Wonderland Hanna Nordenhök Review

Wonderland Hanna Nordenhök BookBlast Review

Wonderland is the second novel by multi-award-winning Swedish writer and translator, Hanna Nordenhök, translated into English by Saskia Vogel. Her first, Caesaria, was published in 2024. Both novels are published in English by Héloïse Press. Vogel is something of a superstar translator, having brought more than two dozen Swedish books into English, and she is also a writer and the co-creator of Erotic Review.

Nordenhök, by contrast, lacks even an English-language Wikipedia page (any Wikipedia editors reading are encouraged to create one), and her three other novels remain untranslated and out of reach to non-Swedish-speaking Anglophones. We can catch a glimpse through Anna Learn’s excellent review of Caesaria for Full Stop, which tantalises the reader with descriptions of Nordenhök’s untranslated novels on ‘Swedish colonial rule in 1930s Indonesia’ (Det vita huset i Simpang) and ‘the first rescue house for “uncivilised children” in 1840s Sweden’ (Asparna). It is hoped that Vogel will eventually translate these as well.

Wonderland, unlike these novels and unlike Caesaria (which is also set in nineteenth-century Sweden) is nothing if not modern. Three main storylines run in alternating chapters through a contemporary ‘post-truth’ landscape, in which the characters are finally confronted with the consequences of having lived a lie. Rather unusually for a multi-stranded novel, these three narratives never intersect but run parallel to one another, taking place in different countries, their characters never meeting.

Hyperion Hotel

The ‘Hyperion Hotel’ chapters follow two Spanish journalists. Marius is the star of his newspaper office, the recipient of numerous journalism prizes, praised for his ’empathic depictions of moving human fates in the midst of world events’. Rodri, from whose perspective the story is written, is Marius’ colleague. Always second best, stuck at the national desk while Marius is sent on assignments around the world, Rodri seethes with resentment. When he begins to notice inconsistencies in Marius’ reporting and is sent to Athens with him as his photographer, Rodri takes his chance to bring Marius down. Written in non-chronological order, the narrative opens once Rodri has already exposed Marius and is on tour with the book he has written about the experience. Far from being content with his victory, however, Rodri is haunted by a snide question put to him at a book event: “There are theories, he had said, that suggest that the whistleblower has a tendency to become one with the hoax that it is his intention to expose”. Could Rodri in his turn be destroyed by his own lies? What are they? These questions are never answered.

This narrative thread is reminiscent of the so-called ‘Spiegelgate’ scandal surrounding Claas Relotius, a multi-award-winning journalist for Der Spiegel who was forced to resign after he was shown to have fabricated multiple stories. Juan Morena, the colleague who exposed him, also wrote a book about his experiences, reviewed by Philip Oltermann, along with the film adaptation, for the Guardian, in which he describes himself as feeling inferior next to, as Oltermann puts it, ‘blond-haired Relotius, almost fifteen years younger and a “high-performance Teuton”, kissed by the reporter gods’. The parallels with Rodri’s story are striking.

Wonderland

The eponymous story is both sadder and stranger than the journalistic scandal in ‘Hyperion Hotel’. A middle-aged homeless woman is travelling across America. She repeatedly disguises herself as a teenage girl and attempts to be taken home by a child or a teenager and fostered by their family. Each time, she gives the family a different name and pretends that she cannot remember who she is or what has happened to her. Eventually, suspicion will grow within the family that she is an adult woman, and she will slip away. Between families, she hitch-hikes, sleeps rough and occasionally joins homeless camps where she is invariably assaulted. The reader comes to understand that time is running out for the nameless woman, and that it is only a matter of time before she is brutally exposed.

The fraud conviction of a thirty-eight-year-old Brazilian woman, Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira, has recently made international news. Oliveira had managed to convince a couple that she was only twelve years old. Further investigation revealed that ‘she had pretended to be a child in Parana, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Goias, Ceara, Rio Grande do Sul, Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Norte and Mato Grosso do Sul’. Along with this story, readers may be reminded of the 2009 horror film Orphan, or conversely the tragic story of Natalia Grace, whose adoptive parents abandoned her at the age of ten after claiming that she was in fact an adult. Nordenhök’s version of these often sensationalised news accounts is a far more empathetic one, describing with cold clarity the experiences of homelessness as a woman:

‘Only the man was awake, a scrawny one who talked incessantly about nothing, and later he had laid next to her, tinkering and fiddling with objects and key rings that he kept in his chaotic pack, stuffed into cloth bags and plastic mixing bowls, and she had let his bony fingers go all over her because, well, he had given her a place to sleep.’

The conditions in which she lives while not with a family are squalid and dangerous, and no one could blame her for wanting to escape them. There is, however, a twist at the end of her story.

The House on the Plain

This thread of the book is sadly too common for there to be an obvious news story to point to, although the Epstein Files inevitably come to mind. In the first chapter, a woman attends her husband’s trial as a witness, repeating the phrase ‘My husband is a warm and considerate man who would never hurt anyone.’ From her point of view, we relive their life together: he is from a rich family, and she is from a poor one. She has an unspecified mental illness. They met at university, where she ‘did not do well . . . she had more episodes’ and eventually dropped out, becoming totally dependent on him both financially and emotionally. He builds a highly successful company and can buy her anything she desires. They have two children together. She has known about his crimes for years by the time of the trial and has never exposed him. Throughout this story, Nordenhök insists on the luxury of their house, their holidays, their comforts, while outside the surrounding plain looms in the wife’s vision, ‘creeping closer to her, pushing its way inside her, controlling her thoughts’. The house is both sanctuary and prison, and the plain both clarity and the threat of exposure.

Case Study

There is a grimy familiarity to each of the three main stories in Wonderland. We have seen them before, we expect them, we already know them. Nordenhök’s combination of the three into one book makes clear the overarching theme of deception and exposure, especially in combination with the ‘case studies’ that punctuate the novel. These chapters, all titled ‘Case Study’, are short standalone vignettes. A schoolgirl covers non-existent injuries with bandages and plasters, only removing them when she has real bruises to show. A politician meets with a speechwriter and is unsettled by seeing his words repackaged into a more pleasing form by someone else. The body of a rich elderly woman, almost unrecognisable due to extensive plastic surgery, is removed from her house by paramedics.

Nordenhök thus extends the scope of her central thesis to the entire world and all its inhabitants: look into this broken mirror of liars and eventually you will recognise yourself. It is a dark vision relieved only by Nordenhök’s subtle powers of description, rendered beautifully in Vogel’s translation, and by her deep and empathetic understanding of the reasons why people live in deception.