. The writing is clever, even more so when you realise the author has written the novel in both Swedish and English. The ending to the novel is superb, it's sudden and sharp and leaves more questions than it answers - it reminded me of the way Philip K Dick often ended his stories.

  The bleak backdrop and simplistic tone also reminds me of PKD's writing, it belies the complexity of the story and the subtlety of its many messages. It's progressive, modern fiction at its very best. I loved the quirky wierdness, while the writing is hugely engaging.

  A book to get lost in, highly recommended for lovers of modern fiction.

  Written on Tuesday 16th May 2017 by Antony Jones.

• Unbound Worlds
  http://www.unboundworlds.com/2017/07/amatka-author-karin-tidbeck-revolutionary-power-language/
  Word count: 875

  Amatka Author Karin Tidbeck on the Revolutionary Power of Language
  By Matt Staggs
  July 27, 2017

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  Karin Tidbeck at SDCC 2017/Penguin Random House ©

  Karin Tidbeck is the author of Amatka, a science-fiction novel set in a world where language shapes reality. We spoke with Tidbeck at SDCC 2017 about the subconscious origins of Amatka, and the way words shape how we think.

  Unbound Worlds: Tell me about Amatka. Where did it begin and how did you develop the idea?

  Karin Tidbeck: It started out as a series of dream transcripts. I started writing down my dreams backing 2004 or 2005. I realized that I could order them geographically because I kept coming back to the same places with the same people in them. I turned that into a poetry collection which I submitted to a huge bunch of publishers. Everyone rejected it. I shelved that, but I wrote a collection of interconnected stories. That didn’t work either, so I wrote a novel based on some of the premises that I had come up with in the poetry collection.

  UW: To what extent is writing a practice one that you learn from those kinds of mistakes? How often do your writings turn out perfect based on what you wanted when you began?

  KT: Oh, God. Never. It’s called a “shitty first draft”, and it’s not called that for nothing. It’s very much a process based on trial and error. I write in longhand, and I’ll ramble on until I can’t ramble anymore. I’ll sift through that and see if I can find something that’s usable. I’ll write a first draft, and more often than not, it doesn’t work. I’ll rewrite it and rewrite it. It’s just a process of making a series of errors until I get somewhere.

  UW: What’s Amatka about?

  KT: It’s about humans colonizing a world where matter is entirely controlled by language. The main character, Vanja, comes to the colony Amatka initially to do research on the citizens’ hygiene habits. She starts to discover the truth of where they all come from and the basis of this world. She begins to question the order of things.

  UW: As a writer of fiction, you must have a particular relationship with language that might be unlike that of a person who doesn’t. Words are a material reality for you. With that in mind, is this a personal novel for you? Could you relate to it more than you might another kind of story?

  KT: I relate closely to all of my stories. Do you know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I’m a fan of that. I decided to take that one step further. Instead of the idea that language controls the way we see the world, I wanted to experiment with the idea of what happens when it literally controls the world. It is a thought that is very dear to me, because I do believe that we can change the reality we live in through discourse.

  UW: I believe that China Mieville played with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Embassytown. Did you read it?

  KT: Yes, I absolutely loved it. I loved the way he worked with language in that one.

  UW: Language, in a way, is an operating system. It changes the way that see things around us. Do you speak more than one language?

  KT: I speak Swedish, English, and Danish. I’ve also studied French, Latin, and German.

  UW: Is learning to write prose anything like learning a new language? Are there are certain forms and conventions you are expected to understand?

  KT: Each form of writing has its own process, so learning to write poetry is one, learning to write short fiction is another, learning to write novels is another one entirely. It’s very rare that you succeed in all formats. When I wrote the novel, I knew how to write sentences, but I had to learn how to create longer dramatic structure, as compared to writing a short story.

  UW: Do you still keep a journal of your dreams? Do you use them for fiction, still?

  KT: No, I don’t. For some reason, I don’t really remember my dreams anymore.

