Collected Works


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2020 by Lydia Sandgren
 Translation copyright © 2023 by Agnes Broomé
 Originally published in Swedish as Samlade Verk © 2020 by Albert Bonniers förlag.
 All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.
 For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
 Astra House
 A Division of Astra Publishing House
 astrahouse.com
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Sandgren, Lydia, 1987- author. | Broomé, Agnes, translator.
 Title: Collected works : a novel / written by Lydia Sandgren ; translated 
 by Agnes Broomé.
 Other titles: Samlade verk. English 
 Description: First edition. | New York : Astra House, [2023] | Summary: 
 “Collected Works is a family saga following unsuccessful book publisher 
 Martin Berg, who must confront life’s banality in the aftermath of his 
 wife’s disappearance. Meanwhile, Martin’s daughter Rakel finds a clue to 
 her mother’s whereabouts”--Provided by publisher. 
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022044685 (print) | LCCN 2022044686 (ebook) | ISBN 9781662601514 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781662601521 (epub)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Domestic fiction. | Novels. 
 Classification: LCC PT9877.29.A49 S3613 2023 (print) | LCC PT9877.29.A49
 (ebook) | DDC 839.73/8--dc23/eng/20220916
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044685
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044686
 First edition
 Design by Richard Oriolo
 The text is set in Garamond Premier Pro.
 The titles are set in Bourton.
 
 
 
 PROLOGUE
 MARTIN BERG WAS ON HIS back on the living room floor, hands folded over his stomach. Stacks of paper all around him. Next to his head, a half-finished novel; by his feet, twenty-five years’ worth of napkin notes in big piles. His right elbow touching an anthology of promising writers born in the sixties, the only book he’d ever been published in. Next to his left elbow, several smaller stacks, each tied with ribbon and labeled PARIS in red marker. And scattered between his head and his elbows, and his elbows and his feet, papers, papers, and more papers: written in ink or pencil or typed on a typewriter with notes scribbled in the margins, double-spaced computer printouts, crumpled and coffee-stained, smooth and shiny, some stapled, some held together with paper clips, others loose. The beginnings of short stories, essays, novel synopses, several attempts at plays, notebooks with covers worn after a lifetime in the inside pocket of his jacket, piles of letters.
 He’d pushed the coffee table aside to make room.
 • • •
 It was a summer afternoon in the year he was turning fifty. A quivering heat enveloped the city. The windows overlooking the street were open and he could hear laughing children, ringing bicycle bells, the distant bass line of a song he didn’t recognize, a trolley clattering down Karl Johansgatan. People were sunning themselves in the park outside, motionless like beached white seals. Earlier, Martin had been seized by an urge to shout at them through the window, but all sound had seemed to stick in his throat. His skin was crawling and there was a sucking sensation in the pit of his stomach, a sinkhole, and his hands were clammy and shaking from too much coffee.
 This was a lull in his story. Dead time between two momentous events. The stuff you cut for the sake of pacing. Nothing to do but wait. For the children to come home. For the funeral. For news. It was enough to make a person want to reach for a red marker and draw thick lines across the entire page. Cross it all out. Raymond Carver’s editor took the axe to large parts of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, deleted entire endings—the happy ones—and that turned out great.
 Maybe he should have tried to uphold normalcy. Seen people, eaten, done a few hours of work. After all, he was still a publisher, and Publisher Berg always had things that needed doing. But instead he’d opted for organizing his papers. He’d spent a long time in the attic storage space, which was crammed full of children’s winter coats, a bicycle in need of a new chain, Elis’s old skateboard, Rakel’s ball gown from graduation prosaically wrapped in plastic, sleeping bags, a tent, posters he had to unroll to have a look at, Cecilia’s tattered running shoes. How many pairs of shoes had she worn out, and why hadn’t she just discarded them? Martin had kept at it, sweat trickling down his back and thighs because the attic was sweltering. In the end, he’d pulled out a box marked Martin, Writing in what was unmistakeably his own hand.
 Martin wasn’t sure how much time he’d spent trying to trace a path from his current position back to some kind of origin. There must have been a crossroads at some point, but for far too long he seemed to have been simply plodding along without a thought to checking his compass. And when had all this time passed? Because it clearly had. His children had grown up. For the first time in decades, he was no one’s guardian. Elis, little Elis, who was traveling around Europe—chaperoned by his older sister, thankfully—was unlikely to move out any time soon. But he’d turned his eyes towards the horizon and sooner or later Martin would have to watch his son pack his vests into boxes and relocate to a commune on Hisingen, where he would listen to Jacques Brel with half-closed eyes, no longer hiding the fact that he was smoking. And then the flat would be completely empty. End scene.
 Rationally speaking, Martin thought as he lay on the rug, because he sensed rationality was all he had left at this point, rationally speaking, he understood this was part of