Here comes Bibbs
, successful blogger slash host slash influencer, but now on dekis.
Childless, 39 years old, soon too old and replaced by new abilities.
Sambon Baby leaves her and the contract for the apartment on Söder in Stockholm is on him.
One hundred thousand kronor within a week, and he sells her the right to stay.
An effective introduction to a plot.
How will it go?
Bibbs are the fly in the web, caught in the trap.
The flu profession, which is based on her selling her life as a story, has also turned love into a transaction.
Förtinglingen, which was a basic chord in Schunnesson's debut Trip Trips, is a fact.
Everything can be exchanged when the panic over the lack of money becomes great enough, also the care of relatives (here are two sketchy portraits of a mother and a grandmother, which I hope will develop in Schunnesson's next book).
Female writers have always
written about how money rules the world and affects the relationship between men and women: from Jane Austen to Victoria Benedictsson's Money, to our turn of the century novels about money and gender.
Sisela Lindblom's The Shameless from 2007 was a satire that managed to capture how language is transformed by consumption dreams, which are often disguised desires for belonging and recognition.
Female consumption is usually at the center, the one that is always most despised (make-up, fashion, interior design), but also reveals fragile hopes for love and future.
Finlandssvenska Milja Sarkola's new debut novel My Capital draws its peak when the female protagonist behaves like a clinical evaluator who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Schunnesson describes Bibb's
days very physically.
It is the body, like capital and weakness, that loses and cashes in to Bibbs, who is as if born yesterday, cynical and naive at the same time, easily offended but refined enough to overlook abuse.
She knows that for a woman she is grief, fear and abuse currency in the new economy.
But it requires new pains, new revelations, so that the audience, and thus the capricious clients, do not get tired.
This constantly leads to "new truth proposals" that must be shared with the public.
This is a sprawling,
a little too hasty novel, but I value Schunnesson's language, she writes out Bibb's inner thoughts so that they are skewed, a little wrong, as when she remembers the happy summer of love.
"That summer was windless and friendly, just like this summer, but now without the friendly."
The word kind becomes homeless here, just like Bibbs when she strokes the streets and does not get access to the picnic blankets of happiness.
"On the grass, families sat like impenetrable engine rooms, looking in was unprofitable."