A review by maketeaa
The Details by Ia Genberg

reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

when i was younger, i often thought i should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that i should be in a constant state of velocity so that i could get out there and truly live, but with time i have come to understand that everything i was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people i meet when i allow my gaze to linger.

somewhere in this novel, the narrator mentions how it felt to have a fever as a child, the feeling of walls coming up between the real world and her consciousness, a forced introspection from the incapacitation. that is the overarching theme of this book -- reflecting on the details floating inside of oneself so intricately form parts of your being that it can only be seen when you can't see anything else. we first learn of the narrator's ex-girlfriend, johanna, who left her kisses on her lips but also everywhere else, on her writing and book inscriptions and who shocked her in her ability to switch herself, to change her temperature, to be warm one moment and cold the next. we then learn about her friend/roommate niki, with a fascination for the gross, the maggots on the dead rat, with her black and white view of the world and her catastrophic fear of abandonment. and, what to me was a turning point in the reflections of the narrator, we have alejandro, with whom the narrator shared a visceral, passionate affair, where the idea of getting lost in the details and not caring about the what and the how but the who first comes to light. it is interesting how the cast of characters all occupy transitory positions in the narrator's life, and, notably, the narrator's repeated observation that, had their times together been in the present, they would have had some diagnosis of mental illness that had gone uncategorised when she knew them -- as she says, there is no inherent rationality to our actions but is only superimposed onto our memories retrospectively. with the theme of undiagnosed mental health, with people in her life that leave a mark on her but ultimately fade away, only to be recalled in the cloud of fever, this is the sentiment genberg highlights to us: these transitory moments, these memories floating in us, may make no sense when we take them in their raw form, but begin to illustrate something when reflected on, when you consider the who instead of the what and the how. what struck me the most, i think, was the realisation that the last chapter was about the narrator's own mother, an anxious woman who the narrator viewed as a fish among a group of fish, chameleoning herself ad a defense mechanism while losing her own character on the way. birgitte herself feels like another five chapters of transitory characters with the number of phases she goes through, and perhaps there is a metaphor to be found in that the person who birthed the narrator was herself a slideshow of different whos, as if collecting these different whos is simply something in her dna. but the book finishes with the narrator and her longtime friend, sally (which was also a striking detail to me -- sally, who cut the umbilical cord of her first child, a constant in all the chapters but yet without a chapter of her own) walk through the cemetery, and the quote at the top of this review was stated. because while johanna and niki and alejandro and birgitte all, to some extent or the other, focused on the externals, the narrator realises that everything is internal, everything is already inside of us, and that all we wish to be and do exists in the network of people we brush up against in our lives, no matter how briefly.