What Do You See Now (Vad ser du nu)

Cilla Naumann

”This is good, I’ll keep it on she said and put the money in the shop assistant’s hand. When we walked out I saw how the wool in the fabric of the coat made her blue eyes shine even more. The hotel was not far from there. Its name still creates red neon letters in the snow and we are just as close as we are distanced, Anna and me. Between us everything is routine and gentle, but still clumsy and nervous. The days behind lay around us; our children’s light voices, other street corners, rooms, situations. Her tongue rotate mechanically in my mouth, the hotel sign shines in the snow in Copenhagen. Thin neon letters, red. The old coat in a bag in her hand.”

 

One by one – a friend, a husband, a father and a daughter – tell us about their love to the same woman, Anna. Together their voices make a close up portrait of a whole family and an amazing description of how time and memory flow through people’s life. Anna is the child and the mother, the play mate and the lover – all at the same time. Always present but never in any other way than in the viewers perspective.

 

271 pages

 

Rights sold

Russia: Text Publishers

Sweden: Albert Bonniers Förlag, Bonnierpocket

 

Reviews

“With great precision and a kind of psychological realism, Naumann manages to portrait the conscious winding roads between memory and present time, expectations and reality, and hand who reach through time.”
DN

 

"...Cilla Naumann successfully and scary weaves the fabric which change colour and pattern and never becomes the same again once one has read a few pages more of the text. And she does it with a language that does not allow one to let go.”
Nerikes Allehanda