Of Blood and Herbs: A Conversation with Johanne Lykke Holm
Johanne Lykke Holm, photo by Khashayar Naderehvandi
Stingy and flourescent like a herbal tonic, Johanne Lykke Holm’s Strega is a novel about young womanhood like no other. Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Holm about how she made ‘this concoction out of blood and herbs’ and the ways in which the aesthetic of the fake informs the novel. We hear about how the girl collective functions both as a space in which to become a person but also to disappear in the pacifying group dynamic. Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the winner of an English PEN Award, Strega is out on 1 November in Saskia Vogel’s incisive translation.
How did you come to write Strega?
After writing my debut novel, a claustrophobic, dark and awful book in many ways, I had this fantasy that I was going to write a happy one. The idea was to write about some school girls, and I had all these happy fantasies of writing about a girl community, but it turned out to be a very different kind of community. I’m not able to get an idea and get to work on it; for me it’s a very language-bound, linguistic process. I find a sentence and then the sentence starts working; every sentence is the consequence of the last. It’s hard to say anything about the narrative or themes in Strega, since I did’t have much of a plan – even though I wish I did. It is just complex work with language and this is what came out of that specific form.
The sentence ‘I knew a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene’ has often been pulled out of the book in reviews and excerpts. You’ve said that there wasn’t a conscious effort on working with themes, but I wonder whether you feel that the novel has some romantic gothic traits, such as ‘the fallen woman’?
Those terms, for me, connect with reading, not with writing. It’s not possible for me to honestly say that was something I thought about, but of course when you say it, it makes sense. To me that sentence is just a very basic and true statement. I find that sentence almost stupid in its simplicity, in how it is actually connected to reality. It is interesting for me to see that it is always repeated. It’s become one of the emblematic slogans of the novel, but to me it’s one of the most obvious and straightforward sentences in the book.
The girls in the novel to me are not real, they are doll-like, the same. But the thing that was important when writing about these young girls was that these experiences – ‘my body is the crime scene’, ‘the crime has already taken place’ – are concrete experiences, not esoteric or abstract. I’m not analysing society through some feminist concept; to me it is simply true. I belong to a generation of women who have that very specific experience.
I turned thirteen in the year of the millennium, and that was quite a different world when it comes to gender and girlhood. It was this very disciplinary and anorexic era. Girls growing up today have words, concepts, theories and books that I could not even have imagined. Therefore, when in Strega the girls’ experience of the body as already a corpse, or like a tomb, and about the fear of murder, dying and being ugly, it is because that is how I felt as a girl, and how a lot of young girls felt. But I’ve started to think that it’s a generational experience, and it might not be true for girls today. I hope it isn’t. These intense, overly-carved out emblematic sentences to me correspond to something true and basic. It is close to my body, and close to the everyday experience of being a teenage girl.
Throughout the novel the girls are presented as a collective. Through the repetitive work in the hotel of mangling and washing laundry, while wearing their undistinguishable synthetic uniforms, they seem to merge into ‘one’. Can you tell me more about how the novel works with the collective?
The collective of girls is both the place where you come to life and start to exist, where you become a person, but it is also where you disappear. This is where you blossom and find your best friend, and maybe you have some romantic feelings, everything is close and intense, and you are not alone anymore. But at the same time you are anonymous, you are one of a group and everyone has on the same outfit and their hands are doing the same movements. To me that is the beauty of the collective, and also of the collective mind; there is something fantastic about being in a group. As a literary device, it has the effect of there being too many; you can’t possibly keep track of nine girls in the same outfit, that’s impossible.
Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Red Room) by lightsgoingon. CC BY 2.0
They are not individuals yet they are each so sharply defined; it’s in their names, which are all strong and related to different cultural references, such as gemstones or poets. A bit like Barbie dolls: ‘we have the one with the pony, and the one with the so and so’. They each have these symbols connected to their name, but only because they are standing next to each other. Bambi is not Bambi if she is not standing next to Lorca. There is this really fantastic thing about becoming one and no longer being the centre of your own perception. I am also Bambi, I am also Lorca, and so on. When Cassie disappears in the novel, if she was this strong individual and they all had these really strong connections with her, then they would behave differently, but these girls act terribly. They are awful when she goes missing. They become too loyal to the group and to the collective energy, and so the group just keeps on carrying out this weird, almost theatre-like performance. ‘Now we’re going out into the woods dressed like this’ and ‘now we are doing this and we have to have our Taro cards’. They don’t behave like good friends would. That is also the power of the collective mind, the group dynamic. The book uses both the fantastic aspects as well as the destructive parts.
Strega is also obsessed with the idea that as a woman you are always two things. You are a person with a mind, but you are also an image. That experience of being, not just to yourself but also to other people, your own kind of doppelgänger. It’s quite a classic gothic theme. I’m thinking about the scene when they go into town to get the creepy dead doll; why are they doing that, why do they accept all these strange tasks? In a sense this presents a very grand image of young girls, and there is something seductive about this play that we are shown. I think they are seduced by something really dark and destructive but I also think that they are – and this is the worst for me, the hardest for me – they are their own accomplices. Strega works with the terrifying idea that the girls are loyal to their own destruction. They are playing a game which results in their own death. We are a group of girls and we know that we are playing with fire. We are loyal to something very dangerous but we are doing it anyway. I don’t think the book has clear answers to why and how that is, but there is an underlying tone of it being so. I don’t think of the collective of girls as this idealistic, wonderful, feminist, separatist community. Rather, I think there is something really fucked up going on.
