Welcome to America
4/5
()
About this ebook
• Linda Boström Knausgård was married to the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård, one of the highest-selling European authors in English translation, until November 2016. They lived in Sweden and have four children. They still edit each other’s work.
• The American reader is already deeply familiar with the most intimate details of Linda’s life, who features prominently in Karl Ove’s autobiographical series My Struggle, with the volume A Man in Love covering the darker side of marriage and of relationships
• In an interview with The Times (UK), Linda says “I married the world’s most indiscreet man.”
• Translated into 10 languages
• Translator Martin Aitken recently translated Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award.
• The struggle between silence and love is a recurrent theme in Boström Knausgård’s novels. In Welcome to America, the main character Ellen stops speaking after the death of her depressed, violent father, and though her mother is pained by it, she lets her be: “So she gets a place that she didn’t have before. A place to be in her world.” When she is silent, things for Ellen somehow become clearer and easier, and her silence prevents her from getting herself into the trouble she sometimes got herself into at school: “It feels like a good place to be.”
• Welcome to America is semi-autobiographical, as Linda, daughter of an actress herself, stopped speaking as a child, albeit only for a couple of days.
• Linda, who considers herself “a very quiet person” says about her reoccurring theme of silence: “It provokes a lot of reactions. It turns into a space that others want to fill perhaps by speaking even more. It’s hard to cope with silence.”
Linda Boström Knausgård
Linda Boström Knausgård (Estocolmo, 1972) es poeta, novelista y productora de documentales para la radio sueca. Su primera novela, Helioskatastrofen"", fue galardonada con el Premio Mare Kandre en 2014. ""Bienvenidos a América"", su segunda novela, se ha traducido a más de veinte idiomas y fue nominada al prestigioso Premio August y al Premio Literario Svenska Dagbladet.""
Related to Welcome to America
Related ebooks
October Child Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Helios Disaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Devil Comes to Town Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Skin Is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Feebleminded Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Long Live the Post Horn! Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Higher Ground Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Baboon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rooftop Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Loop Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Distant Fathers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Black Forest Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death in Spring Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Mother Is a River Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Husband Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Theatre of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Empty Wardrobes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything Happens as It Does Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life Sciences Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDie My Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5That Time of Year Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The President's Room Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fireflies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Blue Book of Nebo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fate Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5My Two Worlds Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Naked Woman Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Havana Year Zero Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Coming of Age Fiction For You
It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If We Were Villains: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yellow Wife: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shuggie Bain: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nothing to See Here: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The People We Keep Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Island of Sea Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foster Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Best Friend's Exorcism: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Missing Girls: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Body Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Likely Story: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Saint X: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Kitchen House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cross-Stitch Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Dutch House: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prodigal Summer: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Half Moon: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Play It as It Lays: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Welcome to America
7 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Welcome to America - Linda Boström Knausgård
-
A family on the brink of silence
Ellen has stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother’s barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We’re a family of light! she insists. But darkness seeps in everywhere and in their separate worlds each of them longs for togetherness. Welcome to America is an exquisite portrait of a sensitive, strong-willed child in the throes of trauma, a family on the brink of implosion, and the love that threatens to tear them apart.
-
Praise for Welcome to America
‘Knausgård’s story of a family in crisis is shocking and imaginative. Everything is written in beautiful and sparse prose which suggests that, after all, from darkness comes light.’
JURY, AUGUST PRIZE
‘Knausgård’s artistry is masterful.’
Bookslut
‘Welcome to America presents itself as an étude in the musical sense of the term: a basic theme that varies to infinity, acquiring with each new variation a new unprecedented facet. A triumph.’
Le Monde
‘The incandescent Welcome to America allows one to discover the author’s vibrant and powerful universe.’
Lire
‘Gets you in the gut. A delirious dance.’
L’Alsace Quotidien
‘A tender novel about a mute girl: gentle, sensitive, minimal, concise, subtle, and brutal. This is writing as self-defense and liberation.’
VOLKER WEIDERMANN, Spiegel
‘A daring and disturbing novel. One will not soon forget the eleven-year-old narrator and her silence.’
MDR Kultur
‘In her slim book, Boström Knausgård conjures a constellation reminiscent of a psychological thriller. Welcome to America is a book that masterfully describes the many nuances of inner darkness.’
