Darling River
Lo and her father embark on nocturnal excursions in an old Jaguar through the burning forests of an unknown European city. Lo is a dream and a mirror where glimpses of other destinies are also seen. Dolores Haze is traveling out of Nabokov's novel towards the childbirth-death of Alaska. A female chimpanzee in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris is trained by a scientist to start drawing. An unknown mother is driving around the illuminated circles of highways outside the cities. Darling River is a magnificent and melancholic novel about a child without a childhood and a woman without a future.
'Sara Stridsberg's third novel is a delicious and cruel trap. A great novel. An essential writer.'
– Le Monde
'Sara Stridsberg's imagination gives birth to very strong poetic pages in which dreams, repetitive and fascinating, form a counterpoint to the repulsive reality.'
– Le Magazine littéraire
'Darling River develops into a strange prose poetic litany of the impossible relationship between an unscrupulous middle-aged man and a pudgy teenage girl, who sinks deeper and deeper into a stream of sugar, sex, alcohol and river water. She loses her mother, her childhood, her health, herself ... I am impressed and eagerly await what Sara Stridsberg will be able to accomplish next.'
– Norra Skåne
“In a distinctive, soaring and deeply unpleasant way, the text has a beauty in itself that drives the reader forward...”
– Vårt Land
“[Darling River] is magnificently beautiful and shabbily pitiful, sad as an open wound and completely obstinate: all at the same time.”
– Svenska Dagbladet