The novel has vivid descriptions of the Hotel Olympic which are similar to a mountainous remote castle in a gothic novel, or even the kitsch setting of a horror film. It has the feel of scenography, a constructed and uncanny space. At one point the hotel is described as ‘demonic’. How do you see the role of this heightened visceral setting?
In my writing I’ve always been struggling to get away from this claustrophobic, theatrical setting, not because I don’t like it, but because it’s so limiting. Although it’s what I do, it’s my style, it’s what I’m drawn to, and it’s where all my references are. I would be lying if I said it was a very conscious thing, I believe it’s more about what comes to you. The book is obsessed with things being fake, in its souvenir shops and theatres, so there is certainly a theme there, but I think that came from this conjuring process of writing more than from my conscious mind. Although there are conscious moments, of course. I remember that I in the middle of writing Strega saw Louise Bourgeois’ Red Room, a space of red boxes with tiny embroidered pillows and mirrors. Everything there was red, black and silvery. I remember seeing that and I thought, this is the archaic hidden well I’m trying to collect something from with this novel. Being a genius, Bourgeois could achieve that very easily, but there is something about these objects, this work with the world as scenography, the interest in the fake, that I think is connected to cultural information about the family, and about womanhood. How an embroidered pillow can contain such evil. In Strega, every object has a demon inside.
Did you have other specific references in mind while working on the novel?
When it came out in Swedish in 2020, the review tended to mention The Virgin Suicides, The Shining, Twin Peaks, etc. I’ve never been shocked or offended by these references, but I do think it’s funny that it didn’t occur to me that people would think of these things. What I was working with was Dario Argento’s Suspiria; not the film per se, but my memory of watching the film when I was sixteen. If you work with clichés then that means you also have a lot of associates, so of course I’m conscious of the field of film makers and novelists that I’m standing with.
Many of those cultural references like The Virgin Suicides and Twin Peaks have in common that they are trying to say something about being a young girl. But it strikes me that no one seemed to notice that all these references include a dead girl, as though that’s the common thing, not the fake, the kitsch, the things made out of plastic. Perhaps those are just things that belong to the world of girls.
Stills from Suspiria, dir. Dario Argento (1977)
Do you think this aestheticisation of the setting, in these references and in Strega, adds to or takes away from the death of the girl?
That’s a hard question. I think that’s how you have to tell that story. Cassie is in a way this beautiful weird doll, not unlike Laura Palmer. Although the horror of Twin Peaks is not about the fact that she is dead, but that she is dead and remains a doll. That is what’s horrific. In Strega we don’t know – I’m not sure whether Cassie is dead. I can imagine that she just escaped to some lovely place where there are no old ladies telling her what to do. It’s a good but really complex question, and I think it’s hard for me as a woman to say something about young dead girls without everything from Ophelia to Twin Peaks coming into it. I can’t separate those things.
The setting is fuelled by red and green; from the nun’s name for the hotel, the mist that hovers over the land, and Cassie’s dress, to the bright liqueur served in the village. What do these colours represent for you?
Red is just this obsession of mine, my editor here in Sweden always tells me to remove 70% of all ‘reds’. The novel is named Strega, which means ‘witch’ in Italian, but it is also this really terrible bright yellow liqueur. It has this fake 1960s aesthetic and the liquid inside is an old herbal, nun’s drink, made from 50 herbs. It is a witchy thing. There is something in the novel that is connected to the earth – green as the colour of nature, and red as the colour of blood. The very real wet soil, the ocean at night, that kind of force. In my mind there is a thin red line from that red and that green to the bright yellow of Strega, and the fake plastic aesthetic of the 1960s. ‘Strega’ is a way to describe the novel from inside my own brain without trying to sound normal. I would say, ‘I’ve made this concoction out of blood and herbs, and I’ve bottled it in that Sixties plastic and named it ‘Strega’.’ Everything in the novel uses this fake aesthetic – the souvenir-shop aesthetic – and the red and green have to do with that. It’s the most real and the most fake.
What are you working on now – are you still in this dark, red world?
I’m now working with my editor on a nearly finished novel. It’s called Röd Sol [Red Sun], and it is really quite different from Strega. The world here is still somewhat off; a plant is still demonic, the coffee mug still has a soul, and so on, but it’s a different kind of novel, more conventional in its structure. My editor told me yesterday that he finds it to be hostile against adults, that it has a hatred for grown-ups. It’s a book about children, not about having them or about motherhood, but about children as people. It’s called Red Sun and so my problem continues; I have to remove 300 ‘reds’ before we can go to print. In my mind it’s a thriller, but to others it will be a very slow, claustrophobic, atmospheric novel in which nothing happens.
Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel, publishes on 1 November 2022. Purchase your copy here.
JOHANNE LYKKE HOLM (b. 1987) is an author and translator. Nominated for both the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, she is establishing herself among the most promising up-and-coming literary authors in Sweden. She has also translated Yahya Hassan, Josefine Klougart, and Hiromi Itō into Swedish.