Strega, the recent novel from Swedish author Johanne Lykke Holm is an atmospheric narrative that feels more like a haunting dream you had once than a novel you sat down to read. Strega is named for the fictional town on the side of the Italian mountains, home to the Olympic Hotel, where a group of nine young girls are sent to work for the summer as maids. The novel is narrated by Rafaela, a nineteen year old girl whose mother sees the job posting for summer maids in the paper, and believes it to be a great chance for her daughter to prepare for her future as a wife and mother.
Rafaela arrives at the hotel in the mountains with eight other girls, who are tasked with cleaning the hotel each day and preparing for guests who never seem to materialize. As Rafaela narrates, “We were nine young women doing seasonal work in the mountains, or nine young women put in safekeeping on the backside of the mountain, or nine young women who watched their hands being put to work, watched them lift starched fabrics to their face only to let them fall to the ground, watched them pour strong wine out of large carafes, like the hands of a statue, right into the parched earth, as though to sate it.” The repetitive nature of each day’s tasks lull the girls into a sort of dream-like state, and they marvel at the eeriness of repeating tasks for an empty hotel. Rafaela begins to disassociate, she feels that her hands are separate entities from herself, tasked with folding the same sheets and towels, sweeping the same floors, day after day. She describes, “Morning after morning, a metallic light fell through the room like a butcher’s knife. I stood and watched it happen.” This image of the knife is symbolic of a larger linguistic tactic that Holm utilizes throughout the novel, which is the presence of violence amidst the mundane. There is a constant sense of foreboding, the images of blood and milk arise over and over again, as the novel maintains a painterly sense of sudden violence and disturbance amidst the lush setting.
While Holm maintains a sinister atmosphere throughout the novel, things take a darker turn when a group of guests finally arrives at the hotel for a night of festivities—and in the morning upon their departure the girls discover that one of their nine, Cassie, has gone missing. They are wholly unsure of how to proceed, so instead of immediately calling the police, they begin performing a series of rituals with Cassie’s personal effects and search on their own for her in the woods around the hotel. Rafaela and the other girls meditate of the constant presence of femicide, and the lurking dangers that await all young girls. Rafaela describes this presence of violence in her own life as a murderer with many faces: “When I turned thirteen, the murderer moved into a new face. One evening during a holiday by the sea, he appeared in the eyes of my father’s best friend. What was murderous in him looked different. Within his hatred too, the disgust was planted as a condition, but this disgust also contained a sick desire. I understood that the murderer’s inner life operated like one of those dolls that houses several smaller dolls. But which is the innermost doll? This I don’t yet know”.
Reader’s will certainly pick up the novel’s strong visual cues: in fact the dreamlike cinematic quality and sense of the danger called to mind two of my favorite films: Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. I was totally taken up with both the atmosphere and the storyline of the novel, which felt like a missive from every young girl born with a sense of the threats that surround her. In an interview with NPR, Holm explains, “I think the book tries to unveil this hidden secret, which is not a secret to girls and women. I think the quotes in the beginning with every woman’s life turning into a crime scene, that the crime has already taken place – I think that is where the novel just spells it out. That is what the novel is trying to show the reader. And if the reader is a girl or a woman, she might recognize this hidden secret from inside herself or inside themselves”.