  UW: Do you think that maybe your subconscious was trying to get you to write that first poem or short story?

  KT: It’s very possible or it could be that it was a phase and it might come back. I don’t really have the kinds of psychedelic dreams that I did.

  UW: One of my favorite questions to ask authors is, “If you like ‘blank’ then you’ll like my book.” How would you fill in the blank?

  KT: If you like revolutions, language, and how to change the world through poetry, then you’ll like this book.
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• Swedish Book Review
  http://www.swedishbookreview.com/show-review.php?i=500
  Word count: 735

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Amatka is Sweden taken to the extreme, Sweden to the nth degree, a place where the state has usurped the functions of human relationships … where the authorities have unlimited powers and conformity is highest law,” Broome maintained. She added: “Apart from a provocative contribution to the discussion about Swedishness, Amatka offers us beautiful and arresting prose.” She further commended “Tidbeck’s unique voice and the compelling strangeness of the world she creates.”
  Karin Tidbeck, Amatka

  Mix Förlag, 2012.

  Reviewed by Agnes Broome in SBR 2014:2

  Review Section: Lost Treasure

  Mix is a digital publisher in the Bonnier Group. Amatka has also been published in print.

  Amatka starts with a journey through a featureless, desolate landscape aboard a train with no one on it except Brilars Vanja Essre Two. She is an administrator from the main colony Essre, on her way to the far-flung satellite colony Amatka, where she is to survey the use of, and need for, hygiene supplies. But where are we? The frayed state of the once-grand train seems conspicuously ‘Ozymandian’ and Vanja’s threadbare belongings and meagre rations suggest that this is a country that has for some reason fallen on exceedingly hard times. The grey monotony of the steppe outside gives little away.

  The plot thickens once Vanja has arrived. We learn that Amatka is one of five colonies, all built from the same collectivist blueprint in which residential housing, factories, shops and communal buildings form concentric rings around the central plaza, at the heart of which sits the all-seeing, all-knowing Commune Office. But even though Amatka is so similar to Essre, something immediately strikes Vanja as not right. There is too much space, too few citizens; she is even given her own room to stay in. The people are not unfriendly but there seems to be something no one dares speak of. And the few who do speak, or rather, whisper, are soon taken away, never to return. Vanja is not a rebel by nature, but as events unfold in Amatka, she starts looking for the truth, hesitantly at first, then ever more doggedly. She learns that the secrets buried in Amatka, literally and figuratively, are the foundation upon which the five colonies were built, the cause of the oppression of its citizens and potentially the undoing of their entire civilisation.

  The collectivist dystopia described in Amatka recalls many a classic literary vision, in which individuals have surrendered all their freedom in the name of security and survival within the collective. The milieu is inspired by the kolkhozes of the Soviet Union, which gives the novel an unusual flavour. Behind the traditional dystopia and the East European references, however, there also lurks something potentially more subversive, a polemic take on Sweden. Amatka is Sweden taken to the extreme, Sweden to the nth degree, a place where the state has usurped the functions of human relationships (parents do not even raise their own children), where the authorities have unlimited powers and conformity is highest law. The lobotomies Amatka’s rulers use to neutralise dissenters are a disturbing echo of Sweden’s programme of forced sterilisation of undesirables, which was only discontinued in 1975.

  Apart from a provocative contribution to the discussion about Swedishness, Amatka offers us beautiful and arresting prose. Language is the foundation of everything in Amatka, it is literally what maintains the shape of its reality: if the citizens of Amatka forget to continuously tell their belongings what they are supposed to be, or use the words that describe them metaphorically, they simply dissolve into puddles of goo. The signifier defines the signified in the most direct sense. The language of Amatka is therefore, by necessity, plain to the point of being inhuman, stripped of metaphors and morphological ornament of any kind. The central role language plays in the narrative is beautifully paralleled in Tidbeck’s own language, as she cleverly allows form to mirror content. Heretofore a writer of short stories, Tidbeck uses her spare prose to economically sketch a bleak, washedout world, virtually humming with suppressed secrets and on the brink of collapse. Tidbeck’s unique voice and the compelling strangeness of the world she creates will surely make every reader determined to follow Brilars Vanja Essre Two wherever the truth may lead.

