Kattflickan och andra berättelser review

The plot of the ‘Catgirl’ of the title occupies similar territory to Anneli Furmark’s previous book, which appeared in English as Walk Me to the Corner and was about people falling in and out of love at a time of life when they thought they were too settled for that sort of thing. This time it’s about Ylva and Danne who are camping at a festival (despite feeling a bit too old for it) amid an argument about a relationship that Ylva may or may not have had. Ylva feels she is being followed by a yellow-eyed girl wearing cat ears who is always around, even appearing in their selfies, like a kind of walking embodiment of the threat to her relationship with Danne.

‘King and Country’ (Kung och fosterland) is inspired by a visit Furmark made to Flanders. She visits war graves and memorial sites, which are a powerful reminder of where nationalism ends up. For this reviewer, who has lived in this part of the world, it comes as a surprise to see Flanders looking just so Flanders-like. The illustrations capture the setting vividly: red-brick houses, net curtains, flat expanses of field stretching out forever, bluebells – and vast graveyards.

The next story describes an unexpected meeting at a train station in Långsele between two women, based around diary entries written by art teacher Maja Beskow in 1912. Lost love is the main theme, and the story is told using a palette of greys and browns which contrasts with the rest of the book.

In Nordic folklore, a myling is an unbaptised child that roams the earth until someone buries it properly. Gerd, who has recently moved from Sweden to Nova Scotia, is worried that this is the fate that awaits her if she dies any time soon. There is a lot going on in Gerd’s life that is probably the real source of unease: the move to a new country, a change of language, church-going school friends, her mother having grown up in a very religious household and then given up religion, the strong suggestion her father is having an affair. It is all suggestively depicted with frequent notes of yellow and bright blue for the daytime and black and white when she thinks about mylings, and at the same time a vivid depiction of moving between countries and people.

In ‘Torborg’, we enter the realms of horror story, as a woman visits her mother in a retirement home full of odd bric-a-brac. A sinister atmosphere radiates from everything, including the staff and from Torborg, the old woman who for some reason is already living in her mother’s room. ‘The phone you’re so eagerly checking won’t be much use to you’ the narrator is told before she and her mother try to find a way out through blue and black shady labyrinth of tunnels with no mobile signal. 

These stories would be highly readable if they were only told in words, but the combination of words and artwork elevates them into something else.