Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This review is technically incomplete. I finished this book back in September (’13) but didn’t write about it until now (January of ’14). I felt I couldn’t write about it because I didn’t (and still haven’t) rated the story “Some Letters for Ove Lindström.” (I’m still too close to the subject matter of that story.)
I know almost nothing about the Swedish/Scandinavian myths and didn’t think I necessarily had to in order to see the heart of these stories. Nor could I tell which stories were translated and which were written in English. It’s testament to Tidbeck’s writing, I think.
The collection started strongly and ended with a bang. The stories that didn’t move me were generally the ones where Tidbeck revisits certain themes without, at least as far as I could tell, adding anything new. Those aside, the ones that did move me are positively gut-wrenching.