We Know You Remember

Tragic Injustice in Small-Town Sweden

We Know You Remember by Tove Alsterdal won the Glasnyckeln or Glass Key award for the best Scandinavian novel of 2021. The award is given jointly by the Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish Crime Writers’ Associations.

A tragic tale of lost youth, blame and remorse in small-town Sweden.

Synopsis

One evening, whilst driving through picturesque Ådalen in Northern Sweden, Olof Hagström makes an impulsive decision. He visits his family home in a small town he hasn’t seen in twenty years. When he arrives, he finds his estranged father lying dead in a bath of cold water.

Police investigator Eira Sjödin has lived in Ådalen for most of her life. She starts to investigate the old man’s death, and memories flood back when she realises who Olof Hagström is. When he was fourteen, he was found guilty of the murder of a local girl, Lina Stavred. She disappeared and hasn’t been seen since.

As Eira Sjödin investigates the old man’s death, links start to form with the long-missing girl.

Review

The stand-out feature of Tove Alsterdal’s We Know You Remember is its setting. Alsterdal draws out the beauty of the landscape with its mountains, lakes and forests and overlays it with small-town behaviour. Teenagers hang around for something (anything) to do, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. That, and the flashbacks to the 90s, made me nostalgic for my upbringing in small-town, rural Yorkshire.

Into the mix, Alsterdal throws the tragedy of a teenage boy who had a confession coerced out of him by an overly zealous police force; (a practice that was not uncommon and led to a significant change in how children are treated under Swedish law).

Alsterdal combines the boy’s memories, the videos of his confession and police officer Eira Sjödin’s compassion and curiosity. In doing so, she springs a closed case open.

That, to mix my idioms, lets the cat out of the bag and puts it firmly amongst the pigeons. Alsterdal exacerbates the situation with a social media hate campaign, small-town relationships, the need to find a scapegoat and twenty years of guilt, anguish, rumour and gossip to create a fascinating novel.

The novel smoulders and never bursts into flames of action or excitement, but it is a first-rate read.

Excerpt

The little indicator on the lock was white, not red, as it was when someone was in the bathroom. Olof had learned to lock himself in there with his comics. That was what you had to do when you had an annoying older sister screaming to let her in.

He opened the door and the water surged out over his shoes.

There was a sponge floating inside, dirt and loose hair, dead flies. The striped shower curtain was closed, and Olof felt the cold water seep through his socks as he stepped into the room. He could do that, if nothing else: try to turn off the water before he left, so the house wouldn’t be completely ruined. He pulled back the curtain.

There was someone sitting behind it. A crooked body slumped in an unfamiliar chair. Olof knew what he was looking at, but he couldn’t quite process it. The old man was hunched over, completely white. In the sunlight filtering through the window, his skin seemed to glisten like the scales of a fish. Tendrils of wet hair were plastered across his scalp. Olof managed to take another step forwards to reach the knob, and the water finally stopped flowing.

Other than his own horse breathing and the flies buzzing against the windowpane, he couldn’t hear a sound. The last few drops of water. The naked body seemed to draw his gaze, holding it firmly. The man’s skin seemed loose somehow, with greenish patches across his back. Gripping the handbasin, Olof leaned in. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes, but his prominent nose had a bump in the middle, an old bandy injury from his youth. He saw the man’s penis, crooked as a worm between his legs.

Then the handbasin came loose from the wall. A deafening crash, as though the house itself were falling down, and he lost his balance. Splashed around, hitting his head on the washing machine, slipping when he tried to get up.

Crawling on all fours, he managed to leave the bathroom and struggle to his feet.

Out of there.

We Know You Remember by Tove Alsterdal