The Helios Disaster

February 17, 2020
A modern, orphaned incarnation of the goddess Athena chronicles her madness in Knausgård’s unflinching examination of separation, loss, and depression (after Welcome to America). Twelve-year-old Anna is hatched whole in a suit of armor from the forehead of her father, Conrad. Frightened by his screaming, she escapes to a northern Swedish village, naked but for her golden helmet. After learning that Conrad is a schizophrenic who has since been committed to a psychiatric hospital, Anna is placed by a social services agency with a churchgoing family. Their well-meaning efforts to assimilate her are soon complicated by her determination to correspond with Conrad, and by an apparent gift for speaking in tongues, which pleases them until they learn that she is in fact speaking Greek. The family commits her, too, to a psychiatric hospital. In brilliant, harrowing pages of deep interiority, Knausgård describes Anna’s fever dream of alienation; Anna is desperate for love and confounded by it, and chronically incapable of connecting with those who might provide it. Knausgård’s bluntly surreal style—she is also a poet— suits Anna’s vibrant, tormented imagination. “This is a war,” Anna says of her loneliness, evoking her mythological archetype. Tidy endings are nowhere to be found; Knausgård instead gratifies by portraiture, in her thrilling conception of a young goddess on earth.

February 1, 2020
The myth of Athena inspires a deeply melancholy portrait of a fractured family in the debut novel by Bostr�m Knausg�rd (Welcome to America, 2019). "I am born of a father. I split his head," says Anna, the novel's young narrator, as if she'd sprung from the head of Zeus. It's a metaphor, of course: The split head of the girl's father evokes the schizophrenia that will send him to an institution and her to a foster home. Yet Bostr�m Knausg�rd brings the metaphor intriguingly close to reality. Though we're in the author's native Sweden, Anna has an inherent connection to Greek roots: She obsesses over a map of the Mediterranean, and her prophetic babbling at the church her foster family takes her to turns out not to be speaking in tongues but Greek. Regardless of Anna's provenance, her life is shot through with a profound sense of longing for her father and a host of failed strategies to connect with him. Church only deepens her sense of distance. The letters he writes her reveal frustratingly little. And channeling her inner Athena feels like a false front. ("I must become stronger. So strong that I won't be the one who is alone, rather those who avoid me will.") The somber, flat tone of the narrative (ably maintained by translator Willson-Broyles) gives the reader plenty of room to interpret Anna as mad or misunderstood, and Bostr�m Knausg�rd's imagery is piercing ("My scream was like a storm. Like pouring rain. My scream was like a spear. Like a way out"). As she becomes increasingly desperate to escape the institutions that constrict her (churches, schools, hospitals) and reconcile with her father, the latter pages of the narrative become mordant, a touch repetitively. But it's a moving trip to an emotional bottom. A flinty, lyrical, and storm-clouded study of loss.

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