If Vogel’s speech has an incantatory effect, the essence, even fragrance, of an enchantress, that’s because this is exactly what Strega entails. Like a winding spell or cautionary chant, Strega’s narrative enthrals and ensnares its readers as much as it does its characters. Told retrospectively by Rafaela (Rafa), Strega simultaneously charts and captures that ripe moment between girlhood and womanhood, when teens magically transmute into young adults and inherit the dangers and thrills that define this age. Rafa recalls an autumn spent transferred from the parental home to the workplace—a once lavish but now mouldering hotel incongruously marooned in an eerie mountainous region; she recalls the repetitive labour she and eight other girls, all seasonal workers like herself, were made to do in this haunting place; she recalls the strange “artificial” looking town, the watchful nuns who lived in a convent surrounded by dense forest close to the hotel; the herbs, plants, trees, gardens, alpine air and subtle seasonal vicissitudes witnessed from her dormitory window. Above all, she recalls her fellow maids, with whom she shared these precious few months, flushed with youth and ever susceptible to the strange permutations of the world around them. Together, they become one: not so much a coven, sisterhood or chorus—though they have an affinity with each of these female-centred collectives—as “one body”, one long extension of the other, one dreaming, sometimes sleepless, “brain”, processing and enduring the extreme highs and lows of their time in the town of Strega and the Olympic hotel.
Rafa’s recollections of these maiden days and nights, much like Vogel’s recollection of translating them, is an invitation to recall other texts and films. That’s not to say Strega isn’t unique—Lykke Holm’s novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Though Strega draws a pentacle around itself—an entrancing, mythical field of contending forces and fluctuating feelings—its points gesture towards other cultural, artistic and generic elements. In its lingering and compulsive descriptions of the girls, we recall Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993) via Sofia Coppola’s dreamy female gaze. In the mischief and play that Lykke Holm’s young women enjoy in the empty rooms of the hotel, we recall Anne Serre’s The Governesses (1992), translated by Mark Hutchinson (2018), in which three restless women romp around their employer’s villa, causing havoc and mayhem. Ever aware of the male gaze, Serre’s governesses resemble Lykke Holm’s maidens in their daring refusal to succumb to its violent vision. In its timelessness, and its sibylline and Sapphic knowingness, Strega also recalls Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), in which the strange disappearance of several young women sets off a chain of events that expose and erode the gendered strictures and structures of their world. In turn gothic novel, sensation saga, fantastical Bildungsroman and Angela Carter-esque fiction of subversion, Strega generically and textually recalls all this, only to return to its unparalleled self again.
What these textual and generic recollections have in common with Lykke Holm’s novel is their collective fascination with the figure of the girl. All these works obsess and fantasize over the dazzling and disturbing potentiality of girlhood. Via my laptop screen, Vogel agrees: “There is such a wonderful mythos around young girls and how they inhabit the world. When we look at Strega, maidenhood—and what’s at stake for these maids—is a huge part of the power and resonance of the book.” And how they inhabit the world, embodying and exuding this powerful potentiality, is exactly the mythos Lykke Holm wants us to explore—and explode. Unlike the heroines of the works by Serre, Eugenides, Coppola, Lindsay and even Carter, there is no male narrator, main character or focalized narrative perspective. Rather, the male gaze or an overarching patriarchal vision is implied in the edifice of the hotel and its hoteliers; in their mothers’ acceptance of adhering to gendered roles; in the girls’ gradual realization that their bodies are not their own. How they inhabit the world of Strega becomes, therefore, how they inhabit this fleeting status of girlhood in all its beauty, complexity and fortuity; how they make sense of their momentary maidenhood-soon-to-be-womanhood for themselves; and how they navigate and negotiate the encroaching conditions and resulting inhibitions of a violently misogynistic world. Running through the uninhabited rooms of the hotel, smoking on its window ledges and around its fountains, playing games in its corridors, communing with each other whilst washing linen in its laundry, picking berries in its garden, making jam in its kitchen—all such actions and activities are how they inhabit their maidenhood, marking this evanescent moment with their characteristic curiosity and longing for life. Mirrored in and journeying out from these spaces, these actions show how they move from one psychological and ontological state to another, slowly losing girlish traits as they transition and transform into knowing young women.
