The Helios Disaster

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I am born of a father. I split his head.

This modern spin on the myth of Athena plunges us deep inside the mind of an unlikely twelve-year-old goddess confined to a small Swedish town. Separated from her father just moments after bursting from his skull in full armor, Anna is packed off into foster care where she learns to ski, speaks in tongues, and negotiates the needs of a quirky cast of relatives. Unable to overcome her father’s absence, however, she finally succumbs to depression and is institutionalized. Anna’s rallying war cry rings out across the pages of this concise and piercing novel as a passionate appeal for belonging taken to its emotional extreme.

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Praise for The Helios Disaster

‘The emotional intensity created by Boström Knausgård recalls Sylvia Plath, but her spare, accelerating modern myth owes something to the poet/classicist Anne Carson’s novels in verse. This novella cannot be read quickly, its psychological range and febrile prose demand attentiveness. It takes skill and imagination to describe extreme emotions in ways to which everybody can relate but that’s what Boström Knausgård achieves in this short, piercing book.’

The Independent

‘The story is tightly, cleverly organized around a central idea: to show how Anna’s perceptive, disturbed mind struggles to impose some kind of mental order and, finally, fails. The author’s passionate involvement with her protagonist illuminates what it is like to slide irresistibly away from reality.’

Swedish Book Review

‘Linda Boström Knausgård’s style is magical, hallucinatory, and very poetic. Passionate, refined, and as clear as cool water.’

Aftonbladet

‘The Helios Disaster is a story about longing for a father and about prepubescence. About the will to die, refusal, and a sun shining far too brightly. But in this field of tension there is also a simple happiness. Boström Knausgård’s authorship keeps getting better and better.’

Dagens Nyheter

‘It is simple and it is grand, a story about a girl who came too close to the sun. The Helios Disaster shines!’

Kulturnytt i P1, Sveriges Radio (Swedish Public Radio)

‘The Helios Disaster is an insightful story about mental illness and missing a father. Linda Boström Knausgård manages to fill the rather monotonous hospital existence with a tension so powerful and poetic that one is actually quite taken by it and reads it without missing a single detail.’

Kulturnyheterna SVT

‘The Helios Disaster is a dense, tender, painful novel written in a prose which, always poetic, touches, shakes, and makes a mess.’

Helsingborgs Dagblad

‘Chosen for the unsentimental language of her portrayal of human existence on the border between a world distorted by psychosis and reality’s structured existence. Her stories are written according to the logic of myths, never asking why, but allowing an understanding of ourselves that is difficult to be determined in the dominant categories.’

JURY, MARE KANDRE PRIZE

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LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD is a Swedish author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for national 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, was nominated for the prestigious Swedish August Prize and the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize.

RACHEL WILLSON-BROYLES is a freelance translator based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Other authors whose works she has translated include Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Jonas Jonasson, and Malin Persson Giolito.

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AUTHOR

Greek mythology means a lot to me—I always return to it. This influence mixed with a plane accident named the Helios Disaster, that I heard about on the radio, to become this novel. Fighter pilots were sent up to look inside the plane, which was still flying, and they saw that everyone was dead. I saw this image of a plane full of dead people, flying on autopilot, until it crashed into a mountain outside the town of Grammatiko. I suddenly imagined that that was how the old gods of the Antiquity got into our world.

TRANSLATOR

"What struck me as I translated The Helios Disaster was what a great deal happens in the tale, even as the book remains a compact one hundred or so pages. The prose is exacting and tight, making it a joy and a challenge to render into English. I also appreciate the many small details that give the reader a sense of time and place, from the embroidery at the craft store to the boiled cod and peas of the psychiatric unit. As a reader, I remain intrigued and thrilled by the mystery of the end of the novel, and its implications for everything that came before in Anna’s story."

PUBLISHER

Linda Boström Knausgård needs few words to draw us into a universe both mythical and disturbing, and at the same time as tangible and real as if we were experiencing it with our own senses. Hers is a passionate universe of sadness and silence, and her writing is exceptionally intense and pure. The literature of Boström Knausgård is dark, tough, and vulnerable—it is all these things, and more. This novel takes one deep into the world of depression and madness, and captivates from the inside.

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LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD

THE HELIOS DISASTER

Translated from the Swedish

by Rachel Willson-Broyles

WORLD EDITIONS

New York, London, Amsterdam

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Published in the USA in 2020 by World Editions LLC, New York

Published in the UK in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

World Editions

New York/London/Amsterdam

Copyright © Linda Boström Knausgård, 2013

English translation copyright © Rachel Willson-Broyles, 2015

Cover image © Paul Citroen / Nederlands Fotomuseum

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 978-1-64286-068-9

ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-065-8

First published as Helioskatastrofen in Sweden in 2013 by Modernista, by arrangement with Nilsson Literary Agency, Sweden

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.

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Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.

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PART ONE

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I AM BORN of a father. I split his head. For an instant that is as long as life itself we face one another and look each other in the eye. You are my father, I tell him with my eyes. My father. The person in front of me, standing in the blood on the floor, is my father. His woollen socks suck it up greedily and turn red. The blood sinks into the worn wooden floor and I think, his eyes are green like mine.

How, at my birth, do I know that? That my eyes are green like the sea.

He looks at me. At my shining armour. He lifts his hand. Touches my cheek with it. And I lift my hand and close it around his. Lean against him. His arms, which embrace me. We cry together. Warm, salty tears and snot run down my face. I want nothing but to stand like this with my father and feel his warmth, listen to the beating of his heart. I have a father. I am my father’s daughter. These words ring through me like bells in that instant.

Then he screams.

His scream tears everything apart. I will never again be close to him. Never again rest my head against his chest. We have met and must immediately part. He could do no more than give me life. The scream presses my lips together; they want to shout at him to stop. You’re scaring me, grows within my mouth. My temples ache. All the love turns to rage in my chest.

So much screaming, I think, and I immediately want to plunge my lance into his heart to make it stop. I’m afraid. Just a child.

He doesn’t stop screaming. He holds his head. Presses his strong hands to it as if to close what has opened.

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I take off my armour and hide my lance in the kitchen bench. I am wearing my helmet when I go out into the world for the first time. I am twelve years old when I show up in the village in the north.

I step into the snow with bare feet. I don’t get far. A naked girl with a golden helmet on her head. Moreover, there are many people who saw the ambulance that picked up my father after the neighbour couple came running to find out what had happened. They had heard his scream from far away. And the neighbours who saw me in the armour on the floor in my father’s living room wanted to know. Had I been kept hidden? Who was I? A child whom no one had seen. Where were my parents?

It was chaos. What should I say?

‘My name is Greta,’ said the neighbour lady. ‘Who are you?’

I didn’t answer. My tongue suddenly felt large and shapeless, thick and in the way.

‘You have to put something on.’

She took off her down coat and put it around me. She carefully but firmly took me by the elbow and led me to their house, which was on the same street as my father’s. She led me like this, into the warm, as they apparently say, and into the kitchen, where she sat me down on a chair.

What do