Elevation

Malin Ullgren

‘She hadn’t been prepared to lose anything. All she had wanted was to gain something. In a way, that was all there was to it.’

Elevation is about a woman in the middle of life who increasingly feels the need of a cure for the approaching emptiness and sadness. Literature has always been an escape from dreary everyday life, but it also has the power to awaken a longing to experience the same elevated feeling that follows great fiction.

When she ends up in an unexpected and secret relationship, fantasy and reality, life and poetry collide. What is the price of elevation? Malin Ullgren’s debut novel is about the tales we tell ourselves in order to survive. An elegant and timeless debut, unanimously loved by critics.

‘Ullgren’s novel is significantly greater literature than anything else I have read about amorous love in recent years. Her language continuously finds the most accurate images for the body’s sensations, the wordless world in which vast parts of our lives unfold – beyond rational thought, and beyond the concept of feelings. Ullgren also has the ability to describe the world in a way that most novelists aspire to, but few possess. A masterpiece.’
Göteborgs-Posten

‘The pages of her novel almost turn themselves – and, like Bovary’s Emma, ​​the book slides almost imperceptibly from entertaining and light ennui to putting the whole of existence at stake. Ullgren is not in a hurry, but likes to dwell on small details, which make the world of the text appear to me: a pair of inherited earrings, a cup of tea, a knife scratching a wax cloth, make the story of the novel more than just a story – it is experienced more as a piece of life.’
Sydsvenskan

‘The discussion concerning life and poetry and how those great things intertwine is not plainly written, but shaped, for the reader to discover. That is one of the great qualities of Malin Ullgren’s novel. Another is how that level clashes with a prose that manages to depict physical spaces, everyday environments, cities – Stockholm, Gothenburg, Paris – in a way, rich in detail and care, that never tires the reader. There is nothing unnecessary here. It is an art in itself.’
Dagens Nyheter