Review: Natasha Brown’s language skills are furiously elegant

One hundred and five pages, that’s all. You almost get pissed. The British author Natasha Brown’s debut illustrates in an extraordinary way why the short novel is such a difficult format, and such a narrow ledge to balance on.

Of course, the stars can stand right in the small, especially in great writers. Agota Kristof’s “Det kan kvitta” needs exactly 73 pages in Swedish, and Vivek Shanbhag’s “Ghachar ghochar” neither more nor less than 128. But a little too often authors and publishers underestimate the density that is actually required for a really neat volume to carry. In other cases, the text is so saturated with promises and overtones that you close the book in a feeling of emptiness after a literary force that has not been allowed to unfold.

“Collection” belongs to which you understand the second category. This is a novel that feels too big for its own form, with epic qualities resting in hints and sudden silences. When you as a reader have resigned yourself to the fact that you simply did not get more, it is only a matter of letting yourself be captivated by a sense of language that is at the same time elegant and furious, cool and revolutionary.

An unnamed I have made a glittering career in London’s financial world. And if a black woman has an ergonomic office chair for thousands of kronor, business cards on exclusive paper and a Bluetooth headset, it must say something about the state of affairs. How could she even be here if racism was not a closed chapter? Or as our main character puts it: “Explain air. Convince a skeptic. Prove that it exists. Prove what is not visible. A slight brutality cuts through you every day – how do you excuse it? ” Waking up wet and panting every night – is that enough?

Our unnamed woman also has cancer, a little bit in passing. But it’s quiet, the hospital has private rooms, cut flowers and espresso. “I’m just glad you’re fine,” says the boyfriend with a kiss. This weekend she’s going to the garden party to his family’s country estate, you know what it’s about – old, white money. These are not parents arguing about a black daughter-in-law visiting, as she will never be one. She is the youngest son’s “latest lady companion”, as mother calls it all.

Patient and tolerant the surroundings await a phase that will land on a few sentences in the story of this man’s life – no point in prolonging the spectacle unnecessarily. A black girlfriend can also have its benefits, believe nothing else. Not least, she can offer a “special kind of liberal credibility”. His white presence can in turn benefit her, and assure the world that she is “the right kind of diversity.” In short, it’s a working staging for both of them.

Natasha Brown could undoubtedly have made something more grand of her debut, but “Collection” is still a striking and intense novel about how racism erodes life itself. Verbal attacks from strangers, colleagues who constantly use her as an assistant and incite that any success depends on quotas. The coffee and airline tickets she fixes for them are something more than ordinary honest exploitation – they are proof of who she is in the world.

In the skewed relationship with the surroundings, Brown’s living stylistics stand out with special sharpness. Just listen to how a mediocre man strolls into the office, in Matilda Södergran’s excellent translation: “He rarely shows up before eleven. As if fresh mediocrity rises every morning from the sea, eels over mossy rocks and sand, then grows jerky appendages that stretch and turn and twist into limbs as it struggles inland, until a fully developed Lou! finally strolling into the lobby on two flat feet in polished shoes. ”

This is a novel which goes beyond the type of discrimination story where all injustice is rooted in a lack of meritocracy and where the worst that can happen is that the rich middle class is treated as servants. Such scenes exist, of course. But Natasha Brown drags everything further, building the image systematically, with historical details from Britain’s colonial history creating a sense of slow suffocation.

“Collection” with its short chapters is also driven forward in superficial and strained breaths, which become a kind of rhythmic emphasis on the main character’s existential exhaustion. This is a human being shaped with almost complete distance; we do not know her and she does not know herself, assimilated to nothing. So the novel’s anti-realist decision to refuse cancer treatment (“Stop kicking. Breathe in the water.”) Also becomes quite consistent, and a symbolic way to regain control. She is already wiped out.

Read more texts by Kristina Lindquist and more reviews of current books in DN Kultur.