Something's Better Than Nothing, Or So That I Thought

On Therese Bohman's "Andromeda" (translated by Marlaine Delargy)

Publishing is the land of used-to-bes – used to be better books, used to throw better parties, used to make (and spend) more money, and the work used to feel like it meant something in the wider culture. Sure, the lowest-level workers were always underpaid, nepotism reigned across the board, don’t even get me started on women and minorities, but the end product – good (and hopefully bestselling) literature to edify the nation – was supposed to make up for all that. Even if the major publishing houses were more commercial – Simon and Schuster first made their money by selling crossword books – they at least pretended to care about shaping the culture in a positive way. (Some editors even believed it!) Nowadays, due to some combination of late capitalism and private equity firms, all that idealism has gone out the window; the publishing playbook is to flood the zone with crap, get some genreslop to hit on Tiktok, pay out the ear for celebrity memoirs, devalue the concept of literature itself with boring awards-bait. All that stuff pays for a couple of good books to come out every year, championed by some never-to-be-promoted editor and four indie bookstore buyers across the country. Only the small presses, where the only financial imperative is a bit more slanted towards ‘just keep the lights on,’ can unglamorously keep publishing good books, and that involves everyone involved accepting unglamorous circumstances. But that’s the price you pay – less money, better books, hopefully some cultural capital to make up for it. It rarely does, but it’s nice to think so for a while.

The belief that you can change something by publishing good books is not so dissimilar from believing in a soulmate: you have to think you can access something ineffable that goes against all logic and evidence to the contrary.¹ These twinned beliefs are at the center of the Swedish author Therese Bohman’s 2022 novel Andromeda, put out this year by Other Press (one of those good small imprints, though bankrolled by all of Penguin Random House’s more commercial pursuits) in Marlaine Delargy’s translation. Andromeda follows Sofie, a young woman just beginning her career in publishing at the venerable Rydéns publishing house, a heavy hitter in the Swedish literary scene. (I presume Swedish publishing is like American publishing, but a little less garish, but what do I know.) Though just an intern, Sofie catches the eye of Gunnar, the publishing director of Rydéns, who’s practically a walking institution himself: he plucks writers out of obscurity in his “Andromeda” imprint, and has discovered multiple Nobel winners. He’s a dying breed, a publisher who cares about literary quality; something about Sofie’s taste and honesty about potential manuscripts makes him want to take her under his wing. Because Gunnar is old-school, this mentorship involves a series of biweekly boozy lunches – if the martini is the classic American shirking-work drink, a bottle of Chablis seems to be the Swedish hooky vice of choice – that teeter on the edge of ‘work-appropriate.’