Caesaria – Hanna Nordenhök

 [Book*hug Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

While perusing through a history of obstetrics in Sweden, as one does, Hanna Nordenhök came across a curious footnote. Caesaria, the small print said, was the name given by a male doctor to one of the first babies successfully delivered by Caesarian section in 1860s Sweden. “He named his own creation,” Nordenhök marvels in an interview, thrown by the doctor’s brazen act of symbolic claim to the girl. Caesaria’s story, unsurprisingly, was relegated to the margins of obstetric history. But Nordenhök could not skim over Caesaria, this seemingly minor detail. “That little orphan girl intrigued me,” she recalls, “and I started to invent my own Caesaria.”

Fiction is sometimes used as a tool to amend historical wrongs. One might think of Adania Shibli’s novella Minor Detail (tr. Elisabeth Jacquette) in this vein, a story that spins off from the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian woman at the hands of a band of Israeli soldiers. Shibli’s book is partially a retelling of this horrifying event, and is partially about another Palestinian woman, decades later, who sees the past war crime mentioned briefly in the newspaper, and feels compelled to learn more about it. Both Shibli and Nordenhök, then, flesh out official records (a history, a newspaper report) in order to make them more attentive to the lives of the women they only mention in passing. If capital “H” history falls short and neglects the humanity of those it documents, Shibli and Nordenhök seem to reason, then it is the proper role of fiction to step in, and make those stories fuller.

Nordenhök, a Swedish novelist, poet, translator from Spanish, and literary critic, has long been interested in the dark sides of Sweden’s past. Her second novel, Det vita huset i Simpang (The White House in Simpang), charts Swedish colonial rule in 1930s Indonesia, and her third novel, Asparna (The Aspens) looks, in part, to the first rescue house for “uncivilized children” in 1840s Sweden. Nordenhök’s fourth novel, Caesaria, released in Swedish in 2020, and available now in Saskia Vogel’s beguiling translation from Book*hug Press, is also set in that Nordic country’s nineteenth century. Unlike the roving geographic scope of The Aspens, or of her most recent novel Underlandet (Wonderland), however, Caesaria is confined to one place: an isolated farm estate called Lilltuna. It is at Lilltuna that Nordenhök transforms Caesaria from footnote to fiction, turning “that little orphan girl” into a formidable, ghastly narrator.

Lilltuna is a markedly foreign and antiquated-seeming landscape. The characters that mill about the farm estate dress in starched waistcoats and pantalettes, eat gruel in the morning and drink sloeberry wine at night. Dead badgers and rotting fruit lie in the fields, and the snow mounds and melts in the pasture with an eerie cyclicality. As a baby, Caesaria is brought to Lilltuna via cabriolet (cue Google image search), and is deposited under the care of the dour nursemaid Mam’selle Fanny and the diligent farmhand Krantz. “The first thing I learned was Lilltuna,” a grown Caesaria tells us, “and Lilltuna belonged to Dr. Eldh.”

Dr. Eldh, the doctor who delivered Caesaria, raises the girl with stories of her own Creation, in which he plays the part of God. In the beginning, the doctor declares, there was the Scrawny One—a poor, unmarried woman who came to a city hospital in distress. During the preliminary examination, Dr. Eldh serenely tells the girl, the Scrawny One had rocked violently on her malformed pelvis, screaming herself hoarse from the pain of her swollen abdomen. The doctor consulted the literature, and then cut into the woman’s flesh, pulling the baby out amid spurting jets of blood—“as one lifts a shimmering pearl from an oyster”—becoming the “author of the human delivery per excellentiam.” Afterwards, the Scrawny One’s liquid gaze skittered across the operating room, gradually turning lifeless amidst clouds of chloroform. As the Scrawny One’s body was sewn together with catgut sutures, Dr. Eldh remembers, he christened the baby Caesaria.