Austria Presse Agentur
‘A short, very lyrical novel. The scenes succeed in their great universality, closely observed, wisely questioned.’
Brigitte Woman
‘Outstanding psychological chamber play. Linda Boström Knausgård has an incredible ability to give voice to the young narrator’s haunting thoughts and she does it through such dense prose that is both simple and powerful, both tangible and poetic.’
Politiken
‘Boström Knausgård has her own poetic language. The imagery is just as natural and brilliant as it is mad and askew.’
Dagbladet
‘A great book! Linda Boström Knausgård certainly does not shy away from the dark and horrible in her family dramas. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and precise. I really love this novel.’
Aftonbladet
‘A book cannot, like a person, be accomplished. But Linda Boström Knausgård manages to get very close. She keeps her balance perfectly: she never judges, never justifies. She just narrates, with perfection.’
Sydsvenskan
‘Linda Boström Knausgård erases herself from her own writing. What remains is the girl who communicates directly with the reader in a remarkably strong voice, despite her being so quiet.’
Svenska Dagbladet
‘Hers is a way of writing that takes risks, without considering the consequences, heading straight for the unknown. Reading her novella is like experiencing a condensed depiction of decay, a decay that also carries a light so strong that it is like standing in the middle of a ray of sunshine.’
Jönköpings-Posten
-
LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD (Sweden) is an author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for Swedish radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was awarded the Mare Kandre Prize and shortlisted for the Swedish Radio Novel Award 2014. Welcome to America, her second novel, has been awarded the prestigious Swedish August Prize and nominated for the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize.
MARTIN AITKEN is a full-time translator of Scandinavian literature. Working mainly from Danish and more recently Norwegian, he has translated the works of writers such as Kim Leine, Helle Helle, Peter Høeg, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. His recent translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. Welcome to America is his first book from Swedish.
-
AUTHOR
‘Silence, or not speaking, is a theme I recognize from my own childhood. To speak and then suddenly not speak―I’ve experienced that. As a child I fantasized about not speaking when I was angry at my mother: I won’t say a word, not a word!
But I didn’t have the strength that Ellen in the book has. I held out two or three days at most, and it felt good. But then life carried on. After I coined the phrase It’s a long time already since I stopped talking
the story just fell into place.’
TRANSLATOR
‘Boström Knausgård’s high-tension prose crackles with electricity. Strobe-like, her sentences illuminate the shadowlands of grief and insecurity as she sensitively probes the emotions of childhood vulnerability, loneliness, and longing. Her uncomplicated sentence structures and straightforward lexis belie great richnesses of meaning. The task is to carry that over into an English that retains the delicate hues of Scandinavian simplicity without compromising its own forms of expression. For this is a remarkable portrait that continues to shower its sparks long after reading.’
PUBLISHER
‘Boström Knausgård’s writing is hypnotic: personal, tight, and otherworldly. It comes from a place deep inside the belly of adolescence, and screams―albeit melodically, gorgeously―about the painful passage out of it that is more commonly known as growing up. This book is a door that opens onto an extraordinary female mind.’
-
LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD
WELCOME TO AMERICA
Translated from the Swedish
by Martin Aitken
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
-
Published in the USA in 2019 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2019 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Linda Boström Knausgård, 2016
English translation copyright © Martin Aitken, 2019
Cover image © Dana Menussi/Getty
Author portrait © Christina Ottosson Öygarden
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-041-2
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-049-8
First published as Välkommen till Amerika in Sweden in 2016 by Modernista. Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency ApS, Copenhagen.
The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Twitter: @WorldEdBooks
Instagram: @WorldEdBooks
Facebook: WorldEditionsInternationalPublishing
www.worldeditions.org
Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.
-
It’s a long time already since I stopped talking. They’re used to it now. My mum, my brother. My dad’s dead, so I don’t know what he’d have to say about it. Maybe that it was genetic. The genes come down hard in our family. Hard and without mercy. The direct lines of descendancy. Maybe the silence was always inside me. I used to say things that weren’t true. I said the sun was out when it was raining. That the porridge we ate was green like the grass and tasted like soil. I said school was like