Born in Lund in 1973, Lina Wolff is one of the iconic voices of contemporary Swedish literature, the onset of her career having brought her the kind of success that other young writers could only dream of. Because, after 2009, when she made her debut with the short-story volume entitled „Many People Die Like You”, Wolff published, in 2012, „Brett Easton Ellis and Other Dogs”, the novel that was granted the most important Swedish literary awards and was highly acclaimed by the reading audience. Her subsequent novel, „The Polyglot Lovers”, was published in 2016 and validated not only a consummate literary talent but also a rare knack for challenging the mainstream cultural patterns, simultaneously shocking and convincing, surprising and enticing its readers, tackling issues that were anything but convenient, but which the author nevertheless approached and mastered, both on a narrative and on a stylistic level, in an outstanding manner.
Divided into three parts, each with its own perspective and distinct narrator, the book sets forth a host of unusual characters and is focussed mainly on the three voices which, by their narrative accounts (most often depicting the same events and incidents, which are obviously approached from different points of view and therefore seem distinct and dissimilar), make up a peculiar history of certain incredible love – and fictional – affairs. The protagonist of the first narrative sequence is Ellinor, a thirty-six-year-old woman who, after two failed relationships, is trying to find her chosen one. And where would a woman like her, already disappointed by the mundane reality and by the men she would habitually meet, look for her soul-mate, other than on the Internet… Thus, she comes across Ruben, an overweight literary critic, who invites her to his house in Stockholm. But it so happens that the love encounter that the readers might have anticipated turns into a kind of contemporary Walpurgis Night at the end of which their inner demons surface, Ellinor sets on fire the manuscript that Ruben has been reading – the only copy of a book written by Max Lamas, an author whom the critic admires, whom he regards as the embodiment of the contemporary literary genius and who has entrusted him with his work. Lina Wolff refutes all the assumptions (and even the hopes!) that the readers might have and, in spite of everything that has happened, she gives a detailed description of Ellinor’s stay in Ruben’s house, convinced that it is precisely what has made her destroy the precious manuscript that keeps her close to the man she has met online. However, the ordinary course that their life together seems to have taken is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious woman who demands to be given back precisely Max’s book.
The second part of Lina Wolff’s novel brings to the foreground Max himself, the author of the book that has been set on fire… And here we are in a hypnotic, surreal world, in which the borders between reality and fiction are constantly and programmatically obliterated and the readers are the witnesses of some strange encounters between Max and a host of characters seemingly hailed from some of the best pages of the French surrealist fiction writers. But, just as Ellinor is on a quest for the perfect man, so is Max on a quest for the ideal woman, one conversant in all languages and capable of fully understanding him. And it is this strong urge that leads him to Italy, the setting of the third section of „The Polyglot Lovers”. Here, the narrative voice is that of Lucrezia, the woman whose heart Max had broken two years before, and the ensuing events will eventually bring her aristocratic family to ruin.
Certainly, summarized like this, Lina Wolff’s novel is anything but innovative, other than in terms of the novelistic experiments that the writer has staged with unbridled delight and with a rarely encountered gusto. However, the gist of the present novel is to be found elsewhere, namely in the extraordinary intra- and inter-textual dialogue of the narrative voices and perspectives. And certainly in the play with contemporary literature, which the Swedish writer has orchestrated almost imperceptibly. „The Polyglot Lovers” is a genuine questioning of the relationship between the sexes, as well as of the hierarchies in present-day literature, of the short-lists advanced by literary magazines and of the image of the literary genius, assumed to be male par excellence. It is with such mentality and stereotypes and with several interpretation clichés that Lina Wolff dallies, but this ploy of hers is by no means a wanton, cursory game, on the contrary, it has a much higher stake. The writer patiently dismantles the established literary grandstands and dauntlessly throws down the gauntlet at her readers, as well as at the writers of the day. Because Max – resentful and teeming with preconceived opinions – seems to be a character devised by Michel Houellebecq, and, well into the book, the readers will find that Lina Wolff in fact parodies the style of the famous French writer, his means of devising characters, more than once also touching upon (and leisurely chaffing!…) his castigating view on women, both in literature and in life. For instance, Max’s ex-wife rebukes him for not having been capable of truly seeing anybody, because even the women whom he has surrounded himself with have been nothing but mirrors in which he has contemplated his own image… Ruben himself is obsessed with literary hierarchies, passionate about the prose-work of Houellebecq (whom he regards as a genius), even if he unhesitatingly confesses to the fact that he sometimes prefers Max Lamas over him… In his turn, Max also admires Houellebecq, but he incessantly wonders why the readers tend to prefer the former over him. Ellinor also starts reading Houellebecq and she feels that she is in danger of becoming herself obsessed with his prose-writing, but in a completely different way than Ruben and Max…
Moreover, the Swedish writer devises, along the lines of André Gide in his great novel „The Counterfeiters”, several instances of mise en abyme, since Max’s text has the same title as his own novel, „The Polyglot Lovers”, and, moreover, when Lucrezia asks for the manuscript to be returned to her, it becomes apparent that it had been written in Italy, at her parents’ villa; thus, fiction interpenetrates the characters’ lives, impacting on the readers in such a way that Lina Wolff’s work induces the strange feeling of an inescapable vertigo, the lure and fascination of which will not be easily forgotten. And what links the three parts of the novel is the assessment of the consequences of men’s attitude towards women in society and in (love or intellectual) relationships; and in this respect Wolff’s beliefs (voiced by her characters) are grounded in particular examples of contemporary fiction. Thus, her own text mainly highlights instances of violence and the consequences of the excessive and prohibited sexualisation of social relations, as it happened in her previous novel, „Brett Easton Ellis and Other Dogs”. In spite of this, the book is by no means a militantly feminist one, but an exquisite exercise in overtly addressing the ways and shapes in which love may oftentimes materialize, the difficulty of communication in a couple and the fear of the great loneliness that foreshadows death. But the writer also implicitly ponders on literature and on writers – men and women alike.
In fact, Lina Wolff confessed in a recent interview: „I have tried, by everything that I have written, to challenge the present-day so-called model-writers and to give a mordant – as mordant as possible – reply to the manner in which they have depicted women, by portraying them exclusively from the vantage point of sex and of the violence to which they are often subjected or which they implicitly accept because of the overall societal perception.” „The Polyglot Lovers” presents all these writers, as well as those readers who are truly willing to partake in her complicated game, with a symbolical mirror which undoubtedly distorts many elements and perspectives of the (social and literary) tradition but which will give her own female protagonists, after they have closely looked at themselves, the courage to say out loud: „Look at us, there is more to us than you might have thought!”
Lina Wolff, „The Polyglot Lovers”/ „Amanții poligloți”, translated into Romanian by Daniela Ionescu, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2018
Translated into English by Mirela Petraşcu
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