  ​

• Comics Beat
  http://www.comicsbeat.com/sdcc-17-interview-author-karin-tidbeck-uncovers-the-dreamlike-storyline-of-amatka/
  Word count: 1753

  Quoted in Sidelights: “a series of dream transcripts” from which Tidbeck then crafted a poetry collection, which publishers rejected, so she turned the material into the novel, she told Nicholas Eskey at the Comics Beat Web site. “Ultimately the process took maybe five or six-years,” she said. “But during the whole time I was constantly interested in this thing; ‘What if matter responds to language? How does language shape the world we live in?’”
  SDCC ’17: Interview: Author Karin Tidbeck Uncovers the Dreamlike Storyline of “Amatka”
  SDCC ’17: Interview: Author Karin Tidbeck Uncovers the Dreamlike Storyline of “Amatka”
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  07/28/2017 8:00 am by Nicholas Eskey

  Author Karin Tidbeck

  Karin Tidbeck is a science-fiction and fantasy author, born in Stockholm, Sweden. Her latest novel, Amatka, focuses on a colonized alien-planet where the physical use of words plays an integral part in the shaping and maintaining of the world. At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I sat down with her at the Penguin Random House booth and asked her a great many things.

  –

  When did you start writing?

  I’ve always been writing. The first thing I wrote I was five-years old. It was an illustrated story called “Two Poor Children.” It’s a comic about two poor children that find gold and live happily ever after. It’s very consumerist.

  Would you say you’ve always been into the fantasy and science-fiction genres?

  Yeah, I’ve never written social realism. I’ve always written fantasy or science-fiction.

  What do you find most appealing about them?

  I see it as a huge laboratory. You can do whatever you want in science; You can try new concepts and new ideas, explore alternatives to the world that we live in right now. To me, it’s the best form of literature because literature needs to do something to you. It has to move you somehow, and what moves me is possibilities; new worlds.

  Have you always planned on writing for an English-speaking market?

  When I was nineteen, I worked in a science-fiction bookshop in Stockholm. There was, and still is, this magazine called “Locus,” which is the SFF industry’s main magazine, and I would read that during lunch break. And I had this revelation that “I wanted to be in here. I want to have my book reviewed in here. I want to have an interview here. And I want to be on the shelves in the book shop… in English.” The thing is, Sweden has a very small readership. It’s very difficult to get books published, it’s very difficult to sell books, it’s extremely difficult to sell speculative fiction. So, I realized that the market was so small that I had to switch languages, but I didn’t switch until I was in my early thirties.

  Tell us a little about your book, “Amatka.”

  Amatka is about humans colonizing a world where matter, physical matter, responds to language. It’s about what happens to society that tries to survive in such a world. What happens to the people who quite can’t find a place in it. So, it’s about reality, it’s about language, it’s about revolution, and it’s about love.

  Would you say you decided to write this book because language and words are such a big part about your life?

  It was a very organic process. It started as a series of dream transcripts that I wrote down when I was… well, fifteen years ago now. And I turned those into poems. So, I wrote a poetry collection based on dreams. That got rejected everywhere, so I used the material to eventually write Amatka. Ultimately the process took maybe five or six-years. But during the whole time I was constantly interested in this thing; “What if matter responds to language? How does language shape the world we live in?”

  Amatka first was published in Sweden, about five-years ago now. How was the process from translating from Swedish to English?

  I did a word-by-word translation to begin with and then I went through it as if it were a first draft of any book. I went through the language, reformulated sentences, because you can’t do a word-by-word translation of anything really. You have to reimagine each sentence as it is.

  Author Karin Tidbeck

  Were you afraid some elements of your writing would have been lost in the translation?

