Den store konstnären
(The Great Artist)
by Emmy Abrahamson and Hanna Jedvik
reviewed by Henry Jeppesen
What do you do when you’re paired with someone at work who is the complete opposite of yourself, and who you have nothing in common with? In The Great Artist, two radio journalists are put together to write a podcast, which will lead them on an unexpected journey filled with surprises, mutual hostility and near tragedy.
Famous Swedish painter, Niki Falc, suddenly takes his own life and Ann Ek, a very experienced radio journalist, and Esti Przybyszewski, younger and organised, are assigned the task of writing a podcast for Swedish radio in Malmö about Falc’s life. Ann and Esti soon learn from interviewing his ‘nearest and dearest’ that Falc was certainly a hit with the ladies. He has five children with three different women, two ex-wives, and a girlfriend, with whom he had no children. A lot of these ‘nearest and dearest’ don’t seem to be telling the whole truth, and many of his children have less than positive views about their late father, who wasn’t exactly the model parent.
At an event held in honour of his father, one of his sons, Fabian Olsson, gives an unexpected, impromptu speech about his father, who, we are told, almost completely ignored his very existence. Another son, Ruben, is also very negative about Falc when Ann and Esti interview him. It transpires that Niki and his sister Lovisa, who was the director of his company, spent hours at a time together while he was ‘painting’ his works of art, and that he is in fact a fraud and his sister painted all the pictures all along: she had been using him as an acceptable front, as male artists were taken more seriously than female artists. Also, Ann and Esti discover that Falc didn’t commit suicide: Lovisa killed him and tried to leave incriminating evidence in order to frame one of his lady friends, Nina Olsson. She also tries to murder both Ann and Esti, whose life Ann ends up saving.
The authors take it in turns for Ann and Esti to tell their stories. They have much to say about one another. Ann is a happily married 40-something with three children, yet yearns to be young again. At one stage, she even takes cocaine at an event. Esti is from Gothenburg and has moved down to Malmö for work. She is younger than Ann and is a bit of a goth. Ann and Esti are so different in a myriad of ways – Ann is maybe a bit too over-friendly, and Esti is very sullen towards people – which makes their story thousands of times more interesting than if they had been carbon copies of one another,
This book, while purporting to be a comedy novel, isn’t exactly laugh-out-loud funny in my opinion, but it did make me smile on several occasions. Furthermore, the story has more than a few twists and turns, and a completely unexpected ending. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone reading this and look forward to inwardly digesting the further adventures of Ann and Esti.
Den store konstnären
Albert Bonniers, 2023
251 pages
Foreign rights: Grand Agency
Emmy Abrahamson (born 1976) is an author and script writer. She has written several books for both young adults and adults, including How to be Thrown Overboard (Hur man blir slängd överbord, 2020), and How to Fall in Love With a Man Who Lives in a Bush (in English translation by Nichola Smalley in 2018). Hanna Jedvik (born 1975) is an author and journalist. She has written a number of books for young people, such as You Will Always Have Paris (Du kommer alltid ha Paris, 2021). The Great Artist is their first book together.