Life form e.g. snail

Catharina Stahlgren

Cardboard, 320 pages

A healing tale of protection and forgiveness

This is a story about Mark and Elisabeth. She, a burnt-out, reassigned teacher, has a breakdown six months after the death of her little sister. When she comes home from the hospital, she feels unprepared for life, naked and skinless. “Everything alive needs a haze or other moist covering around it. The earth must have an atmosphere. The tomato seed its smooth coat.” She takes walks in Slottsskogen where she meets Mark, who has lost his life’s dream. He sees Elisabeth when she comes to the café where he works and he begins to think about attracting her. He also carries a past.

The story is about how harsh and limiting the life you have been given is, about being in a body that can suffer, and about searching for something when the ground gives way. It is very much about the boundaries between magical thinking, prayer and incantation, and about wanting to be needed. It is also a story about forgiveness.

Catharina writes a lot about the smallness of human existence without having any ready answers. For her, sensation is the smallest element of literature and it feels important to be able to portray it as precisely as possible. She is a writer and painter, a trained lawyer, who lives with my family alternately in Gothenburg and on an island in Bohuslän.

Votes about the book:

"Lifeform e.g. Snail is a very nice story about two lives that approach each other."

"It's naked and believable, and I love this novel!"

"It has beautiful language and I find myself underlining several sentences while reading, many times where I recognize myself and my own experience with mental illness."

"Catharina Ståhlgren's book provides increased understanding, should be read by relatives and those who encounter similar situations in their work. You can feel the fatigue and heaviness in your whole body when reading it. A great book." Hanneles bokparadis

"A very readable book!"

"The section about the unsaid, the longing for someone and the inability to make oneself understood are the most interesting for me."

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