In every moment we are still alive / Tom Malmquist ; translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781612197111
- Physical Description: 232 pages ; 24 cm
- Publisher: Brooklyn : Melville House, 2018.
- Copyright: ©2018.
Content descriptions
Original Version Note: | Translation of: I varje ögonblick är vi fortfarande vid liv. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Wives > Death > Fiction. Parent and child > Fiction. |
Available copies
- 13 of 13 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect.
- 1 of 1 copy available at Houston Public Library. (Show preferred library)
Holds
- 0 current holds with 13 total copies.
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
100 Mile House Branch | MAL (Text) | 33923005922756 | General Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
Quesnel Branch | MAL (Text) | 33923005922764 | General Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
Williams Lake Branch | MAL (Text) | 33923005922533 | General Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2017 November #1
In this wrenching, autobiographical first novel, Swedish poet Malmquist follows a narrator who shares the author's name and personal history through a horrifying experience. Tom's longtime partner, Karin, at 33 weeks pregnant, suddenly becomes critically ill and is rushed to the hospital. Tom watches helplessly as her condition worsens, and after their baby is delivered, he spends sleepless days shuttling between Karin's room and the unit where baby Livia is struggling to hold on to life. Malmquist tells the story in claustrophobic, shell-shocked present tense, only later widening out to reveal his relationship with his parents and Karin's, the couple's past, and Tom's Kafkaesque struggle with hospital and government bureaucracy. The reader is immersed in the minutiae of Tom's experience, as he focuses on one detail or anotherâa "beige suspended ceiling in the corridor" here, or a doctor's "chestnut leather briefcase" thereâhoping to ground himself in reality. Not an easy book to read, but remarkably credible. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews. - ForeWord Magazine Reviews : ForeWord Magazine Reviews 2018 - January/February
Malmquist's immersive prose perfectly limns the demands of living within the chiaroscuro of deep grief.
In Sweden, two expectant parents await the birth of their first child. But a routine trip to the emergency room begins parenthood for one parent, and ends it for the other. In Tom Malmquist's harrowing story of loss, In Every Moment We Are Still Alive, "all you can do is fall to pieces and then come back."
Neither Tom nor his partner Karin are prepared for her bad bout with the flu to morph into acute myeloid leukemia. Karin's life-threatening diagnosis requires that she be put into a medically induced coma, and that their child, Livia, be delivered two months prematurely.
Suddenly, Tom's life is transformed into a chaos of shifting diagnoses, emergency interventions, and terrible grief as he's shuttled back and forth between hospital wards, trapped between the life he's known and the inexorable changes bearing down on him.
Malmquist's narrative gives form to grief through the story's formal construction. Familiar conventionsâfrom paragraphs to dialogue to narrative linearityâloosely cohere, only to fall apart and reform in new ways as the story shifts between past and present. The paragraphs themselves are dense, tight, and claustrophobic; dialogue is unmarked by quotation marks or paragraph breaks. This structure of controlled chaos slowly reveals Tom and Karin's life together, as flashbacks are interspersed with an overwhelming present.
The pain of the narrator's experience is almost palpable; this book is hard to read in the best of ways. Malmquist perfectly captures the oppression and laboriousness of various systemsâfrom hospitals to social security to mortuary services. Connections between people are hardly any better. It's almost impossible to keep straight the rotation of doctors, friends, and family. The kaleidoscope of characters is disconcerting and anxiety-producing. In contrast, Tom, Karin, and Livia are a tight knot in the center of it all.
With a unique form as tightly wound as the voice of the narrator himself, In Every Moment We Are Still Alive is infused with deep urgency. A great stylist, Malmquist's immersive prose perfectly limns the demands of living within the chiaroscuro of deep grief.
© 2017 Foreword Magazine, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2017 December #1
A Swedish woman becomes deathly ill as she is about to give birth to her first child, and her longtime partner must learn to traverse parenthood and grief at the same time.When Karin is 33 weeks pregnant and struggling to breathe, her partner and fellow writer, Tom, rushes her to a nearby hospital. Karin is diagnosed with acute leukemia, and a baby girl she names Livia is delivered by emergency C-section. Tom struggles to be present for his premature daughter as Karin becomes increasingly unresponsive over the next few weeks in the hospital. Translated from the Swedish by Koch, the first part of Malmquist's autobiographical novel moves swiftly through hospital passages, and the days meld together in his prose. Like Tom, we are plunged into medical terminology and family tensions that build in urgency until Karin's death. After her loss, the narrative begins to piece together memories of Tom and Karin's life together before the illness. These sections are often untethered from each other, out of chronological order, as if fragments from a dream; it is in this part of the book that Malmquist's background as a poet shines through, even as the heaviness of the memories is often suffocating. Tom's efforts to care for Livia and navigate his other familial relationships are woven between these flashbacks from his courtship with Karin and her earlier health scares. Tom works through the complicated bureaucratic system to establish his legal relationship with Livia, as he and Karin weren't married; he struggles to resolve tensions with Karin's parents due to the privacy she wanted during her illness; and his own father's health rapidly declines after 10 years of living with cancer. By turns raw, unsettled, and touching, Malmquist's book is an extended meditation on what it means to love and to mourn. A deeply emotional and affecting novel. Copyright Kirkus 2017 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2017 December #1
Malmquist presents a moving portrait of the disorientation of grief in this heady debut novel. It opens with a frantic, prolonged blow-by-blow account of the emergency hospital visit during which Tom's pregnant partner, Karin, is diagnosed with fast-acting leukemia. Days after her diagnosis, Tom becomes a bewildered new parent to premature daughter Livia, while mourning his partner, who dies shortly after giving birth. Tom stumbles forward while flashing back to earlier, happier times with Karin. He frankly recounts his jealousies and her fears of abandonment. The slippage in time illustrates the strange logic of grief, which catapults the bereaved back through random memories. In the midst of these moments, Malmquist offers a stinging satire of the bureaucratic processes ill-equipped to cope with an unmarried single father whose partner has died. A final note of hope that avoids making sense of pain rounds out this beautiful, raw meditation on earth-shattering personal loss.
Copyright 2017 Publishers Weekly.(Feb.)