Description

When the celebrated Swedish writer Johanna Ekstroem found out that she was dying from an eye melanoma she asked her closest friend, Sigrid Rausing, to finish her last book. Rausing transcribed and edited the thirteen handwritten notebooks left by Ekstroem. The result is a memoir of exceptional depth and intensity, published to critical acclaim in Sweden in 2023.

The work showcases Ekstroem’s vivid imagination, writerly precision, and psychological insight, interwoven with Rausing’s spare and sober reflections. And the Walls Became the World All Around is a literary experiment, a testament to friendship, and a deep meditation on grief.

Publisher Review

Johanna Ekstroem’s prose towards the end is clear as glass. The last notebooks are amongst the best things she has ever written. Sublime, devastating * Dagens Nyheter * What really stays with me is the conjuring of an extraordinary friendship… Greater tenderness is hard to imagine * Goeteborgs-Posten * What Johanna Ekstroem does most of all in these texts is to excavate deeper… inwards, backwards, sideways and forwards * Svenska Dagbladet * Dreambook, poet’s journal, diary of a love lost and an illness that is in part perceptual, this is a book like no other I have read. Intertwined in its very making, there is also a story of friendship and grief. Hypnotic and haunting, the whole is bathed in a northern light that had me reaching for a Bergman classic — Lisa Appignanesi An intuitive, beautiful distillation of feeling. Rausing enters the haunted space of these notebooks with open arms, and in doing so, reveals Ekstroem’s unique poetic and courage with deep understanding. The investigation extends bravely into the patterning of the subconscious, documenting human desire in all of its brutality and wonder. How do we love or live when we know that time is finite? A penetrating, variegated book, that puts friendship rightfully at its centre, a book that vibrates with loss, but also the wild, vital force of Ekstroem’s creative vision — Nikita Lalwani An astonishing meditation on the dancing boundary line between the self and the world, Johanna Ekstroem’s notebooks record the last two years of her life with poetic wisdom, humor and sheer vitality. Sigrid Rausing’s eloquent translation, together with her passionate, forensic drive to discern Ekstroem’s precise meaning and revivify their conversations from the far side of the grave, make this unique work also a living portrait of friendship. Indeed, the book itself feels hauntingly alive-an indelible reading experience — George Prochnik A deeply compelling meditation on dreams and the unconscious, a testament to the power of friendship and love and language, an intimate record of both loss and joy. Shadowed by illness, pain and mortality, And the Walls Became the World All Around nevertheless builds to a profoundly moving and hopeful end — Tom Lee This book is like nothing I’ve ever read. It sometimes brings to mind Anne Carson’s Nox, at other times Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, but it is absolutely its own thing: a haunting of the dead by the living. As Rausing pores through her dead friend’s notebooks, excerpting, reproducing pages, parsing, analysing them for us, an intense, radiantly intelligent kind of memorialisation alchemises into being, a duet between the deceased and the survivor in which the departed gets to speak in her own voice. This utterly original book takes its place easily among the great literature of loss and grief — Neel Mukherjee It is almost unbearable that the first of Johanna Ekstroem’s life-writing to be translated into English should be this, her account of her own death. But what a voice emerges, just as we have lost it. In editing, translating and framing her late friend’s final pieces of writing, Sigrid Rausing has created a text of strange, harrowing beauty. But it is in the interplay of their two voices – Rausing’s spare, steady prose, which you’d call austere if it wasn’t so palpably loving – and the tumultuous, neurotic beauty of Ekstroem’s sections – that the book really becomes something extraordinary. A dialogue between the living and the dead. A tender, desolate memorial to a brilliant mind and a final act of extraordinary friendship — Simon Woods Never before have I encountered a book that becomes its own kind of illuminated manuscript, with its intense dreamscapes and self-portraiture, its haunting awareness of time, and its two strong presences on the page, a counterpoint of voices, the one that seeks and the other that gives that search its shape and afterlife, and profoundly enlightens. An illuminated manuscript is also about existence itself, and how that existence is ultimately captured, its arrangement of space and what is considered to be central, without ever losing sight of all the life that teems in the margins — Chloe Aridjis