Review: 'Strega,' by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Johanne Lykke Holm's transfixing novel "Strega," in Saskia Vogel's virtuosic English translation, is a thought-provoking fairy tale for our flawed patriarchal world, its freighted moral the haunting observation that "a woman's life could at any point be turned into a crime scene."

Lonely all her life, 19-year-old Rafaela leaves home to work at the isolated Hotel Olympic, in the northern Italian Alps. The hotel just "appeared one summer, as if out of nowhere, like something demonic." Nuns at the local convent dubbed it "Il Rosso" after the color that suffuses it inside and out — red paint, red carpeting, red everywhere. Parents, deluded by the changing world, sacrifice in order to send their daughters there to work, intending them to learn to "care for child and home," to "stay with one man."

An alien emptiness pervades the nearby town of Strega when Rafaela first arrives. She seems to summon the eight other 19-year-olds who become her coworkers at the Olympic.

"When I opened my eyes, other girls my age were standing around and watching me." The hotel too is eerily quiet. Weeks pass and no guests arrive. The women are treated "as one body," collectively punished for their transgressions, though they view each other as individuals, with Rafaela falling in love with Alba "right from the start."

Initially, the novel lacks the physical presence of men, redolent of the island in Sophie Mackintosh's magnificent debut "The Water Cure" or the Lisbon sisters' home in Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides." The young women are "daughters of hardworking mothers and invisible fathers who slunk along the walls." They're only allowed to miss work for "Dead mothers, dead sisters, that's it." When men do appear, violence will follow.

Rafaela remarks that "If you can't give your body the good stuff, give it the bad stuff," and she revels in both, resulting in a story that is breathtakingly sensuous. She runs her hands over everything, because as Alba points out, "the hands' lack of freedom is … the prison of the soul."

Rafaela captures images in her mind's eye as if confronting "the face of death." She is acutely cognizant of smells, be it of "infants," "burned hair," "dank basement," "moth repellant." And she puts everything into her mouth, not necessarily lewdly, but always viscerally. Cigarettes, a shoot growing off of a plane tree, her burned finger, Alba's neck, the blue light streaming through a window, a rose petal.

She does exercise occasional restraint, however, as when a slice of lemon slips off a platter onto Alba's shoe. "I had the urge to put it in my mouth but didn't."

Vogel's propulsive, incantatory translation is driven by hypnotic anaphora and punctuated by innumerable poetic gems, as with the couplet-like, "We felt frost on our fingertips, bark on the backs of our hands." Enthralled in the delectable afterglow of reading this deeply atmospheric and affecting novel, I recalled that strega means witch in Italian, and realized that I had quite simply been possessed, caught by the bravura spell that Holm and Vogel had cast.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer and book critic.

Strega

By: Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.

Publisher: Riverhead, 208 pages, $26.