Willful Disregard
by Lena Andersson
translated by Sarah Death
First Posted May 2016
After finishing The Divorce, I looked back at a bunch of books that I vaguely remember as being similar. It takes a really long time to move all my old reviews over, but, as that is the point of this website, whenever I get an inkling to do it, I just go for it. It tends to be a cascading chain, however, because I often internally link to other things I’ve posted.
I do appreciate that I’ve stopped opening and closing reviews with block quotes. Reading disembodied text right when you begin is really disorienting—was I going for an epigraph vibe? I think in this review I was attempting to mimic the vague dreaminess of the book, and I think I succeeded only in capturing the “vague” aspect. It feels a little incomprehensible eight years later, which is sad for a book I clearly enjoyed quite a bit. As I added to the contemporary edit, if I had read House of Mirth before this, I might have noticed some parallels.
“I think the basic problem is that we interpret others’ actions in behaviorist terms, objectively and from the outside. We interpret our own in phenomenological terms, from within our own consciousness. That’s the human dilemma. And that’s why we all have such extensive understanding of our own actions and so little of others’.”
He refilled her glass and then his own, and said:
“Isn’t it more the opposite: people are terribly self-critical, too quick to understand others while condemning themselves?”
“You think so? It’s not something I’ve noticed, I must say.”
“Oh?”
“Or at least, only as a flattering veneer, compensation for the aggression we feel toward other people…”
I can’t get over this book. It is singular and will not be recreated. The narrative style is dry, so deadpan that a lively character would challenge the tone so much as to be absurd. But the narrator is logical to a fault. She is the book; she gives it structure. Not only do we get to see what Ester thinks is happening in contrast to a what actually happens, we get to see why. And if Ester wasn’t overly analytical—nearly robotic in her practicality—then being able to uncover her motives and watch her wouldn’t work [note from 2024—it still works]. We are allowed to, in Ester’s words, interpret her actions in “phenomenological terms” even as we see her attempt to explain her own actions in behaviorist ones, “objectively and from the outside.” But even with her removed, dissociated, and distant logic, she still gets things wrong. Very wrong. Constantly.
Things clearly don’t work out for her, but she already tries: that, more than the love affair, is the story:
One mistake perplexed her. She could not have avoided it because it arose from a judgment and an evaluation she could not consider wrong. The fact that anger was forbidden in love was something unknown to her. She could not conceive that a single outburst of anger, the one she had sent as a text message on the Saturday evening after the film, on finding his premises in darkness, was sufficient to ruin everything. On the contrary, she thought anger was permitted precisely when you were close to each other.
And perhaps she was right that this was a universally accepted notion, she thought. And therefore wrong in her perception of their closeness.
Perhaps the translation gives it that dreamy state—did the original Swedish lack the brutish nuance of the English?—though it did win a top literary award, so if anything it skews the other way. Reading the epigraph—the Swedish Penal Code Chapter 8, Section 8—brought me back to my years of law school. And much like those days, I did not understand the significance of much of what I saw until much later. In some ways, I still don’t. Did Hugo take her affection, and a year of her life, though appropriation from his misleading actions? Yet those actions weren’t actually misleading to most people, just to her—she was willing accomplice, even the casus belli to her own disaster. Her willful disregard of his socialized niceties. Yes, I did go back and use the title, because it is so fitting. That is the whole book, willful disregard. And willful is the perfect word because it is understated—to anyone else it would have been soulful, or full-soul, all-of-her destruction. Grandiose.
His actions were shit but not outside of the ordinary—a short fling and move on. He, in the long run, probably had no idea what was happening in her life, her mind, her intentions. Her love was misplaced and perhaps the disregard was his, a purposeful ignorance of what his actions—taken to soothe his own conscious, his own ego—cost her in time, happiness. As he passively waits for her to just fade from his life:
He put things off and dreamt of the state in which everything would be different. She did not, and she seldom put things off. Paradise was a logical nullity because life was friction and friction could only disappear at death. Life was composed merely of an endless series of small nows in which one lacked the energy to do what one wanted to do. There was no later, because later, too, would prove to be a now that was also deficient in energy.
That passivity is the antithesis of Ester, anathema to her, and Ester gets the title; Hugo deserves nothing, he is the acted on, not the acted, so no. No. The title is hers: her choosing hope at the cost of happiness, over and over again. Seeing the why, over and over again. Seeing Ester see, seeing Ester not be able to stop. Never being able to stop her from seeing, never being able to stop ourselves from understanding. We become Ester, in a way that readers don’t usually get to—from inside. Even as she tries to watch herself from the outside, we see, over and over, her from that perspective, the angle she wants, strives for, nearly reaches. In that commingling our consciousnesses meet. That is the wonder of Willful Disregard; she and we collide through the substrate of the omniscient narrator as the words on the page match the unspoken thoughts in our heads.