The Land of the Fern

Elin Bengtsson

Mika, I want to know what you’ve done. To forget about us. Give me the recipe.
The rows of bunk beds, fitted sheets, the smell of leather, skin.
Have you become a man now? Marching with one hand on the gun and the other on the crotch.
Despite we promised to each other that we would be different, what nobody imagined would exist.
No men or women. Just steel.
When Margit gets off the train at Malmö Central Station, she has no idea where to go. She only knows that it’s impossible to stay at home, in the silence after Mika. Mika who left her on the pile of cushions in the tool shed and told her that they must get away from each other. That the forbidden between them, that no one was supposed to know about, has to end.
Outside Margit’s and Mika’s symbiotic world, Margit doesn’t know where she belongs. It’s only in the darkness inside her head, where it’s still Mika and her against the world, that she knows who she is.
But Malmö is making constant attempts to break through her paralysis and alienation: there is Ina with her steel blue eyes and sharp tongue, the placards she hangs on the electrical boxes and the slogans she writes on the buildings, looking at Margit in a special way. And Paco, with all his theories and his soft smile. But the closer Ina and Paco get and the more she becomes part of a new, activist community, the greater Margit’s fear of her and Mika’s secret being revealed becomes. That the insects that move at the roots will come up to the light.
The Land of the Fern is a strong, vertiginous novel about losing someone. About the rules about who may love whom and how, and the need to create one’s own spaces, where life can take a new shape.