
The Details
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Feverstruck, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly she’s hit with an urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside: an inscription from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from the past begin to flip, full of people she cannot forget. That ex, now a TV host. The friend who disappeared. The man who appeared at the right moment. The woman whose elusiveness shielded a secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one painting? The Details unveils the fragments of experience that make up a life; a powerful celebration of what it means to be human.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Kira
Josefsson
Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and literary translator working between English and Swedish. Her translation of Ia Genberg’s The Details was shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, and her translation of Johanna Hedman’s The Trio was shortlisted for the 2023 Bernard Shaw Prize. In 2017, her work on Pooneh Rohi’s The Arab won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, she has lived in Helsinki, Paris, and Montréal; New York City has been her home for more than ten years. She also writes on US issues in the Swedish press.
Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and literary translator working between English and Swedish. Her translation of Ia Genberg’s The Details was shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, and her translation of Johanna Hedman’s The Trio was shortlisted for the 2023 Bernard Shaw Prize. In 2017, her work on Pooneh Rohi’s The Arab won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, she has lived in Helsinki, Paris, and Montréal; New York City has been her home for more than ten years. She also writes on US issues in the Swedish press.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
“The details” by Swedish Ia Genberg has been a favourite among our patrons and staff an we are so glad to see it finally translated to English, so even more people can read it and enjoy it as much as we did. The members of our staff recommends this book to our patrons at different ages and with different preferences, as it’s both sublime and poetic, yet relatively easy to read. It has been over one year since the book was first published in Norway, but we can barely keep any copies on our shelves for too long. This makes it a strong candidate to represent preferences of both our staff and the readers. Additionally, besides being short-listed for the Booker prize, the book received an astounding critique in Norway and won the prestigious Augustprisen in Sweden.
“The details” is a beautifully woven story where not much it happening on the surface, yet it catches readers’ attention and doesn’t let go until the final sentence. The narrative is told from the perspective of a woman who lies in bed sick, and when she opens an old time favourite book she finds a note written to her by her ex-lover. This note sparks a flow of memories filled with details and melancholic impressions. The main character paints portraits of four people who have been, for different reasons, important in her life, and she tries to revoke the elements of their presence. The author slowly and skilfully sets together a mosaic of human experience with its beautiful, brittle details that makes us who we are. The book is contemplative and complex without being overwhelming for a reader to sink into. A lovely, intimate read. (Bergen Public Library) The narrator of The Details is a woman in the midst of her life. Maybe not lost in the dark forest of the midst of her life as Dante, but in the state of a “pause”, lying in bed in a bittersweet feverish haze, letting the memories of past lives step forward. “Our life consists of many different lives” is a bearing thought in the novel, which will rediscover four encounters that has been especially important in our narrator’s life: she tells us about these relationships by revealing certain details and episodes of the relationships. In an interview in Swedish radio, Ia Genberg told us how she began from the beginning each time she sat down to write The Details – which you can feel as a reader: it has a confidence and freshness, each word seems precise yet effortless. Written in a stream of focused energy, maybe even in… an artistic flow? The book gradually gained more and more recognition and won the Swedish August Prize. Which isn’t really that important because I don’t think Genberg write for fame or money. She writes because she writes, clear and honest, and somehow cutting through much louder literature. The Details take place in a near, yet already distant past: the 1990’s and 2000’s, a time “when people who disappeared were hard to find.” Anyone who is no longer in the phonebook is gone, possibly forever. One method of searching for a missing person that practiced in the book is to travel to a small town in Ireland, divide the map into twenty squares and systematically search them one by one. For some people, this novel may offer a much-needed respite from contemporary efficiency and accessibility. The novel also depicts how different periods and relationships in our lives are forever linked to a certain book or author: Paul Auster’s New York trilogy is one example of a title that plays an important role in this book. Ia Genberg shows how we grasp after different people and books, as companions through our lives. (Gothenburg City Library/Stadsbiblioteket Göteborg)