Medical advancements are a wonderful thing, but what happens if the doctor sees that step forward as personal gratification rather than something for the societal better?
It’s a premise that Hanna Nordenhök’s beautifully gothic Caesaria examines. Set in 19th Century Sweden, Doctor Eldh performs his first c-section at the dawn of modern gynaecology. While the unfortunate mother doesn’t survive the child does, named Caesaria after the procedure that gave birth to her, and the infant is whisked away to the remote Swedish countryside by the Doctor.
What though is the child’s status, an adoptive child, a pet or some form of medical trophy to be raised for the advancement of the clinician’s career?
Through the child’s first-person narrative, Nordenhök examines these themes alongside a tale of burgeoning womanhood and self-discovery.
Nordenhök’s prose is poetic, imbibed with a childlike innocence in keeping with a central character kept sheltered from the world. This is an innocence though that is slowly lost. As the child becomes a woman her feelings change, no longer delivered the new toys or clothes from her wish list the girl inches into a more adult world.
It’s a world of increasing darkness and violence, the rural idyll of the Swedish estate shattered by the arrival of a psychiatric patient who upends the household’s world.
Nordenhök’s writing, translated here by Saskia Vogel, is a series of short, almost poetic, passages that dart back and forth across time. It’s an evocative style, though at times verges on repetition.
There’s an underlying sense of yearning, be that for the increasingly intermittent visits by the Doctor, the girl’s very own ‘creator’ or a wider yearning to gain a sense of belonging and understanding of where she comes from and a tangible need for family, beyond the tentative link she has with her deceased mother, of who’s pelvic bone the doctor keeps in his study.
As the doctor eventually grows tired of his ‘creation’ the girl must forge her own path in life and it’s here that Caesaria moves from the mythical into something more powerful, an examination of the lasting impact of neglect and betrayal of the doctor/patient relationship delivers.
A gothic period piece, while set in 19th Century Sweden, Caesaria is also a reflective work of our own time, the sense of abandonment, loneliness and the urge to belong as prevalent now as it was when modern medicine was only just beginning to take hold.
Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök, translated by Saskia Vohel is published by Heloise.
