Centralen
by
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There was silence. They beheld one another like animals without the complete ability to judge if they have met their enemy.
-You must have slept better here than in the bear’s cave, the man rejoined the conversation. The girl stiffened. Were all in the forest aware of her doings? She replied with a brief nod.
-Do not be angry, answered the young man with a smile that she found more than bewildering. You have always known that I am, just as much as I know that ”you are.”
She was not able to remember that she had met the man before and yet she felt a sense of calm in his presence. She decided to find out a little more and got up from the floor and the skins. The man persisted in puffing on his pipe with the self-assurance many would perceive as pure arrogance. But there was something more.
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About the Book
The reader is brought on a timeless journey together with a girl without a name - through the barren landscape of Siberia on a train, destination unknown.
Exposed to situations that urge her to gradually come out of her existence as an automaton, the girl is forced to make some critical decisions even if they appear frightening and at times alien.
An enigmatic fiddler at the train station, a criminal Icelandic entrepreneur and a young Philosopher in the woods – together with what turns out to be a rather mysterious meeting on the Siberian tundra, are only meetings along the girl’s way to exploring herself. A series of events leads her back to the Central station where she once began her journey. As she returns she is ready to reunite with her deepest fears.
In this intriguing debut, the author energetically builds a bridge between dream and reality, individual and universal perception, in a beautifully naked and rare language which combines expressive dialogue with poetry that remind us of Japanese literature and Nordic playwrights.
About the Author
Linda Eketoft (b. April 4, 1977, Sweden) started to write fiction during Law School at University of Lund in Sweden, after living in Paris where she studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne; creating poetry in her spare time. She arrived in London to complete her Masters in Law, before starting working in city. It was not till after having lived in Sydney for a year and returning to London she decided to publish her first book, ‘Centralen’. Her extensive travels in Europe, South America and Antarctica in combination with mountaineering in the Himalayas and Karakoram and her infallible passion for the arts - have laid the foundation for experiences she uses in her writing.
Eketoft is fast creating a reputation for being hard-to-place in terms of literary style. Her debut is stylistically very unique from other contemporary writers’, and has initially been branded surrealist, magic-realist, and gothic to mention a few. The shared view among readers in terms of theme however is that Eketoft seems to deal with the borderland between individual perception and universal reality that emerge from intriguing encounters and situations.