Lena Andersson’s first novel was Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love, published in translation from the Swedish in 2016. This is the sequel. It features the same main character, Ester. She is a philosopher and a play writer. She is single. She gets involved with a married man, Olov, who is a married man. They are both middle aged. He is an actor and he travels a lot. They share interests in philosophy and theatre and they hit it off together. They have a fling and then for the rest of the book, Ester pursues Olov while he maintains a distance, but also teasing her, and keeping her on the hook. Ester drives her friends crazy with her obsession with Olov, and she does not care, even to the extent of driving her friends away. This state of affairs lasts for most of the book with a few meetings and assignations. The book is 336 pages long. There is some charm in the details of Sweden’s cities and the cultural life that the two protagonists share. But for the most part the story is Beckett-like in nothing happening. As one reads the book, one wonders why one is still reading, yet Andersson manages to keep up a tension in the text. One wonders how it will end, and will there be some extreme event, or will it have a more realistic ending of the relationship. As the two adults act like teenagers, sending each other texts, phoning, provoking and testing one another, the reader will wonder if anything is actually going to develop. But the story circles around Ester’s bizarre holding on to this hopeless relationship which isn’t a relationship. It is not really a psychological study of obsession, since there’s never any explanation of her behavior: there is just the brute fact of it and her rationalizations for what she is doing. Acts of Infidelity is intriguing and smart, but also baffling in its strangeness. This is not a novel for most readers, and one might worry that there’s something self-serving in the book’s refusal to present the reader with a conventionally interesting narrative. Maybe it is appealing to the vanity of readers who can praise themselves for reading such an intellectual novel. Nevertheless, it is a striking work that stands out.

© 2019 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.