Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök, translated by Saskia Vogel

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.

Praise for Caesaria

“A glimpse into the life of a woman who’s been reduced to a curiosity. A quietly raw, poetic study of imprisonment, both imposed and internalized, and the shifting boundaries between care and neglect, human kindness and human cruelty.” —Marta Balcewicz, author of Big Shadow

“A novel as beautiful as it is unsettling. Hanna Nordenhök’s prose combines with singular mastery the density of poetry with the feverish atmosphere of a gothic tale.” —Fernanda Melchor, author of Paradais and Hurricane Season

“Nordenhök’s locked-up mansion is a disciplinary system of supervision and punishment, a claustrophobic spectacle where death and disaster are indisputable components in the condition of being a girl. Caesaria is simply wonderful!” —Johanne Lykke Holm, author of Strega

Press Coverage

“A breathlessly creepy and deeply affecting portrait of a girl’s life so confined and so deprived of impressions that it’s verging on madness.”—Göteborgs-Posten

“A dark, violent, and at times breathtakingly beautiful tale, at the same time as it works as a brutal account on gender and power.” —Opulens

Five New & Noteworthy Books in Translation —All Lit Up

“There’s a moment a little less than halfway through Hanna Nordenhök’s Caesaria in which, in the span of a single paragraph, the narrator describes both cattle rutting and an accidental (human) disembowelment. It’s one of several points where this novel suggests a bleakness and a violence just below the surface of things; combine that with plenty of atmosphere and scientific mystery for a Gothic concoction that stays with you.” —Tobias Caroll, Words Without Borders

Read an Excerpt From Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök (translated by Saskia Vogel) —Open Book