And the Walls Became the World All Around

Johanna Ekström's prose towards the end is clear as glass. The last notebooks are amongst the best things she has ever written. Sublime, devastating * Dagens Nyheter * What really stays with me is the conjuring of an extraordinary friendship... Greater tenderness is hard to imagine * Göteborgs-Posten * What Johanna Ekström does most of all in these texts is to excavate deeper... inwards, backwards, sideways and forwards * Svenska Dagbladet * Dreambook, poet's journal, diary of a love lost and an illness that is in part perceptual, this is a book like no other I have read. Intertwined in its very making, there is also a story of friendship and grief. Hypnotic and haunting, the whole is bathed in a northern light that had me reaching for a Bergman classic -- Lisa Appignanesi An intuitive, beautiful distillation of feeling. Rausing enters the haunted space of these notebooks with open arms, and in doing so, reveals Ekström's unique poetic and courage with deep understanding. The investigation extends bravely into the patterning of the subconscious, documenting human desire in all of its brutality and wonder. How do we love or live when we know that time is finite? A penetrating, variegated book, that puts friendship rightfully at its centre, a book that vibrates with loss, but also the wild, vital force of Ekström's creative vision -- Nikita Lalwani An astonishing meditation on the dancing boundary line between the self and the world, Johanna Ekström's notebooks record the last two years of her life with poetic wisdom, humor and sheer vitality. Sigrid Rausing's eloquent translation, together with her passionate, forensic drive to discern Ekström's precise meaning and revivify their conversations from the far side of the grave, make this unique work also a living portrait of friendship. Indeed, the book itself feels hauntingly alive-an indelible reading experience -- George Prochnik A deeply compelling meditation on dreams and the unconscious, a testament to the power of friendship and love and language, an intimate record of both loss and joy. Shadowed by illness, pain and mortality, And the Walls Became the World All Around nevertheless builds to a profoundly moving and hopeful end -- Tom Lee