It should not be ignored that the novel is, as its blurb states, a “monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge”—rather than that of women. There is a prescience, a self-possessed sensitivity to these vulnerable teens that the older women around them lack—or choose to forsake. Rafa may be speaking from the supposedly disciplined and distant position of woman- and motherhood; she may be speaking from the privileged process of retrospection; but it is the alert and lively vision of youth, with all its acute fears and insecurities, newly awoken hopes and desires, that she channels in her speech. Throughout the course of the text, she reclaims and unravels a pure knowledge that many of us shroud and bury deep within ourselves. Pressing her mouth to mirrored surfaces, glass panes, paper postcards and the necks of other women, the young Rafa longs to taste the world, to test its limits and push open its dimensions; to try its response to her own ocular and material self. Conscious that in all these condensations, expressions and compressions of selfhood the world is and is not as it seems, Rafa does not wait for her breath, reflection, or any impression to come back to her. With the heat and humidity rising, she pushes on, aware that the trace of her being, much like the traces and effects of all maidens, will all too easily fade, evaporate or be snuffed out. Knowledge of this kind, where new sensations triggered by the physicality of the world reverberate and intersect with your own, appears as a kind of magic, a short-term knowing that reveals long-term lessons one never forgets.
Indeed, the body is the site of one unforgettable lesson echoing across Rafa’s story. Remarking in the opening paragraph that she “had yet to understand . . . the crime scene was not the bed but the body, that the crime had already taken place,” young Rafa and old reunite. Girlhood and womanhood connect, their temporalities coalesce, their differences collapse in the onset of the knowledge that violence to women—indeed, any female-presenting individual—is a constant, lurking, looming threat. To be in the body of a woman is already to exist in a “crime scene”; it is already to have encountered patriarchal violence and internalized the shame and blame of it. This unfortunate, unforgettable truth—an unfortunate, unforgettable type of knowledge that becomes embodied and eventually results in an actual, yet bodiless, crime when one of the girls goes missing—returns to Rafa again and again in darker and more opulent forms of cultural violence. It returns in a play where a woman’s body is sadistically assaulted and brutally murdered in front of an audience, including all nine girls; in a gothic folktale read by the girls in the hotel library; in a macabre dance where a doll comes to life, substituting for one of the living girls. That this shrouded knowledge eventually enshrouds the girls and leads to the death of one of them is Lykke Holm’s way of highlighting how culturally encoded and ubiquitous this violence is; how all-consuming and even pervasively applauded it is; and how the taint and pain of such violence is carried in the body long before the fatal blow.
When editing her translation of Strega during lockdown, Vogel was struck by this unforgettable truth and its parallels with contemporary life. “It was the time when Sarah Everard was walking home and then abducted and brutally murdered by a policeman. She was really present in my mind through the rereading and editing of the novel,” she remembers. “Sometimes the wider politics of life take a backseat to finishing the project that’s on your desk.” But with this story and the “ever present question of violence” in Strega, Vogel, like many in the UK, was compelled to connect with the case of Everard, especially as it rose to public attention while Vogel was working on the translation. The stark reality that this happens to women everywhere could no longer be suppressed or ignored. Suspended in lockdown, many were forced to connect with this woman and reckon with the socio-political institutions that had allowed her death to happen. In Strega, when the maid Cassie goes missing, the girls are not much compelled to reckon with this loss, they are the only ones who truly, genuinely do so. The hoteliers (perhaps former maids themselves turned bosses), do not want to deal with it. Soldiers demonstratively trek around the surrounding woodland, playing the part of searchers, but have already accepted the loss—the deliberate sacrifice?—of Cassie. Time becomes suspended, as it did for us in lockdown, despite the daily labour the girls are forced to resume. But unlike the lifting of lockdown precautions, where all the frequent atrocities facing women again became swallowed up in the capitalistic push and pull of the world, when the girls in the hotel go back to work, they still create space to mourn. Moving as one, the maids continue to search, hope, hurt, cry and grieve together. Mourning as one becomes both a communal act and an individual release and realization: it is a secular and occult rite; a testimony, not just to one of their own, but to all young maids, the remembrance of whom becomes shrouded all too soon.
