This is exactly what I needed to get me out of a reading rut. Is there a "plot" to speak of? No, not really - and that's what's so beautiful. Genberg paints such vivid pictures of people and eras of her life that you can't help but get swept up and transported right along with her. It's slow, quiet, and incredibly comforting. Well-deserved place on the International Booker shortlist - certainly wouldn't be upset if it won!

JUST WHAT EVEN LOL VERY COOL AND WEIRD THANK YOU SO MUCH TO NETGALLEY FOR THE ADVANCED READER COPY VERY COOL!

Turning to the second page of The Details, I felt that rare sense of electricity and premonition that I had stumbled onto something truly special. And I wasn’t wrong. Genberg’s gorgeous prose, her shrewd observations, her many allusions to literature, and her focus on people’s stories and relationships – all of these elements synthesized into an incredibly compelling novella.

This book is for lovers of character-driven novels. It’s the account of a woman whose thoughts are spiked by a high fever and who revisits her experiences with four meaningful people from her past and present. I loved Genberg’s moody, contemplative writing, her existential questions, and her intimate character portraits. Huge kudos also goes to Kira Josefsson who translated Genberg’s novel from Swedish. Highly recommend.

Thank you to HarperVia and NetGalley for the advanced readers copy.

I had much higher hopes for this book than how it turned out. Overall it was not very memorable. I normally love what my old creative writing professor would call a "bathtub story," or a woman sitting in the bathtub ruminating on things, but I felt like this left something to be desired in terms of reflective depth.

One of the most unique books I’ve read this year. Beautiful writing! The story centers on a woman that has come back from the Serengeti. She finds out that she has been infected with Malaria. As she starts to have fever dreams, she remembers four people that were important in her life.

There’s not much of a plot but the story is very character driven which I loved. It really felt like I was the one having the fever dream while reading it!

A thoughtful and detailed narrative. "The Details" is split into four sections, each of which focus on a specific person and their impacts on the unnamed narrator of the story throughout her life. It makes you think about human connections and how memories form.

I found it interesting, and sad, how each of the featured characters struggled with their mental health in one way or another. It's a quick read, but thorough and with realistic characters. Definitely worth reading.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

This is a short and sweet character-based novel. I loved how reflective, slow and introspective it is, but also with a lot of things happening. I love the voice of the narrator, but most of all, the context and the setting.

I like the concept of reminiscing on memories and people from your past from a fever, in theory, but I don’t think it added anything to the story overall. I read this in the span of a couple of weeks, and I completely forgot about the fever bit. And even though I thought some characters and some stories where more interesting than others, I think overall, it was a great novel.

Definitely want to keep reading more of this author. Hopefully, we get more translations!

“𝕎𝕖 𝕚𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕕 𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕤𝕖𝕝𝕧𝕖𝕤 𝕚𝕟 𝕖𝕒𝕔𝕙 𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 𝕚𝕟 𝕒 𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕟𝕖𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕠𝕟𝕝𝕪 𝕙𝕒𝕡𝕡𝕖𝕟𝕤 𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕙 𝕡𝕖𝕠𝕡𝕝𝕖 𝕨𝕙𝕠 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕔𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕒𝕚𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝕒 𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕘 𝕝𝕚𝕗𝕖 𝕥𝕠𝕘𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣, 𝕒𝕤 𝕚𝕗 𝕨𝕖’𝕕 𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕕 𝕒 𝕘𝕦𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕠𝕟𝕝𝕪 𝕕𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙 𝕨𝕠𝕦𝕝𝕕 𝕥𝕖𝕒𝕣 𝕦𝕤 𝕒𝕡𝕒𝕣𝕥.”

This book was beautifully mundane. I felt like I knew these characters myself and could compare them to the various people i’ve come across in my life. The writing was so raw and real and I could feel all the emotions behind each and every word. I kind of wish it were longer, but then again maybe that was the intent.

I loved this short novel. It was so vivid, touching, beautiful and true. What's funny is that the novel it most reminded me of was Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved -- very different in plot and structure, but something about the reading experience was similar for me.

