The Corpses We Planted

With fluid prose and dramatic twists, Lina Wolff elicits laughter from the depths of despair. The Corpses We Planted is a furiously entertaining and ingenious novel.

The August Prize, motivational statement

A psychoanalyst in Uppsala advised me to return to the notes from the first session with a patient after every completed psychotherapy. I would then find that the secret to this person’s story was visible already at this point. This is what I did with Lina Wolff’s new novel. When I returned to the prologue, it was as if everything was clear – and then I read the book again. It is fantastic. The Corpses We Planted is a story that one doesn’t come across very often. It is tender and cruel, light and dark, burlesque and agonizing. Not like dualism, but like a web that allows the reader to see the world as it really is. /… / Lina Wolff’s story is unpredictable and magically enchanting. Like literary music. With her prose and storytelling, Wolff masters every key and is not afraid of discord. It has been a long time since I read something so eloquent, playful, and heart-wrenching. An abnormal world that belongs to everyone; a darkness that is unable to cut off lightness, a lotus flower that grows straight out of the dirt and the soil, where the planted corpses are resting.

Upsala Nya Tidning

There are scenes in Lina Wolff’s new novel that I will never forget. They are not pleasant – detailed descriptions of murder, torture, and human cruelty. But don’t be discouraged. The Corpses We Planted is a fabulous novel, masterfully narrated, and the dark, no – pitch black – strokes are in contrast with tenderness, yearning, and love. And humour. […] A novel that is captivating, astounding, and frightening.

Svenska Dagbladet

I’m personally delighted at how Wolff excels at building such movement in her prose. It moves so quickly, so effortlessly! How does she do it? Is it a matter of short sentences intermixed with longer sentences? How witty phrases are inserted, breaking up the narrative? Or can the secret be found on a more abstract level – in the humour, the ferocity, her understanding of the mystery of existence, the freedom with which she relates to both the shallowness and depth of humankind? It is, like with all great writers, difficult to say.

Dagens Nyheter

Whereas many Swedish contemporary writers possess an imagination that is prompted by images and tableaux – a literature marked by the dominance of moving images – Wolff’s well-composed novels simulate a sort of improvisation. The ferocious, ingenious prose dances across the pages and adds a sensation that the story is being created in the present, as if it were a necessary effect of the style and the rhythm […] She mixes existentialism, loneliness, love, yearning, genuine humanity – and disguises the serious message underneath playful exaggerations. Men murder and rape. Women happily murder in return […] The Corpses We Planted is real literature. Meaning that it is a text where the reader is allowed to experience forbidden thoughts, where genuinely ethical questions are allowed to remain vivid. It is as dark as black soup yet idyllic. Beautiful and perverted.

Sydsvenskan

What leaves the strongest impression is Hörby as a respectable literary location – the village where Swedish law ceases to exist and anything can happen. In addition, the local daughter, Victoria Benedictsson, hovers above the hamlet like a restless spirit. She – just like Wolff – knew everything about taking storytelling, life and death into her own hands.

Aftonbladet

I can’t think of many authors who can surprise me as much as Lina Wolff does. On the one hand, her novels always take unexpected turns; on the other, none of her novels are alike. The Corpses We Planted is, as always when Lina Wolff is involved, a peculiar novel […] It is the recurring binary contradictions between high and low, between cruelty and love, the corporeal and the spiritual, that appear to be much of the driving force in Wolff’s authorship. Desire and violence are both parts of the same humanity, and the motives that enable the novel’s machinery. It is a dark image of humanity, an image that is consistent throughout Lina Wolff’s authorship – life as a danse macabre between the beautiful and the grotesque.

Göteborgs-Posten

The Corpses We Planted is an utterly magnificent book. It brings to mind writers like Agota Kristof and Olga Tokarczuk; yes, it truly is a novel of that caliber. Lina Wolff unfolds a distinctive kind of grotesque social realism, filled with both horror and tenderness, stirring up grand themes with irreverent brilliance. And one can’t help but completely fall in love with the book’s narrator—Jolly is simply unforgettable.

Julie Paludan-Müller, Editorial Director, Gads forlag (DK)