THE BIRD IN ME FLIES

Swedish artist Berta Hansson grows up on a farm and finds it stifling in this fictionalized account.

In 1920s Sweden, a family farm requires a lot of work. Everyone pitches in except Mama, in bed with tuberculosis. Berta covers Mama’s sickroom wall with drawings and makes birds of clay for her; it is achingly painful that she and Mama can’t hug for fear of contagion. Berta wants to be a bird herself, to “fly off. / Away from our village— / to something else. / To a place where I could be myself”—to stop doing farmwork and housework, and to make art all the time. Even as a job—and even though she’s a girl. Viewing a reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Berta relates to Eve, who’s “waiting for her turn to come / into existence. To be seen. To come alive.” Lundberg’s full-color, page-filling paintings make this verse novel a picture book. They are damp and moody, the colors dark and tertiary, the shapes full of shadows and stark angles. Some faces are jarringly rouged, with red noses, like Hansson’s real-life work. Cold and hot temperatures emanate from the pages. Beauty pours from close-ups of Berta’s hands, in pink-peach-gray watercolor shadings and exquisite lines. Papa insists Berta become a housewife, but at roughly age 17, this budding artist stages a coup by burning a pot of soup—and gets herself sent off to art school. An afterword by Swedish journalist Alexandra Sundqvist adds biographical details; unfortunately, the backmatter includes only two Hansson reproductions.

(This book releases first as a digital edition, with print release currently scheduled for Aug. 4, 2020.)

Melancholy and moving.