Corridors of Grief

Where does the mind retreat when it frays, stretches, snaps? What sort of physical space can best contain a mind turned anxious, come undone, a mind uncoupled from some previously recognizable iteration of itself? A quarter of the way through the Swedish writer Sara Stridsberg’s latest novel Beckomberga, translated into English by Deborah Bragan-Turner, a passage appears that offers the reader insight into an earlier era’s answer to these questions.