DE FÖRDRIVNA – THE DISPLACED
By Negar Naseh
A SWEDISH COUPLE from the transglobal middle class, she a doctor, he an artist, has left Stockholm for a dreamy existence in Sicily. Filip has his own studio next to the big stone house, Miriam is on parental leave. The landscape is stunningly beautiful, the tomatoes are rich in taste, the privacy complete. Yet, the situation is tense. Miriam, restless and afraid of something happening to the daughter, has started to drink gin. Filip’s international breakthrough with his art has begun and he is disturbed by everything that stops him from working.
WHEN FILIP’S CHILDHOOD friend Ashkan and his girlfriend Erika come to visit the couple’s customary pattern is questioned. Ashkan is a journalist and wants to visit Lampedusa to write about the people drowning in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe. In the stagnant heat the question of how isolated one can allow oneself to live is raised, and in the appearing cracks the characters begin to find different ways of approaching the world.
NEGAR NASEH WRITES as concentrated as in the praised debut During All This Winter in this psychological drama straight out of our time in Europe.
ABOUT THE BOOK
First published by Natur & Kultur, Sweden 2016
RIGHTS SOLD
Sweden, Natur & Kultur
REVIEWS
The conflict between lifestyle and life, between withdraw oneself from the world and to be confronted with it, is portrayed with sharpness in Negar Naseh’s second novel. She dares to hold on to monotony, drought and silence all the way to a story that burns. The Displaced becomes an omen about time, in time.
– Dagens Nyheter
Thrilling and so elegantly written! […] Personally I feel more pointed out than I want to admit. Worse is the portrayal of Miriam’s awakening, where the naive benevolence is punished bloodily and brutally.
– Göteborgs-Posten
A drama of fate about the individual’s responsibility to at least sometimes connect to the blood circulation of the world […] the anxious times bring out the best and worst in people. Negar Naseh’s language, transparent as a camera lens and caressing like a wind in the warm landscape at the same time, captures these process both floating and terribly concrete. […] [The Displaced] is delusively simple, but without a doubt part of a great authorship.
– Upsala Nya Tidning
[Naseh] remains with the anxiety as loyal to it as Stig Dagerman was. If you like Dagerman you have a lot to find with Negar Naseh, who appears to be an author with almost unlimited potential.
– Jönköpings-Posten
The master of ambiances Negar Naseh – you remember the debut During All This Winter? – composes the new novel with opposites as basic chords. Heat plays against cold, passivity against commitment, sleep against alertness, in this hypnotic relational drama.
– M Magasin
[Negar Naseh] is a master in portraying the quiet drama with ordinary gnawing and discomfort, which gradually gets closer to a crescendo smelling of insanity and tragedy.
– Västerbottens-Kuriren
One can be mislead to believe that the title The Displaced is alluding to the refugees. But it can also point at the couple themselves. Not only in isolated exile in their wannabe romantic bubble, but also in regressed exile from their own living vulnerability, from everything that’s risky in the love between adults. Europe is about to change fundamentally. What Negar Naseh’s novel says is actually this: love is politics and we need a new way of loving.
– Dagens Nyheter
Negar Naseh continues in her second novel to portray, in a beautiful and condensed prose, the suppressed – Fokus
The feeling of depression is palpable.
– Damernas Värld
A skilfully staged relation crisis…
– Dagens Nyheter
… an expressive chronicle over our time.
– Borås Tidning
The Displaced is a claustrophobic story, a kind of chamber play, about a relation running out of air, where silence is replacing conversation […] [Naseh] writes in a clean and clear prose, near the boiling-point.
– Södermanlands Nyheter
Always a perfect balance between the spoken and unspoken.
– Hufvudstadsbladet
Naseh puts her finger on the ‘white melancholy’ that Ashkan in the novel calls the feeling. She does it with refinement and flow in the language. Worth reading, very readable and beautiful.
– Accent
A map over a condition.
– SR Kulturnytt
Miriam and Filip are not more main figures than anyone else, however, their positions are crystallised towards a background that’s the biggest crime of our time. Who has that responsibility, that guilt and that punishment, and is it possible to carry?
– Folkbladet
Negar Naseh brings the reader to where it burns. She directs a revealing spotlight all the way into the smallest nook of the crackled couple relation. The twosome’s silence and compromises. The life with toddlers that is encroaching on the personal integrity.
– Helsinki Lukukeskus Läscentrum
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