Swedish novelist Fredriksson (Hanna's Daughters) offers a formulaic, mannered relationship saga about two mature, divorced women from vastly different cultural backgrounds who establish an improbable but enduring friendship. In Sweden in the 1980s, Inge Bertilsson, an unsentimental former school teacher who now writes books on education, befriends a Chilean immigrant, Mira Narvaes, who arrived as a political refugee from Pinochet's dictatorship years before with her husband and sons. Gingerly, each of the women, both near 50, begin to explore the other's world: Inge, who lives alone and has two grown daughters, endured marriage to an abusive, alcoholic husband, whom she claims still to love. She asks probing questions about the other woman's past in Chile that Mira, a proud, pious, vivacious woman, would rather keep buried. But then Mira decides to search for her daughter, who at 13 was raped by soldiers, then disappeared into a Chilean prison. With the help of Inge's two daughters and Mira's own sons, now well-assimilated Swedes, the two women discover what actually happened during those dark years. Fredriksson is bent on telling a straightforward tale with little regard to narrative style; she unaccountably switches from voice to voice and offers hackneyed descriptions (loneliness "closed in around them like shrunken old garments"). Perhaps this is the fault of the translation, which is flat and full of British vernacular. While Fredriksson's observations about Swedish society are occasionally pointed and even humorous, and she also illuminates the horrors of the Pinochet regime, the novel never achieves liftoff. (Apr.)
Forecast: Fredriksson's great popularity in Scandinavia and Europe has yet to translate into comparable numbers here.
Hanna's Daughters did well for Ballantine, however, and her audience will undoubtedly enjoy this novel, leading to respectable though not stellar sales.
