Queen by Birgitta Trotzig

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig is published 2026 by Faber Editions in a translation by Saskia Vogel

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A beautiful, deceptively non-gentle mediation on isolation, both the enforced kind and the kind that a person leaps at, arms open, thinking it can be mastered rather than it mastering them…

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Queen is the nickname of a girl, then a woman, whose whole life we see through moments in this terse, effective, emotive novella, first published in Swedish in 1964, though set many decades earlier.

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In the early 1930s, a stranger, a woman, arrives into a tiny village in the south of Sweden, who is not Swedish and not American, but is arriving there from New York.

She is seeking the family of her husband, who is not with her. The family she finds – a pair of middle aged siblings who scrape by working and living on a farm long past its best – are Judit (aka Queen) and Albert, whose family have lived here for generations in times of plenty and times, too, of lack.

The narrative sketches out their pasts – the successes of previous generations and the failures,too…

…The ways in which community was essential to survive the harsh winters, but how enforced cruelty was both normalised and retreated from in oscillating periods of thought and attitudes towards scarcity…

The gates must be barred through some winters to protect the family from the hungry outside…

In later generations, the gates are always open to welcome the hungry in…

In even later generations, by the time the siblings (though mainly Queen) manage and labour on the farm, there is no surplus, there is nothing spare, though even if there was, generosity isn’t high on either’s agenda, yet no one ever really bothers them because they look like the hard times are where they have landed…

Albert is a local laughing stock, a middle aged friendless fool who brags about his purity of heart and body until his repression all leaks out in a barely consented to affair with the woman who arrives from America, the (spoiler alert) widow of the siblings’ younger, troublemaker brother, who ran away to New York after a few too many local daughters’ brothers and fathers promised to rid the town of him.

He left behind a child, who Queen tries to maintain a relationship with, but is bluntly refused by the family of the young woman whose it is.

Eventually, Albert gets his sister-in-law pregnant, and they marry, though not for love, just for propriety, just for what is done. After the child is born, the mother fades away over the course of years and decades, Queen and her brother raising the child to help on the farm, with Queen visiting her sister-in-double-law in her hospital bed as the years pass until she, too, fades.

And – other than a short section about the life of the brother in 1920s America (a brutal collection of anecdotes about poverty, precarity, slum-dwelling and cheap labour that is barely mourned when it dies) – that is Queen.

Lives may seem to be sketched, given the brusqueness of the book, it’s shortness, yet here there is rich painting, layered and complex portraits of real-feeling, serious, people.

This is a novella of lives of several generations, and we see societal change and the ways in which the huge socioeconomic alterations of the century surrounding 1900 did and didn’t hit this small town and these small, yet complex, people in rural, Southern Sweden.

It’s beautiful and moving, serious and sad. Bleak without being overly cruel and yet optimistic, hopeful, in a way, because even the lonely and the sad, here, find moments of connection, moments in their lives where they, briefly, matter.

Sure, these moments may not last, but these moments in real life rarely do…

We all oscillate (well, I do) from how important we feel to ourselves and others, and though it might be nice to be loved and cared for and seen throughout ones life, not everyone gets to have that.

I liked it a lot.

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I loved this sad image:

“Pneumonia claimed her in the winter of 1913 as easily as one carries a child across a creek.” – p. 24

Melancholic, an evocation of blunt loss and mortality… Circles of life and settings rendered tightly here. Yes.

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“the mother was bound to him – not in love, it did not in any way resemble love, but in the way that whatever may happen, whatever you want for yourself, you’re bound to your body.” – p. 53

So often, yes, how and who we are is less what we want and need but what we are habituated to… We are where we are and what we do, less than we are how and why so…

This is a serious, meditative and articulate text, encouraging thoughts on selfhood and life itself and the ways people fail, or sometimes fail to fail meaningfully enough for the failure to be even interesting to themselves.

A treat, yes.

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For more details, check out the Faber website via this link