Such is the personalized version of Genesis that Caesaria receives, sitting at the foot of Dr. Eldh’s walnut library desk in pinafore and plaits. Gristle and death become her origin story: Caesaria knows herself as the “Incurable One,” the “Damaged One,” or the “Bandaged One,” a twisted version of Christ. Over and again, narrating from a future time, Caesaria tells the reader of her “morbid disposition,” seeming to tacitly justify Mam’selle Fanny’s practice of keeping her on a leash. Caesaria is not allowed to leave the farm estate, or to interact with other children. When a wagon filled with schoolchildren chances to roll into the courtyard of the house, Caesaria is swiftly locked in the nursery, prohibited from stepping foot outside. She looks at herself in the glass of her nursery window, thinking that “the girl’s face in there was smooth and dark, as if it had been erased and replaced by something,” but she can’t quite think what. A sense of deformity casts a thick shadow over Lilltuna; Caesaria believes she is the monster.

And why is Caesaria kept at Lilltuna? Is there something truly wrong with the girl? Why does the doctor fold up the top of the carriage when the coachman drives them around the estate’s borders? Why does Mam’selle Fanny’s face change whenever Dr. Eldh arrives at the estate? Suspense and foreboding drive the novella; the pages turn themselves. Caesaria, speaking in a future moment, raises these questions, but postpones the answers. “I wondered for a long time why Doctor Eldh continued to keep me at Lilltuna,” she says, but “I no longer wonder.”

When Caesaria is a child, however, much is kept hidden. Deprived of clear explanations or experiences of the world beyond Lilltuna’s boundary hedges, the child pays careful attention to the most minute of gestures, strains to make out the inaudible, shapeless words that she overhears in the house. Eager for acceptance, Caesaria quickly adopts the clinical language of Dr. Eldh and the biblical recitations of Mam’selle Fanny as her own. “I was rocking on my coccyx,” she says; “the Sceptre shall quench the fire of the dragon and be raised to the throne of heaven.” But this learned language is particular to Lilltuna; it will not serve her in the larger world. When Dr. Eldh hosts a group of visitors at the estate, Caesaria is barely able to parse the language of those city men:

I saw those invisible threads and connections moving through the air; looks and expressions that interjected the words that drifted from one person to the next: greedy, provocative flutters, unspoken questions and answers, equally tangible and intangible. It was as if the guests were speaking a language I didn’t understand but was nonetheless always scanning, and I adapted my movements to its patterns, its grammar, and if I accidentally broke its rules my face dissolved, annihilated by heat.

Reluctant to expose herself to ridicule and shame by saying the wrong thing, Caesaria retreats more and more into herself, abstaining from interacting with others. She makes herself smaller, a footnote to the men’s conversations. Her powers of observation and description, meanwhile, grow ever more refined. One winter, a man from the city called Master Valdemar arrives at Lilltuna, and Caesaria keeps her account of the stranger careful, never declarative:

As Krantz and the doctor laboured up to the house with the curly-locked man, he kept slipping and sliding in the powdery snow, his feet tucked into dainty evening boots with grubby gaiters on top. As they came closer, I could hear him sniggering and cackling, talking strangely and shrilly in Krantz’s and then the doctor’s ears; neither of them engaged with him but simply stared ahead with dogged countenances, slightly bent under his weight.

Caesaria is attentive to Master Valdemar’s movements, clothes, and tone, but also to the texture of the glances and silences that surround him. She listens to Dr. Eldh speaking to Master Valdemar through the floorboards downstairs, until “the words blurred and lost their edges.” Her watchfulness is not purely driven by catlike curiosity. There is also fear prompting her assiduous study of the man; self-preservation makes her such a canny observer and narrator.

And Master Valdemar is indeed a threat. Like many gothic novels, Caesaria is cut through by sexual violence. The strange man from the city becomes a predator, falling upon the maids of the house each night, ignoring their pleading, sobs and whimpering as he drags them into the nearby field. In the morning after the first rape happens, Caesaria notices that the maid Hulda’s face looks “grey and strange” as she sits over her gruel. Mam’selle Fanny stays facing the kettle at the stove, silently standing amidst the billowing steam, and Krantz takes longer and longer walks into the pasture, skipping breakfast altogether. Over time, Hulda becomes “peculiar, a grey hole of nothing,” absented from herself. Seen through Caesaria’s child eyes, the Master’s violence seems unavoidable, something that the (female) employees of the house must bear as due course.