Lykke Holm does not just give the girls space to grieve and come to terms with this violent loss; she gives it to us too. “Johanne makes lists of young women that have died, including where and how,” Vogel notes when we discuss this communal and textual space of grief. Lists of remembrance: another kind of act of recollection and recall, of which society has long disposed. These lists or small personal commemorations may not literally be threaded into the prose of the novel, but they exist in its incantatory style, in its anaphoric motions and short Swedish syntax. These names are present behind the rituals maintained by the girls when searching and grieving for Cassie. These forgotten women become present in their movements and in the emotion Lykke Holm’s novel opens up and contains for us, giving us space and words in and through which to recall and recount our own losses, our own long-lost, unloved maids, our own collective loss of maiden innocence. “The way we’re able to follow these girls when they’re searching for her and looking at her trinkets which have been left behind is a really beautiful way of representing loss, but is also evident of how things are often swept away, left incomplete, unknown; we’re never going to know the full story of Sarah Everard, just like the girls will never fully know what has happened to Cassie—they can only imagine it,” reflects Vogel.
Left without a body to mourn, Rafa and her fellow maids lay Cassie to rest by recuperating and sharing her belongings. This lack of a body—or substituting it with found objects—is not an act of sacrilege, but a performance, a remedial rite that is sacrosanct. It is an act of coming together, an act of consolation, of social consolidation, in the face of an inexpressible loss. And it also signifies the eventual break-up and dispersal of the maids, as they journey on, into womanhood, towards the next stage of their lives, with only crumbs and material remnants of that time to account for it. Yet objects have additional significance in Strega, a talismanic quality and totemic truth. It is through Cassie’s things—her pocket mirror, hair clip, fruit knife, christening spoon and dress; all the “valuable and shimmering objects” she had once “owned”—that the girls reconstruct a sense of her and honour the girl, the person, that once was. It is also through the same trinkets that they try to resist the violence done to her. Through such tokens, the girls are able to cultivate or approximate a witch-like form of resistance. There is a supernatural, as well as secular, force woven around these belongings when included in the many rituals performed before and after the disappearance of Cassie. Drawing a circle, laying down tarot cards, candles, sage and coal, clasping magical stones and jewellery, the girls reach for what will either anchor them during this unsettling period or transport them forwards, into alternate times, visions, premonitions; into alternate methods of grasping and deconstructing and controlling a very unstable, very uncontrollable, very unbearable reality around them. Objects from home; objects to carry them away from it. Objects representing what they once were and what they, too, could become. Objects that governed and measured and contained their lives, Cassie’s life, and could now, with the right words, the right kind of ceremony, return her to them.
It is these objects and the gestures, movements, rites and realms conjured by and around them that render Strega itself the “witch” it translates to in Italian. When discussing who or what the witches or witch-like forces are—the girls, the nuns, the three Macbeth-style sisters-turned-hoteliers, the mystical natural realm surrounding them all?—with Vogel, she confirms my feeling that it manifests in all of the various characters and environments described. She does, however, assert that “it comes out especially in the girls and their rituals—the rituals you reach out for in order to make sense of the world around you.” Studying what the girls’ hands do throughout the day, the reader begins to rehearse and retrace their gestures and footsteps, participating in the hypnotic routines Rafa retrospectively relives. It is these rituals the girls reach out for—some enforced by the hoteliers, others personalized acts and actions of rebellion, the small though spiritually strident patterns stating and asserting the self—that resemble the figure of the witch; that make us feel like something witchy and propulsively supernatural is afoot. Spooky and shuddering sights, signs and sounds all come spilling to the fore, but none so harrowing as the violently felt loss of Cassie. The girls may not utter the name of the witch—there are no brooms, cauldrons, familiars, toads or unsightly hats—but the power of accursed and cursing women comes out in these repetitive motions and collective moments; it resurfaces in the young women’s instinct to hit back.