It was very interesting Women who had a fever and she had certain books. In her past. This time, the stories of these women Tied together and explain the story. They all had something to do. With her pass. Jo HAC a what's Was a person she lived with, and they were Like soulmates but things start to change when this person start to write a novel. Lend to break up. M o n o k a What was a person she was really comfortable with? Had a really have a relationship but I did not last.. She disappeared at a concert that She never knew what happened. MIOKI. It's very wealthy and And she showed her a different way of life. Money didn't really matter, When she ran out of money because she was a student, she will go out by expensive stuff for her. She ended up Going Out with the man from Ireland. I She has a roommate name SALOY. And they were really good friends. And she got along really well with her. They got along really well together and had a very nice life. Bridget was another whole story altogether. She had a tragic pass. When she was very young, she was R APE. This caused a lot of suspicion in her life, and she really couldn't get all my life. It was very hard for her to be near anybody with express your emotions.

This was an absolutely lovely novel that proved to me once more that writers who can create a stone soup of a novel out of nothing at all, and to read it will be life-changing. It reminded me (not for its subject, but for its -subjectivity-) of reading Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik, Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett, In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova. These are very different books in terms of their focus but similar in the way the work through the accumulation of detail and exquisite observation and are part of a tradition that I suppose people who had read Proust (and maybe some who haven't ) would call "Proustian."

THE DETAILS is one of those books that delivers everything I want in a novel. It’s reflective, character-based, and succinct (it’s incredibly thorough, yet isn’t even 200 pages long). In THE DETAILS, our unnamed narrator suffers from a fever and feels spurred to reflect on four relationships she’s had throughout her life, starting with an ex-girlfriend but also including a family member, a friend, and a lover. Each section paints an observant, compassionate, detailed (hence the title) portrait of an individual and a time in the narrator’s life. Notably, the four individuals profiled are not necessarily the most important people to the narrator (she has several children who barely get mentioned; her best friend is present in most of the chapters but doesn’t get a chapter of her own). Genberg tells each story in a way that’s subtle and readable, using storytelling structures that intrigue the reader while also fitting the narrative (cross-cutting in one chapter; a reveal that had me immediately go back and reread the start of another chapter). And, though the chapters each focus on a new person, Genberg creates a complete picture of the narrator’s young adult life in Stockholm and the narrator’s unique way of understanding the world.

First published in Sweden in 2022; published in translation by HarperVia on August 8, 2023

The Details is about “lives within our lives,” our “smaller lives with people who come and go.” The novel’s narrator, a woman who is aging into her senior years, recalls fragments of her past, memories triggered by fever, “people filing in and out of my face in no particular order.”

The narrator reminds me of the recurring “Sprockets” sketch on SNL. Mike Meyers played Dieter, a pretentious, humorless, self-absorbed German art/film critic who hosted a talk show. Dieter had little interest in his guests, whose responses to his questions typically made him feel “emotionally obliterated.” The protagonist in The Details suffered from some of the same self-inflicted melancholy when she was younger. In the grip of fever, however, her sense of self recedes and she embraces joy sparked by random memories of having lived. Or so she claims.

To be fair, the narrator asserts that even her younger self, always observational, was capable of “letting myself go and directing my attention outward,” where she found “a sharper sense of being alive” in “the alert gaze of another.” My impression is that her outward-directed attention is largely directed at mirrors or their human equivalent — people who reflected her attitudes and desires.

Like Dieter, the novel’s narrator is a brooding intellectual. She values deep conversations and rejects everything that is too shallow or superficial to meet her standard of worthy interaction. She condemns MTV and television shows in general (“To get absorbed by a show, to let yourself be swept up, would have been a sign of mental lassitude”). She has the same attitude about magazines, political debates, and conversations at family gatherings, viewing them only as “incidences of current trends, available to interpret for a deeper understanding of the world.” She doesn’t like people who tell anecdotes (“a form of chronic illness that attaches to some people”). Like Dieter, she is a humorless critic of her surroundings.

