Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (Tr. Kira Josefsson): Money, money, money   

An international bestseller, Ia Genberg’s The Details was one of 2023’s standout reads for me. Published for the first time in English, this year’s International Booker Prize longlisted Small Comfort is an earlier novel, also translated by Kira Joseffson. It has a similar structure, following five characters although this time the link is money rather than the narrator’s memories of her life and the people who influenced it.

There’s a price for everything. People don’t realise that, but you can put a price on everything. Everything can be transformed into money.  

The novel opens with the transcript of an interview between a journalist who shares the author’s name and a man who was briefly a child star in a film adapted from a beloved children’s author’s book. Genberg is having trouble keeping Greger to the point. He’s much more interested in expounding his theories about money and not too fastidious in how to accumulate it. In the second section, the employee of a pharmaceuticals company is tasked with bribing an official, which may or may not have horribly backfired. An actor commissioned to give a speech at a wealthy man’s wedding reveals the groom’s appalling behaviour to his closest friends and family, behaviour that a PhD student researching the link between wealth and empathy would find entirely believable. In the final section, a family goes to enormous lengths to ensure its inheritance, hoping their annual performance will be the last.

Marriage: there’s always a winner and a loser, one who makes more withdrawals than deposits, one whose investments turn out to be wiser over the long term, who seems to constantly repay their debts right before the interest rate goes up.  

Small Comfort reads much more like a set of short stories than The Details, each of them linked by the theme of money and its pervasive influence on human behaviour and relationships. Genberg explores her theme inventively posing many questions about our response to wealth, and the lack of it, from Greger’s frank espousal of money as the measure of success, pointing out a few home truths to his liberal interviewer who turns a blind eye to what lies below the surface of her ethical choices, to the family who perform an annual weekend long charade of industry and happiness for the increasingly crabby, elderly relative, in the hope of an inheritance. An entertaining, thought-provoking piece of fiction, not quite so impressive in its execution as The Details which I admired for its elegant brevity but certainly enough for me to hope more of Genberg’s work will be translated.

Wildfire: London 9781035433940 384 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)