  There were some difficulties when trying to carry them over into English. The Swedish [translation of Amatka] has no metaphors, or synonyms, or homonyms, because it’s not part of the Swedish language. Since they were “forbidden” in the book, I had to write them out of the prose as well. So, making that happen in English was difficult because English is a different language in that way. It’s difficult to tame when you’re not a native speaker, and I’m not a native speaker. I can [translate well] to Swedish; it’s hard to do to English. Swedish dialogue can be more direct that English is, so the way you shape the character or the impression of the character through dialogue is harder when you translate from one language to another.

  Is there anything else you’re currently working on?

  I’m currently working on a novel, which I can’t talk about because it’s not done. I have a few short stories that will be coming out in the near future, which I can’t talk about either because they’re also not done. It’s always an interesting question, isn’t it? You go into the world and show them your new baby. “Here’s my baby! Look at it!” And everyone’s like, “Okay. When’s your next baby?”

  What ideas would you love to experiment with in the future?

  I’d like to write more about gender structures and explore different modes of how think about gender, how we see gender, and how we experience gender. I would also like to write more about mental illness. Most of the stuff I read when it comes to mental illness is horror stories or very sad things. I would like to explore the subject in ways that doesn’t turn the sufferer, if you will, into the victim. It can be something else. I’ve done this in a couple short stories already, but I would like to expand that.

  Do you think you’ll ever write exclusively for an English-speaking market?

  That’s what I’m doing right now. I really don’t write in Swedish anymore because I can’t sell. It’s very difficult to sell. And if you do sell, you really don’t get paid. So, I write almost exclusively in English.

  What advice would you have for readers, particularly young-adult reader?

  Language is the ultimate power. Language is how we decide what the world is or what it’s going to be. And without language… If you don’t have the language, you don’t have the power. Reading anything really, because you don’t have to read the “Russian-classics” in order to be a reader. The important thing is that you read, because you arm yourself with words.

  In a typical day, what is your writing schedule?

  If I’m working on something new, in the morning I’ll write long-hand, meaning by hand, edit in the afternoon, and then do all the dull stuff I have to do. You know, email, invoices, and booking… When I read, I read comics and novels. Sometimes I’ll play video games or board games. That kind of stuff.

  Who have been some of your writing influences?

  Probably, since I was a kid, there was a Finnish author named Tove Jansson who wrote “The Moomins” books. Basically, she talks to kids about scary stuff, which opened my eyes to the fact that there’s darkness in the world when she made it so you could cope with it. And there’s Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” graphic novels that I read when I was a teenage and they were very important to me. Also, science-fiction by Ursula Le Guin, weird fiction by China Miéville, and some Swedish folklore as well has been very important.

  Is there anything in particular you draw your inspiration from?

  I really can’t say I get my inspiration from there, or there, or there. What happens is that I think of my brain as a compost heap. Everything I see, and experience, and then goes on the top, and it just ferments. What I write is basically what I scoop out from the bottom. You know, the garbage juice that comes out.

  What do you love best about writing?

  It is the best feeling. It is the best high, because it is a high, when you’ve begun to write something and you realize that this is something, that this could be big. You fall in love with it and you fall in love with the story. It’s a rush like nothing else. And you get hubris. You’re sort of the “I’m a young god, I’m on top of the world! I can do anything! This is amazing! I’ve come up with something that no one has ever come up with before.” And obviously after that you sort of fall flat and go “This is shit… I don’t know what I’m doing… Keyboards should be taken away from me.” And then you keep going to the next point which is “Okay, this could work.” Then you’re back to “I’m a young god, again!”
  Nicholas Eskey
  Nicholas Eskey is an avid reader and writer. When not contributing to The Beat, he works on his personal projects, the latest being a fantasy novel called "My Personable Demon." He lives in San Diego, California, and is frequently bossed around by his cat.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/06/27/533818736/in-amatka-a-warped-and-chilling-portrait-of-post-truth-reality
  Word count: 756