There is also a kind of witchcraft inherent to Vogel’s practice of translation. Talking to fellow writer and translator Jen Calleja in Granta, Vogel describes how “translation felt like channelling, in the séance sense”. When talking over Zoom, I comment on how apt this description is for Strega and ask if this simile still “felt” true to her experience of translating Lykke Holm’s novel. “There’s almost nothing that I love more than to really inhabit a text,” Vogel replies. “Sitting with someone’s words and meeting a text every day is exciting, because they’re not words I get to change, and I guess that’s where the channelling comes,” she confirms. But also like the girls, Vogel needs her own talismanic “things”—a kind of mood board of objects, descriptions and sensations—with which to capture, channel and convey the essence and sensibility of the novel. Polyester was one of the first materials that came to mind when discussing the kind of fabric Strega resembled with Lykke Holm. “Polyester is silky and can be beautiful, but as soon as the weather turns humid—which it does at certain times in the novel—it’s choking your skin,” Vogel observes. “For the girls, it’s also an economic question, because they engage in beauty and treasures in certain ways within their cultural and socioeconomic framework—particularly as workers in the hotel—and we only really know the girls through these treasures.” Vogel’s translation is, therefore, not only inspired and imbued with the feelings and qualities such materials suggest, but is embedded with their charged energy, that static shock polyester tends to give off when you least expect. Of course, it is easy to compare translation to magic and conjuring, to the transference of energies and forms; it’s a special kind of metamorphosis that occurs when transforming one word, phrase, clause or sentence into another. Vogel’s channelling of clipped Swedish sentences, filmic in essence and stance, into English, is done with an efficacy that almost unnerves. Here, that (word) magic takes us full circle, back to Lykke Holm’s own process of writing and translation; back to her own belief in the anarchic figure and fantasy of the witch.
For Lykke Holm, writing is “submission”. She explains this at her UK book launch before a coven-like crowd of listeners, complete with hand gestures that replicate the movement of a force flowing through her and onto the page. It is a surrender to another power, one that completely takes over and this, too, speaks something of the occult. Like the girls in her work and the Vogel’s translation practice, she is also at the mercy, at the command of other powers, other goings on in the dark—even if these are the strange and wonderful goings-on of her own imagination. Together then, Vogel and Lykke Holm perform a kind of literary rite with Strega and its ongoing linguistic variations; they form a sort of translator-writer to writer-translator kinship, having both read and translated each other’s works (Lykke Holm translated the Swedish version of Vogel’s novel, Permission, in 2019). Working together, they, like Rafa and her fellow maids, act out a special ritual that at once reclaims and renews women’s experiences and stories, and the possible types of actions and languages available to them with which to narrate and recollect both.
Witchy recollections and references then occur when thinking through these affinities, the aforementioned passages and the multiple rites that make up Strega. In its dance sequences, its fascination with mirrors and reflections, its delight in semblance and deception, and its depiction of young women being manipulated and physically manoeuvred by seemingly innocuous but highly dangerous older ones, Strega recalls Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Luca Guadagnino’s gory remake (2018). And in its enumeration of feminine things, the performativity and potency surrounding said objects, the magical properties of natural and bodily matter, and the seductive conjuration of it all in the form of a young woman who experiences sexual violence, Strega recalls Anna Biller’s technicolour movie The Love Witch (2017). But, unlike these films, the novel neither confirms nor denies the existence of actual witches; instead, it gathers witch-like strength from residing in the remote places of the earth, in speaking up for those unable to speak for themselves, in summoning powers that the hardened, capitalistic world of man has long denied, and in casting spells and curses in the direction of those who ignore the maids at the centre of it all. Taking her cue from Silvia Federici’s theorization of the witch as a figure who is sacrificed or scapegoated to protect the hegemonic powers that be, Lykke Holm makes her book the most witchy force and knowledge available to us. Centring real power in the midst of nine very young women—like the nine muses, the nine daughters of Pierus, the nine gifts of the spirit, the nine sorceresses, the nine mothers—Lykke Holm lifts up the powerless, triumphs in their voice, and celebrates the lives, however short, of the most vulnerable and derided in society.
Strega comes at you like a mantra, a hymnal, a song from the past. A whisper from your own reflection, a gust of wind, a snapped branch. Strega comes like long lost voices, shadows dancing, tinkling bells; like jet black hair, full red lips, starched linen and a drunken kiss. It is the dimly lit passage through which we all must tread and the red-painted hall within which we must dance. It is the taste of cherries and the stain of blood. It is a place, a person, a force, a sign. It is a rare transmutation translated nine times.
