A Reign of Silence

IN 1954, SWEDISH WRITER Birgitta Trotzig, aged 25, arrived in Paris just as the Algerian Revolution was igniting. Bored with neutral Sweden’s stifling Cold War culture, she was impressed with the crowded possibilities of French politics—among them “a whole world of religious radicalism that seethed with ideas.” She read Simone Weil and converted to Catholicism. She found inspiration in the radical worker-priest movement, recently suppressed by the church. Her first novel, Ur de älskandes liv (“Out of the Loving Lives”), published in 1951, had been, as she would describe it in the 1975 essay “Poetry and Ideology,” “furiously and programmatically aesthetic,” a book from which she had “removed everything” but images. Galvanized by political life in France, she turned to studies of poverty, such as Oscar Lewis’s 1961 ethnography, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, as a new literary model. She wanted to pursue documentary literature, writing on places and cultures. But it never happened: “Poetry as a fact, a fact of life—that was what I crashed into; and it threw me off the track I had hoped to follow.” Published in 1964, Queen is indeed poetic, but its long, uncompromising, and rich sentences pulse with what Trotzig called “a solidarity born of love.”