  Quoted in Sidelights: “She paints the moral ambiguities of a repressive society in the same gray tones as the sky above Amatka,” he reported. “Most of all, her meditation on the power of names — and how language can be used to control both perception and substance — resonates chillingly in our post-truth reality.”In 'Amatka,' A Warped And Chilling Portrait Of Post-Truth Reality
  June 27, 20177:00 AM ET

  Jason Heller
  Amatka
  Amatka

  by Karin Tidbeck

  Paperback, 216 pages
  purchase

  The Nordic speculative-fiction scene has become increasingly prominent in the past few years, with authors such Leena Krohn and Johanna Sinisalo, both from Finland, garnering fresh attention and translations in the United States. In Sweden, one of the most promising authors of science fiction and fantasy in recent years has been Karin Tidbeck.

  Her 2012 short story collection, Jagganath, showcased her knack for sharp yet dreamlike tale-spinning. Tidbeck's debut novel Amatka came out the same year, in Swedish only — and it's seeing its first English translation now. Not a moment too soon, either: Despite being originally published five years ago, its surreal vision of deadly conspiracies, political oppression, and curtailed freedom couldn't be more eerily timely.

  Amatka takes place in one of the most audacious science-fiction settings since Besźel/Ul Qoma from China Miéville's The City and The City. In Miéville's book, two fictional European city-states are superimposed upon each other, with residents of each forbidden to acknowledge the existence of the other. In Tidbeck's agricultural colony of Amatka, a totalitarian government rules over a deprived and economically depressed population. But this is no run-of-the-mill dystopia. One of Amatka's many repressive rules is the requirement that citizens routinely repeat the names of certain marked objects in the colony. If they don't, those objects will dissolve into what the main character Vanja, calls "gloop" — a formless substance that feels uncannily like living tissue.

  Despite being originally published five years ago, [Tidbeck's] surreal vision of deadly conspiracies, political oppression, and curtailed freedom couldn't be more eerily timely.

  The strangeness does not come anywhere close to ending there. Vanja is from another colony, Essre, and she travels to Amatka for a work assignment — to assess the marketing possibilities there for the hygiene-product company she works for. This world's level of technology is woefully backward, and Vanja struggles to acclimate to Amatka's coldness and remoteness. It's a place of underground mushroom farms and impossible lakes that freeze and thaw of their own volition, a nowhere-land with a gray and featureless sky. The more she settles into life in Amatka, though, the more the colony's oddness intensifies. Objects begin to dissolve at an increasing rate, and conspiracies start to appear — some of them connected to a fomenting rebellion, and some of them regarding the government's apparent cover-up of the true reason behind its draconian laws. Not to mention the reality-melting secret of the gloop.
  'Jagannath' Stories Are Weird In A Good Way
  Book Reviews
  'Jagannath' Stories Are Weird In A Good Way

  Tidbeck's premise is almost comical, but her execution is anything but. Amatka teems with mysteries, and almost every innocuous detail — like the fact that the colony's residents are vegan — winds up having head-spinning ramifications later on. As exquisitely constructed as her enigmas are, however, they're atmospheric and deeply moving. Vanja is not an easy character to latch onto, but that sense of distance makes her ultimate choices and sacrifices — and what they say about loneliness and freedom — so much more poignant.

  Amatka does not wrap up as conclusively as many readers may like, but then it's nowhere near being a conventional sci-fi novel. Tidbeck triumphs at crafting an ending that's both unsettingly vague and unerringly true to the warped internal logic of her world. Amatka is so disorienting that it makes the otherwise generic elements of her political dystopia — including crippling procedures and secret camps for dissidents — feel almost comfortingly familiar. It's an unnerving trick, and one Tidbeck pulls off to effect: She paints the moral ambiguities of a repressive society in the same gray tones as the sky above Amatka. Most of all, her meditation on the power of names — and how language can be used to control both perception and substance — resonates chillingly in our post-truth reality.

  Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

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