Caesaria

Overview

From Hanna Nordenhök comes a gothic tale set at the dawn of modern gynecology, when the female body appears as a cryptic landscape and male hubris reigns.

On a remote country estate in nineteenth-century Sweden, a renowned obstetrician keeps a young girl named Caesaria as a trophy: she was the first baby he delivered by caesarean section. She lives a dollhouse existence, characterized by supervision and punishment, assault and incarceration. Told in lush, elegant, and dreamlike prose, Caesaria narrates her confinement in the doctor's mansion and encounters with its mysterious inhabitants and visitors.

Radiating a low-level dread and sense of unease, Caesaria probes gender warfare and class oppression. What is reality to those who have grown up trapped in their own bodies, without connection to the outside world? Nordenhök shares an astonishing answer, almost mythological in scope, through the tale of one eponymous girl.

Reviews

Author Biography

HANNA NORDENHÖK has been awarded several major literary honours for her work. Her novel Caesaria (2020) scooped Swedish Radio’s Literary Prize and was also shortlisted for Tidningen Vi’s Literature Prize. Nordenhök also works as a translator from the Spanish and has been praised for her translations of Fernanda Melchor, Andrea Abreu, and Gloria Gervitz. She lives in Stockholm.

SASKIA VOGEL is the author of the novel Permission and a translator of more than 20 Swedish-language books. Her writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. Her translations have won the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction (Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears), have been shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize (Jessica Schiefauer’s Girls Lost), and supported by grants from the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Authors’ Fund, and English PEN. She was Princeton’s Translator in Residence in fall 2022 and lives in Berlin.