The narrator has fevered memories of four people who played important roles in her life. She first shares her memories of Johanna, a woman of velocity whose enthusiasm contrasted with the narrator’s inertia. She remembers Johanna’s kindness and kisses, their general agreement about literature (both are fans of Paul Auster), and Johanna’s encouraging remarks about the narrator’s writing (in contrast to lovers who didn’t want to read her writing, or those who wanted to read her writing but “didn’t get it, or who got it but had nothing intelligent to say.” The narrator’s relationship with Johanna made her feel safe because “she had started on me and wouldn’t give up.” The narrator is stunned by Johanna’s “sudden and brutal departure.” Perhaps the narrator believes Johanna gave up, but my sense that is that the narrator gave up on moving toward the future and Johanna grew frustrated with the narrator’s inability to set or achieve goals.

Before Johanna, the narrator shared an apartment with Niki. While Niki was messy, moody, and impulsive, she was also brilliant and funny. Their relationship was intense until Niki left for Galway with a guy named James. The narrator accepted Niki’s father’s request to track her down when Niki’s mother became ill. The quest proves Niki to be capricious and emotionally unstable, although it isn’t clear that the narrator sees her that way.

The third memory is of Alejandro, who arrived at the turn of the Millenium. Alejandro danced on stage for a jazz band. The narrator has deeply meaningful sex with Alejandro, sex that permits her “authenticity in the midst of this act, without a single thought in my head, without imitation, to be permitted to wreck my life once more.” What this means, beyond the narrator’s impression that they made a connection, is unclear to me. In any event, he became the lover against whom all other were measured. When Alejandro disappeared from her life under ambiguous circumstances, he left ambiguity in his wake. There seems to be a pattern of lovers suddenly leaving the narrator, but the narrator never asks herself whether she might be responsible for those abrupt departures.

Birgitte, a woman adrift who was shaped by her childhood trauma, is the fourth memory. Her shallowness, conflict avoidance, and “absence of personality” would not seem to make her memorable, but Birgitte is the narrator’s mother. She gave birth to the narrator during a “psychotic break.” For a time, she was into psychology and astrology and crystals and tarot cards, apparently giving them all equal weight. She was (according to the narrator) a “seeker,” a derisive term that implies “a pose, a new way of being superficial.” Divorced from Birgitte for fifteen years, her father cried when she died, wept for “a life lived but also spilled.” The narrator has little to say about Birgitte. Perhaps the narrator is choosing not to remember anything positive about her mother, the things that made her father mourn Birgitte’s passing.

Readers who are turned off by paragraphs that run for two or three pages should look for a different book. The density of the text requires some concentration. Some readers don’t want to make the effort. I don’t fault those readers, but I don’t fault writers for not catering to readers who prefer short chapters and plentiful paragraph breaks so they know where to place a bookmark.

I am probably similar to those lovers of the narrator who have “nothing intelligent to say” about the author’s writing. The narrator is something of a Debbie Downer. Not to stereotype, but whenever I pick up a work of Scandinavian literature, I prepare myself for an aftermath of depression. The Details fits that pattern.

I appreciate the details that accumulate in the pages of The Details. I appreciate the narrator’s ability to discuss failed relationships without obvious bitterness. I appreciate the concept of people who play important roles in our lives before they drift away or choose to disappear.

The novel is marketed as a book that demonstrates how connections shape a life, but I don’t see much shaping. How did the significant people in her life affect the narrator? I’m not sure. Her take seems to be: They were here, they’re gone, life moves on. I get that. I expect that we are more inclined to think about people who come and go as we gain age and experience. I suppose there is value in illustrating the transitory nature of most relationships, but I came away from The Details with an equal mix of admiration and indifference.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

my favorite literary fiction novels are perceptive, reflective, intelligent and needling; books that can cut right to the bone have so much staying power for me, especially those in small packages. ia genberg's THE DETAILS is all of this and more, and i loved it.

our middle-aged, bisexual swedish narrator is hazy with fever, her sickbed thoughts swirling as she recalls memories of her past as a student in 1990s stockholm: the tumultous but thrilling freedom of young adulthood with no plans, money, or direction, the dual terror and comfort of being molded by those around you while also trying desperately to define your own life. each chapter is devoted to a major figure from her fluctuating circle of friends, acquaintances and lovers, structured just enough to be lucid but loose enough for the reader to float along the narrator's conscious like a river.

genberg's prose is sharp and stunning, and at a novella length (~120 pages) there is not a word out of place. frames of perception, character motivations and personal histories are laid bare cleanly, but the particulars are what give genberg's characters their depth. true to its title, the small moments that pop out from above the surface of the narrator's memory are the ones that become most steadfast for her: names, streets, subway stops, meals, smells, book titles, authors. in many ways, THE DETAILS is also a love letter to swedish literature, and to the books and writers that see us through a life. i deeply appreciated genberg's attention to these details but also her ability to extract the beauty and pain of universal experiences: the inevitable complexities of romantic and familial relationships, unsteadily coming of age, learning to see others as whole people and not just as characters in your own life.

highly recommend.

