Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi, “Smoke and Mirrors”

“Smoke and Mirrors” is the title of Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi’s new novel, the fourth since her debut in 2017 with the prose poem “The Night That Preceded This Day.” Perhaps the title can also be understood as a reading aid. For what is true and what are tricks, illusions and fantasy in this Gothic ghost story?

The focus of the story is Bernarda, who grew up at the Malmö City Theater, where her parents worked, is now employed in the theater’s decoration workshop and is the mother of a small daughter herself. But it’s not easy being a mother when you’ve never been a child yourself.

In Bernarda’s childhood adults have “better things to do than be parents.” A theater child is not allowed to get involved in what constitutes a child in the ordinary world, namely playing, “because the game already belongs to the adults”. Instead, the theater children sit in the wings, “watching the business news on silent film television,” like small, dry and serious adults, the only role left for them among the family archetypes.

The author may have had his own experiences with this, as Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi also grew up at the Malmö City Theater as the child of director Staffan Valdemar Holm and set designer Bente Lykke Møller. Her intimate, bloody depictions of life on and off stage come across as extremely true, a beautiful and shocking testimony to a world turned upside down.

This almost mythical figure, the young girl, is a specialty of Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi

Bernarda was a strange child, “in her doll closet the atmosphere was like Noreen,” as Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi writes. (Though I wonder whose dollhouse the mood was in not Nordic?) Only in the friendship of Asta, another theater child who one day seems to suddenly change Bernarda’s life, was she firmly and securely anchored. Together they were a unity, a primal force.

This is almost mythical Figure, the young girl, is a specialty of Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi. On the back cover of the debut novel about a thirteen-year-old girl is a single line: “It is a terrible thing to be a child.” In “Strega” from 2020, a group of very young women work in an abandoned mountain hotel, a herd of like-minded and very distinctive animals. The dark, crackling force field around a young girl can also be found in the friends in “Smoke and Mirrors”.

But Asta, Bernarda’s confidant, died. She was gassed in her bed along with her little brother and her mother, the great actress. Bernarda knows what happened but has never told anyone. When she tried, she saw herself raising her hand to her mouth to literally prevent the truth from coming out.

Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi calls the fact that men abuse, rape and murder women “this tradition that goes back thousands of years.”

Twenty-five years later After a catastrophe, she begins to be haunted by her dead soulmate. Asta appears in the apartment as a teenage ghost. It hangs from the ceiling, walks through the rooms, throws down porcelain and mirrors. Is it madness, a psychosis, an unprocessed trauma that Bernarda has been putting off for so long that it finally manifests itself in hallucinations? Or does Asta want to say something to his friend, as ghosts usually do?

The main character, Bernarda, is named after the “matriarch in a female tragedy,” Federico García Lorca’s play “Bernarda’s House,” in which a cruel mother imprisons her five daughters during a period of mourning. It is just one of many pieces incorporated into the novel to deepen the themes that soon emerge. The aim is not only to portray the young girl, but also the violence that – almost inevitably – is exercised against her from puberty onwards, perhaps throughout her life.

Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi calls the fact that men mistreat, rape and murder women “this many-thousand-year-old tradition.” It is so deeply imprinted in us that it is difficult to imagine life otherwise: “You must continue the destruction, because you have always done it, and no one can say for sure that the world would continue if you stopped.” With suppressed anger, the author demands revenge, a multi-thousand-year revenge, on all the perpetrators of history.

It is reminiscent of a gothic queen like Djuna Barnes or the Swedish Mare Kandre, but also of her contemporary colleague Hanna Johansson

Johanne Lykke Naderehvandis In its depth of symbolism and romance, the novel is reminiscent of a Gothic queen like Djuna Barnes or the Swedish Mare Kandre, but also of her contemporary colleague Hanna Johansson. An orange, a braid or a perfume bottle acquire a fateful charge – but where Johansson is a city, Lykke Naderehvandi is more of a beech forest.

Because of course evil is universal, but isn’t it also specifically Scanian? Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi points out something that Lina Wolff also portrayed in last August’s award-winning The Bodies We Buried – that Skåne is a damned place and that a special darkness lies in the fertile underground. “Is there a demon portal somewhere near Helsingborg? Is there a special Scanian poison?” thinks Bernarda as she walks through Malmö’s streets.

The literary landscape is, as usual with this author, overwhelmingly sensual. Everything smells and tastes, drips and clinks. It is evil and beautiful. But Smoke and Mirrors is more urbane than the other novels, the subject matter both more acute and more accessible. Yes, it’s a little more often novel than the previous ones, and in a positive sense. It will and should be read by more people.

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