Sister and Brother: A Family Portrait
Agneta Pleijel. Trans. Harald Hille. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2018.
Reviewed by Hardy Griffin
Prior to reading this novel, I had not come across the works of Agneta Pleijel. But I quickly found out she is a leading voice in Swedish letters, having won many prizes for her novels, as well as being a previous chair of PEN Sweden and the Critical and Cultural Director at Aftonbladet, one of the country's main newspapers.
True to its title, Sister and Brother: A Family Story follows the lives of the siblings Helena and Albert, who were real people and relatives of the author. Their father is a driven professional musician, and as she grows up, Helena shows immense musical aptitude. Her older brother, Albert, is a disappointment to the family at first because he is deaf, but then he discovers painting at what seems to be secondary-school age. Helena is successful as a singer in Paris, but she is obsessed with returning to Stockholm to be with the musician Jacopo Foroni. Later, she becomes depressed and adrift, and in this vulnerable state, of all people her father convinces her to give up singing and marry a wealthy man. Albert, meanwhile, becomes a respected painter who, unfortunately, is only rarely able to sell his paintings — he has far more success as an advocate for the deaf in Sweden. |
This, more or less, is a synopsis of the novel, and yet it does nothing to describe the depths of this intricate, highly interesting work. For starters, the novel has occasional bold-faced interjections that we come to understand are from Pleijel herself, commenting on the research and writing of this very novel — an aspect of the work I found fascinating. At times, these asides point out milestones in the lives of the characters, such as: “Despite being deaf, [Albert] took and passed the entrance exam for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts…” At other times, however, these boldface paragraphs offer philosophical reflections:
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At best, one can have had living contact with five generations. You can remember your grandfather or grandmother. You can get to know your grandchildren. That’s how time moves forward, in chunks of five…
Those who died before our time don’t affect us much. It’s also hard to harbor warm feelings for the unknown people who will be born after us. But maybe the dead and the unborn can meet in us? Sometimes I think that. As if the past wants something. |
Moreover, you quickly come to see why Pleijel has been so lauded in Sweden if, like me, this is your first exposure to her writing. The novel begins with the story of Helena and Albert’s parents, Lina and Isaac, and of how Lina’s father refuses to give Isaac permission to marry his daughter if he is a concert performer (he had appeared as a tenor opera soloist in many European cities). Isaac gets around this by becoming the Chorus Master at the Royal Opera, soon after which he is appointed First Court Singer. But just as Isaac twists fate to suit him, so fate’s twists come back to haunt him, for his first child, Albert, is deaf.
Enter Helena, the second child, a musically gifted girl who is often happy (other than missing her brother Albert, who has early on been sent to the Manilla Institute for the Deaf and the Blind). So, at first all seems to be in her favor, but Pleijel slowly, subtly tips the scales as the two come of age and in their adulthood. Helena becomes a well known singer in Paris because of her father but she desperately wants to return to Stockholm. Nowhere is Helena’s dependence on men more obvious than in the following boldfaced aside by Pleijel: “Only once, my mother told me, had Helena disobeyed her father, when she promised Jacopo Foroni she would marry him.” And yet, she, too, seems to be punished by fate for this hubris. Over and over, I was moved by Pleijel’s language, such as the scene where Helena's mother, Lina, suffers knife-like contractions during Helena's birth: |
[Lina] lay there on her back and hummed songs up toward the ceiling, louder and louder to ward off the knife. She sang wordless arabesques that grew to cathedrals. When she cried out, they collapsed and became ashes. She sang flowers that blossomed out with a pop and then wilted. She sang trees that branched out and grew taller to reach the sky and then crashed to the ground and lay there, uprooted.
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In this and other passages, the translator, Harald Hille, manages to convey Pleijel’s powerful language for English readers.
When Helena, around 20 years old, becomes depressed and withdraws from the world, the doctor comes to examine her and tells her parents that life sometimes needs “...to withdraw back into its kernel, so that one day it could manage to re-emerge, like a snowdrop pushing through the snow.” How fortunate we are that Pleijel and Hille have labored to bring the kernel of Helena and Albert’s lives back to us through this ambitious novel. |