101 Ways To Kill Your Husband by Laura Lindstedt & Sinikka Vuola has landed a glowing review on the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, that published the review as part of a series on the nominees for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Inspired by a real-life case from the 80s in which Anja, a Finnish woman, shot to death her abusive husband, 101 Ways To Kill Your Husband flips over a common trope of crime and mystery literature, in which the story opens with the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman, by telling a story where it is instead an abusive man who gets murdered, 101 times. What’s more, the trial that followed the murder resulted in a historical sentence when the jury found the husband posthumously guilty of both the abuse he inflicted on his wife and of his own murder.
The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet joins other Finnish and international media in reviewing 101 Ways To Kill Your Husband with favour, stating that “in a joint novel two Finnish authors explore how form and style can affect the content in a text. The result is like a derailed version of Märta Tikkanen’s “Manrape”. […] On top of the Oulipo movement’s high literary influences, another central source of inspiration is Simon Bond’s illustrated book “A Hundred and One Uses for a Dead Cat “(1981), whose macabre humor the authors have successfully absorbed. On the side of the literary inspirations another proclaimed angle is the feminist social question presented in the introduction. The authors’ tiredness of the very wide-spread trope in popular culture of a murdered woman namely works as a further prompt to the project. The subject is serious, but the approach is playful.“
101 Ways To Kill Your Husband embraces the experimental approach with a boldness that is both refreshing and, based on how the book has been received, very successful. The review underlines this and then touches on how one can think of the difficulties that may arise in translating an experimental work:
“The experimental approach is not a novelty for either of the authors. On the contrary it is the basis for their activities, which have their roots in a view on literature as both a free form of art and a serious social factor. In the different style variations this can be seen in the vigor with which they use the qualities of the Finnish language and the literary references they borrow. […] translation can be seen as a sort of continuation of the whole project, another setting of variations that on top of the form’s relationship to the content even actualize questions that deal with language and culture specificity. “
101 Ways To Kill Your Husband is one of the nominees for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and has already travelled to France, where the rights are with Gallimard, Denmark, and Hungary.
A full Swedish translation, penned by this year’s winner of the Runeberg award, poet Peter Mickwitz, is available.
Congratulations to the authors, and don’t miss out on this title!