Drowned is a creepy psychological thriller that describes two sisters, two visits, and two sides of one man. Bohman makes nice, economical use of a rural-sounding Swedish house, a lot of plants, Millais's Ophelia painting, and, yes, even the weather. I also thought Marlaine Delargy's translation read very nicely.

(There's more on my blog about Drowned, here.) ( )

billed as a thriller but honestly not much in the way of thrills.

well written but a lot of snoozes, fluff.

good ending

stella, marina, and gabriel hanging out at a house in sweden.

would not recommend ( )

I read Bohman's other book, The Other Woman, and while it wasn't great, it was compelling in the way it tried to think about class differences and how it shapes gender relations.

This book felt like it had something more going for it. It's a thin story held together by thin characters, and that's fine if the language or the style was striving to be something unique, of its own. But it was, in the end, a rather conventional book. There's a great image to work with embedded within the story, but the ekphrasis just sort of faltered.

Something that bothered me in The Other Woman and is a lot worse here is Bohman's style; there are commas where periods should be, and I'm not sure if it reads differently in the original Swedish and if the translator Marlaine Delargy should have reworked it so it doesn't read like this in English: "They met at a party while she was still a student, he tells me how beautiful he thought she was, pale skin and strawberry-blonde hair, I swallow, I have to look away, gaze at the moon, which has moved a little farther across the sky, it just seems to be getting bigger and bigger."

I'm all for twisted female relationships, troubled sisters, and the hell that is heterosexual love under patriarchy (I'm thinking of Theweleit here, who said oppression of women occurs through "exaltation" of certain women via imposed standards of beauty), so I'm sad that I didn't quite like it. ( )

Drowned by Therese Bohman is a literary novel and atmospheric psychological thriller. As the description says, the basic story in is deceptively simple. A young woman from Stockholm, Marina, visits her older sister, Stella. Stella, a horticulturist, lives in the countryside with Gabriel, a charismatic older man who is a writer. Marina finds herself attracted to Gabriel, but also seems to sense something dark and surreal about her sister's seemingly idyllic life. The novel itself is much more complex than the simple story would indicate.

The tone of Drowned is ominous and threatening right from the start. Even though the first part of the novel is set in the summer and there is lots of talk about the heat, the garden, the flowers, I still felt a shiver up my spine. There are so many undercurrents of conflicting emotions and things left unsaid that the suspense was building as I anticipated that something was dreadfully wrong and questioned what was really happening. There are small clues carefully introduced as the novel progresses that help make the conclusion very satisfying for me.

Due to be released on May 22, 2012, I felt that this translation of Drowned done by Marlaine Delargy (who also translated The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, another novel I enjoyed), was very well written. It is a short novel that leaves a big impact. Although some readers may find the extensive descriptions exhausting to read, I Highly Recommended it. http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/
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Goed boek dat de karakters spannend kan weergeven. Realistisch. Jammer van het open eind. ( )