Collected Works: A Novel: 'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble' (Telegraph)

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the astounding detail Sandgren injects into each of her characters, any one of whom could be the protagonist of their own story”[…] “A remarkable, addictive and quietly subversive work” Nej men det här ÄR en så bra bok. Ett tillgängligt epos man inte vill lägga ifrån sig!!! Uppskattar att boken är marinerad i gbg - äntligen har man fått sig en äkta stark gbgroman! Det har varit too much sthlmslitteratur på det senaste om ni frågar mig.

The hottest debut of the year! If Klas Östergren and Donna Tartt had a love child, who grew up in Gothenburg and became an author, well, there you have Lydia Sandgren.” Philosophers, on the other hand, were solitary creatures of the mind, soaring high above the mishmash of family in a celestial craft built of thought alone: by default, a philosopher worked alone. Gustav, meanwhile, is hurting too. His obsession with Cecilia’s inexplicable disappearance had made his art hagiographic, fixated on her image. When posters for Gustav’s retrospective plaster Cecilia’s face on major billboards across the city, Martin’s daughter Rakel learns a haunting fact that points toward her mother’s whereabouts. She and her brother chase this clue across time, memory, and Europe, to discover why their beloved mother abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person can ever be answered. Poised at the intersection of life and art, reality and imagination, [ Collected Works] blends the thrill of mystery with the curiosity and depth of philosophical inquiry.”— The New Yorker Hij, Gustav en Cecilia zijn dan een drie-eenheid. Als geliefde van Martin, fungeert Cecilia ook als muze en model voor de boezemvriend, een kunstenaar in hart en nieren. Zij wordt Gustavs grote inspiratiebron voor de schilderijen uit zijn meest succesvolle periode. Samen vertrekken Martin en Gustav in hun studentenjaren naar Parijs waar Cecilia hen later vervoegt, om inspiratie op te doen voor hun culturele interesses. Martin jaagt dan nog steeds de droom na om een onnavolgbaar schrijver te worden terwijl Gustav al goed op weg is in het ontdekken van zijn kunst en kunnen. Martin heeft dan ook op dat moment een te romantisch beeld van een schrijversbestaan voor ogen.With her Collected Works, the author has cemented her love for literature – and we hope she does it again.” Collected Works long feels like it must be working up to a clarifying reveal -- presumably involving some resolution with or regarding Cecilia.

Met nog meer memorabele anekdotes, meer humor en de vinger wat vaker op de deleteknop had Sandgren een waar meesterwerk kunnen beitelen uit dit veelbelovende debuut. Niettemin is ‘Verzamelde werken’ zo’n boek waarvan de personages je vrienden lijken te worden, zo’n boek dat de omgeving doet vervagen, zodat je al lezende de tram mist of tegen een paal aan loopt. Wedden dat er over twintig jaar debuten verschijnen met een wikkel waarop staat: ‘De nieuwe Lydia Sandgren is geboren.’? She translated Wittgenstein's diaries, and published two books of her own before she disappeared (more than Martin ...).

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Sandgren hooks the reader with an absorbing, multilayered plot that shifts between past and present, building slowly towards the emotional and narrative mystery at its heart." Martin Berg’s wife, Cecilia, disappeared years ago. His memories of their carefree college days seem ever out of reach, and the intellectual curiosities that once made him the object of her desire have given way to midlife uncertainty. The methodical and quiet life he’s made for himself and his adult children couldn’t be further from the one he dreamed of in his youth, when the manuscripts lying around his apartment were flush with promise and his ailing publishing house was still new. Collected Works: An amazing novel for a long weekend read – about love, loneliness and literature. (…) The author (…) has created an expansive polyphonous tale celebrating magnificent authors. Sartre, Camus, Selene, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Joyce – masters from different eras are not only mentioned in the novel, their works reference events and ideas that are paramount to the characters in it. (…) The result of a decade’s work, the novel by Lydia Sandgren, is intended to be read mindfully, a read under which it is well worth putting everything else aside, turn off the wi-fi and immerse yourself in the story. The reader will be rewarded with an enthralling mystery and a fantastic story about love, literature, and longing – as an integrated force steering decisions and actions.” Clues that her disappearance isn't as complete as Martin has long believed do crop up from early on, not least in the form of Ein Jahr der Liebe -- but even these lead more to more questions than satisfying answers. Sandgren writes her story well, and Collected Works is consistently engaging, but there could have been even more to it.

Lydia Sandgren is a debut author, but she writes this novel as if she’s done nothing else for decades…” Offering a reader upward of a quarter of a million words is a big ask, not least in this attention-sapping, time-scarce epoch with countless distractions tugging constantly at our sleeves. A writer must be sure of themselves and sure-footed enough in their writing to pull off a book of this kind of length. Nothing in Collected Works feels superfluous, despite its length. The secret at the heart of the book is what might keep someone reading, but it is all the various characters and their shaded intentions, so elegantly described, that makes this book a pleasure to read. It is truly rich, describing Martin’s life in particular in real depth. However, Sandgren shows that we can seemingly know all the facts of someone’s life and miss what they hide – from others and from themselves – even when it is in plain sight. It’s an addictive read, which reveals, teases, and conceals superbly, and which, like all the best big books, leaves the finishing reader bereft. It makes me ecstatic that literature can be this too: a doorstopper of narrative joy, cultivation, and linguistic delight.”

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Instead, Collected Works is a kind of assemblage of (connected-)character portraits, or indeed a collective portrait of a family in the largest sense of the word -- shaped, in no small part by Cecilia's presence and then absence, but hardly only so.