We know of Strega (“witch” in Italian) that it is a village in the mountains where there is a cable car leading to the Olympic hotel. Nine 19-year-old women are sent there to train in serving customers who never come. One of them is murdered. The rest remains vague, as in a dream where our senses are awake, but where the contours of reality undulate according to our perceptions.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
Written by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from Swedish by Catherine Renaud and finalist for the Nordic Council Grand Prize for Literature in 2021, Strega endorses an unequivocal feminist point through a plot which, although it is camped in a secluded place, out of time and space, is (unfortunately) in tune with the times. For Rafa, the narrator, the female body is a crime scene: “I knew that a murderer was never far away. I had seen him come out of the walls […] We are all candidates, but only some of us are chosen. »
We feel that something is wrong at the Olympic Hotel, but what? Everything, in fact. The strangeness of the employees, a presence in the corridor at night, the families who never call for news and this singular party where a crime has probably been committed. Despite a direct style, punctuated by short sentences, the author offers us a slow story, which stands out from the traditional suspense novel, and where the action is sometimes delayed. But she also surprises us with her writing close to the senses, poetic and dreamlike – too surely at times –, like a fog that never really dissipates.
In bookstores September 6
Strega
Johanne Lykke Holm (translated by Catherine Renaud)
The People
256 pages