In Caesaria, male violence against women takes multiple forms. Master Valdemar, with his maddened, remorseless use of the maids’ bodies, represents one extreme. At the other end of the spectrum, however, lies Dr. Eldh. Initially, the man appears to be buttoned up and timid in his interactions with women. “Ever since I was a young lad,” the doctor writes to Caesaria in one of his letters, “I’d been given to acute shyness when in any form of contact with the opposite sex.” Although the doctor is practically paralyzed with fear when interacting with women in balls or brothels, he finds comfort in operating on the female body, seeking to classify and dissect that which terrifies him. The doctor obsesses over the “ailments related to the female sexual system,” and passionately prescribes the use of speculum, lancing devices, and hot knives for such female “afflictions” as masturbation or nymphomania. For Dr. Eldh, scissors and scalpel, scientific knowledge and a clinical detachment are the ultimate ways of conquering that great female unknown.

Reading about Dr. Eldh’s aversion-cum-attraction to women immediately put me in the mind of Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel La cresta de Ilión (translated by Sarah Booker as The Iliac Crest). In that short, febrile work, a male doctor narrates his fear of, and desire for, the female body. The tension in the book comes from a rising sense that the boundaries between male and female, between sanity and madness, are slipping out of the narrator’s grasp. Less and less able to enforce such fundamental binaries, the once-authoritative doctor turns into a patient himself; the armor that scientific male hubris once lent him proves to be nothing but a gossamer shield. In both books, although male doctors slice and suture female flesh, they do so out of fear. The Iliac Crest and Caesaria both ask: What are the effects of men’s fear of women? What happens when women internalize that male fear, and believe themselves to be monstrous?

In a note from the author that prefaces The Iliac Crest, Rivera Garza writes that the increasing disappearances of women in northern Mexico, and the erasure of key female figures from Mexican literary history are the maddening, inexplicable, and impenetrable circumstances that her novel questions. “When disappearing becomes an epidemic, especially among women,” Rivera Garza writes, “this book reminds readers that there is always a trace left: a manuscript, a footprint, a dent, an echo worthy of our full attention and inquiries.”

Johanne Lyyke Holm’s novel Strega—another of Saskia Vogel’s many spectacular and stylistically wide-ranging translations from Swedish—likewise features a narrator who becomes obsessed with female disappearance. After her friend Cassie suddenly goes missing from the hotel in which they work, the narrator is seized with fear: “I woke up unable to breathe, heart stiff with a simple thought: that Cassie could be forgotten.” Wracked with grief and anger, the narrator decides to collect whatever she can that reminds her of Cassie in her underwear drawer, “in anticipation of a tribunal somewhere, where all would be brought to light.” These objects, the narrator thinks, will serve as evidence for a simple argument: that Cassie had existed. Vogel’s translation of Balsam Karam’s The Singularity, meanwhile, shows a mother searching for her disappeared daughter, a child that even the sky and sea “forgot and abandoned.” Like Rivera Garza, Lyyke Holm’s narrator, and Karam’s mother character narrator are driven by an impulse to document disappeared women’s lives, to grow narratives that might sustain their memory.

In Caesaria, Nordenhök seems to think along similar lines, allowing Caesaria—that footnoted girl of Swedish obstetric history—to reappear in writing. From a trace, Nordenhök, through Vogel’s vivid translation, has brought forth an imagined version of Caesaria, creating a nightmarish glimpse into what could have been her world. The book serves a kind of dark, poetic justice to the real-life Caesaria, ensuring that her name and story are not forgotten. Ask questions of the footnotes, Nordenhök’s novel seems to warn the reader, don’t assume women’s lives can be summed up in small print.

Anna Learn is a PhD student at the University of Washington, where she studies Persian, South Asian, and Hispanic literature. You can find her work on her website.