Catapult
Review by Walter Cummins
Although I read a translation of this novel, I assume the English sentence structure replicates that of the original Swedish, a series of flat statements of discrete facts—this and this and this. The prose avoids grammatical connections that would convey causal relationships.
In that sense, the writing duplicates the existences of two central young women, Naomi and Diana, and that of an unnamed female transcriber, whose lives at the start of the novel are just a series of doings, repetitive daily events. Each statement receives an equal weight, for example, that fact that one takes a metro seat as equal to a momentary reaction, say, that the faces of the other riders look grey, just a series of facts about what is happening to a character at that moment in her life.
Here is one example of the prose: “Sometime later they run into each other again. It’s the same place. Naomi is at one of the café’s round tables, stirring the contents of a small, pale-blue sachet of sweetener into her black coffee. A tiny white pill. She doesn’t touch the chocolate that’s included in the price of a coffee.”
The sachet of sweetener and the ignored chocolate receive even more attention than the fact that the women have run into each other. But as the relationship develops they begin to pay attention to the details of each other as they do to those of objects and actions existing around them. Once Diana joins Naomi at the table, Naomi begins to perceive her: “The other woman sits down at her table, facing her. She drapes her coat across her knees. She’s dressed in black. Her style is simple. Looking at her, Naomi thinks that she is elegant.” The “elegant” is a judgment the conveys an unstated emotion.
In the novel such emotions, even strong ones, are reported as facts, as when Diana tells Naomi, “Lately I’ve had the sense that I’ve disappeared,” Naomi, not knowing how to respond, “blows on her coffee and drinks. The artificial sweetener is potent.”
The sense of being “disappeared” lies at the heart of the novel. The characters exist in a continual present, feeling incomplete. With something essential missing from their beings, they seek connections that might evoke a solidity in their lives, a certainty of meaningful existence.
The transcriptionist’s work for a ghostwriter serves as a mirror of the basic condition of Naomi and Diana. Every day, all day, she types what women have revealed in recordings so that a ghostwriter can write the stories of their lives bound in red covers.
These subject women, often reluctantly at the start, speak into a tape recorder, revealing what has happened to them, the good and the bad, though sometimes repressing the bad. They want to get in touch with who they are and leave a record that proves they lived. But the record of that existence is the product of a ghostwriter who shapes their narrative to make it coherent. Just the term ghostwriter, a hired portrayer who creates a verbal version of them, gets to the human dilemma of this novel. These women need someone to authenticate their being.
The transcriber’s compulsion to retain a sheet of paper with the recorded words of one women—“I have seen you. Have you seen me?”—captures the essence of what Naomi and Diana and all of the recorded women are seeking to know about their relationships. “Seen” is the fundamental word, suggesting something much deeper than a mere visual recognition, a perception of an essence that acknowledges each other’s existence.
But so much seeing in the novel is transitory and deceptive. Places are definite—a coffee shop, a metro station, a bakery, an apartment. But people, unlike things, won’t hold still. What about a person is being seen? Some disappear without a trace. In the case of Naomi and Diane, they switch physical appearances, deliberately at times, accidentally at others, When identical, people mistake them for each other. There are even moments when they are confused about who they are: “Naomi kisses her, once, and she thinks that it’s like kissing herself.”
No one wants to be disappeared. All seek a defined identity to leave a mark. What they end up with is a ghostwriter’s version, ultimately the creation of another’s imagination, a form of fiction, like all lives.
But the transcriber grasps what affects them all: “It feels as if I have a doppelgänger. As if there were two of me. It feels as if my life has moved on without me, and I have no other choice but to move on, too. I need to become somebody else.” As much as they want to be someone, all that is available to them is the double fabricated by a ghostwriter.
