Novel
Kvinnor och äppelträd
Not translated into English
Moa Martinson · 1933
Synopsis
The working-class districts of Norrköping, between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Sally and Ellen grow up there in poverty, and the book stays on their side. We see what was not shown: pregnancies, bodies, desire, what women say to one another and what they keep from men. Their mother Sofi, small and thin, looks like a plucked hen apart from her eyes and her fair hair. Nothing is softened, and the language is the one people speak.
Context
The manuscript was refused by publisher after publisher until 1933, when it appeared with the country's leading house. The woman who wrote it was forty-two, with five children behind her and no schooling: the novelist Elin Wägner and the Fogelstad feminist circle had paid for a typewriter and a typing course for her. What this novel introduced into Swedish letters can be named: the mother's body as the centre around which the experience of the poor and that of women gather. The language and the freedom of tone in sexual matters caused a scandal, and the right accused her of soiling her own milieu. A sequel appeared the following year.
Who it is for
Recently available in French, from a discreet publisher. Nothing to know in advance, except that the book spares neither the reader nor its characters, and that it speaks of things that were not spoken of.
Prizes and reception
The book that brought the bodies of poor women into Swedish literature, and the only one by its author that is read in French.
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