Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök
Swedish fiction
Original title – Caesria
Translator – Saskia Vogel
Source – Review copy
I am a little late to this one. I had hoped to get to it earlier as Heloise is a small publisher bringing some exciting books out in translation from around Europe. I was drawn to this as I saw Hanna was a translator from Spanish to Swedish and had done books from Melchor and Zeran. Both of which works I have enjoyed. She also had success with this book, and her follow-up novel Wonderland made a number of the year lists in Sweden. This is maybe the perfect creepy book for winter.It follows what happens when a doctor performs a caesarian. He was an early gynaecologist. But he then keeps the baby for his own.
Maybe it really had been the badger that screamed on those summer nights, maybe the screams had not been Beda’s but the badger’s, but for some reason the animal had stayed silent on the night we took to the woods. And I wonder if any of what followed that winter, the winter during which the one who called himself Master Valdemar arrived at Lilltuna, would have happened had I not discovered my morbid disposition. The disease that had begun in one loca-tion, only to spread, which is when I’d started beating it into submission with tightly wound bandages.
The scream of the badger one night
A babe ripped from her mother’s stomach and whisked off to a remote country estate of Dr Eldh. He is an early gynaecologist who rescues the baby from a mother who later died. He kept the mother’s pelvis after she had died, something he tells Caesaria. The book is told in the years that followed as surrounded by servants, the young girl Caesaria is trapped in this rural doll house like a living doll just for the Doctor to see Caesaria, hence the title of the book and the procedure the Dr had used to bring the Baby into the world. We follow the young girl over the following years trapped in the estate as the only outside influences are the doctor’s visits over the years. Hanna captures the seasons so well, the height of summer and the bitter cold and darkness of the winters in this remote estate, as we see a girl heading to become a woman. What will be her fate at the doctor’s hands? What was his intention in having her there all those years? Will she be okay? Later in the book, another man also appears to be living on the estate. He, a conductor from Copenhagen, is invited to the estate to recover? But when we hear screams in the night as he has his way with one of the maids, we fear for Caesaria. The Dr seems to come less as she gets older as well!
Doctor Eldh had then made several small incisions in the exposed uterus, and jets of blood the length of quill feathers spurted from it.
The anaesthetised woman had then suffered a severe and prolonged contraction of the uterus, and sponges were pressed against the bowels to stem the haemorrhaging: when the contractions subsided, the uterus was cut right through, and the lifeless little creature, covered in birthing custard, who was me, could be plucked out and resuscitated, by means of insufflation and cold compresses.
How she was brouyght intpot he world as he did one of the first caesarian operations on her mother
The book is v told in observations and descriptions of the events with no real dialogue; it is a gothic tale of a girl growing up alone as a living doll for a doctor. Why he does it has never really gone into detail. It says a lot about the uncontrollable nature of Male power at the time, which was late 19th century Sweden in the early years iof Gynaecology and Dr Eldh is sadly a leading surgeon.. The fact he could just tear (Well, do a Caesarian ) the baby that became Caesaria from the dying mother and whisk him off. To live like a sort of child-like Miss Haversham in an estate, I can see Caesaria being like Haversham as the estate rots around her, trapped in the world as she isn’t allowed to leave and see the wider world she is trapped in the confines of the estate. A dark gothic tale of male abuse of a woman and a young girl a stolen choldhood. A girl becomes a living doll, a toy for the Dr to come and play with occasionally. But what happens when the doll becomes a young woman? What happens when his visits stop? How will a girl unaccustomed to the world cope? All this is captured in such detail that you feel the summer heat, rotting leaves, and snow in the winter. A book that is both disturbing for the reader but also thought-provoking. Partly based on actual events at the time, it seems even darker to read. Have you read this or any other books from Heloie Press?
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