I am so thankful to HarperVia, Netgalley, and Ia Genberg for granting me both digital and physical access to this twisty thriller before it published on August 8, 2023.

The Details is a short novel about a woman who is very ill and suffering from a high fever and begins to recall four people in her life who affected her in different ways. Each chapter is devoted to each of these four characters. It's a beautifully written piece of literature and more of a character study than a suspenseful novel. I enjoyed it more than I expected, and I found myself reflecting on people in my own life who have affected me in various ways. I highly recommend this beautiful book and hope that others will enjoy it equally as well. Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for the ARC.

Ecru silk damask, if it were a novel.

Fine sentences, trenchant observations, but all a bit samey. The nature of Love is, I guess, pretty much to be variations on a theme for most all of us. Like the damask I opened with, it's details that change not the shape of the central concerns of the lover. Her apparent life-long bisexuality simply is, from beginning to end; there's zero mention of coming out, except a tiny nod at the very end when her father's calm reaction to it in the past gets a sentence fragment. Nor is there a single soul whose response to her bisxeuality is...well, to be honest, even present.

This being the way I think things should be, I got no kick with that.

What doesn't excite me then? I have the sneaking suspicion that there's not more than meets the eye here, that the meanings are all present and accounted for, that one's meant to be exactly where we're left. I'm perfectly ready to stipulate that this could be my failure to dig deeper. Honestly the prose and the story don't invite me to do so...Nor do I, a lifelong US citizen, feel I'm led to see and feel the map coordinates throughout the text. Because I'm not Swedish nor am I familiar with them, the towns and neighborhoods of Stockholm that are named gave me no extra information, no deepened shadows or illuminated spots from their mentions.

The events of her life of love coming to her as fragments in a malarial fever gets little enough play that I never had a chance to develop a response to it. It's merely a framing device and no more. I found that to be a good thing because it didn't require a lot to use it effectively. Mentions here and there. No more than might occur in a letter one sends to a friend recalling shared moments from the past.

If your present mood calls for something meditative, something thoughtful without being stressful, here's a short, pleasant trip to Sweden with an honest hearted companion. Let her tell you some of her secrets. Your day might be enriched even more than mine was by my bisexual sibling. One small tic in the corner of my eye was caused by Alejandro,in the blurb above, campaigning for the narrator to have a baby with him. It is Kristian, whom Alejandro displaced in the narrtor's love, that wanted to have babies with the narrator. *tsk* on the copywriter!

I love a fever dream of a novel and The Details is one of the best I've ever read. And it's perfect for women in translation month! This isn't a book in translation, but it is Genberg's English language debut and it is incredible!

The concept of this novel brings me back to Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory,” being that it’s a sick woman recalling former lovers. I came away from reading this a little confused about what just transpired, but it is a fun quick read that made me think of all the people in my life that will stick with me when I am older. I also love the setting of Stockholm and broader Europe.

I loved this a lot more than I expected I would. Our narrator, in bed with a fever, takes us through several formative relationships in her life, including her mother, several lovers (both male and female), and her lifelong best friend.

This is such a quiet novel that slowly reveals some undeniable truths about life and love. The details of the title are in so many ways just the little things we pick up from others around us, the formative relationships and people who shape the people we become. One of my favorite lines (and there were many) was: "I've had more than my share of magic in life, most often in the encounter with others. There is something there, and only there. I can't be more specific than that, can only say that if we're searching we should look in each other, that a pair of eyes are another's sideways colon into something, or out of something."

By the end of the novel, our narrator is no longer feverish, but she is still reckoning with what the people who impacted her the most mean to her and her life. It's a beautiful exploration of relationships and what makes up the many decades of a life. I highly recommend.