Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm (tr. Saskia Vogel)
Review by Jess Moody
Think of Strega as a kind of summer night-terror. Heady and feverish. Chills and the thud thud of a heartbeat in its repeated phrases, its perfect-pounding verbs ‘I saw… I saw… I saw…’ Burning herbs, and air which ‘taste[s] of iron’. Signs and symbols weighty with significance but not, for the most part, decipherable.
The Olympic Hotel sits in a mountain resort, all empty corridors, dormitories, unused rooms, woods and poison-bordered gardens. Here is a dreamscape architecture of foreboding, its boundaries raised to tempt transgression. Rafa is one of the new maids in this place where the guests do not yet come. Strange punishments and pleasures are dealt out by the trio of women who run the establishment (and who hold some ancient conflict with the nun’s convent next door). As the season rolls out, the maids smoke, and eat, and clean, and face up to the surety that every good girl has a death waiting for her somewhere. When the guests finally arrive, not every girl will survive the night.
Johanne Lykke Holm has created here a dizzying classic, full of bite and fear and sumptuous pleasures. The translator is Saska Vogel, whose work Lykke Holm has herself translated into Swedish. That’s a nice twist to a tale of connection and the unsaid ‘shrouded knowledge’ between women. The language they work together here is at once thick, oozing, sharp, caustic: words for a dark world of gendered violence, heady with both ‘thunder and violets’.