Acts of Infidelity

February 11, 2019
In this exhaustive and engrossing anatomy of a romance, Andersson revisits Ester Nilsson (the protagonist of Andersson’s only other novel published in English, Willful Disregard), a clear-eyed philosopher-poet with a tendency to dive blindly into relationships. During rehearsals for a play Ester has written on “the agonies of love,” she meets Olof Sten, an older, married actor with whom she feels an instant connection. Before their romantic relationship has properly begun, she tells him she wants to share her life with him; he demurs, saying he will not leave his wife. The two carry on an intermittent affair over the next several years, giving Ester the opportunity to bring her philosophical training to bear on Olof’s smallest actions to convince herself that he will leave his wife. Olof, though, is a creature of “almost pathological ambivalence,” who intuitively senses just how much of himself to give, and withhold, to maintain the status quo. The novel is as much about love as about two competing philosophies of language about love. Ester, for whom “a phenomenon didn’t really exist until it was articulated,” is continually frustrated by the more reticent Olof, for whom “nothing had happened if it was unnamed, uncategorized and unformulated.” The affair, like the novel, has its numbing repetitions, and making readers inhabit this relationship purgatory is part of the point of Andersson’s involving analysis of love’s absurd syntax. This is a cogent, astute novel that will be appreciated by patient readers.

February 15, 2019
Swedish novelist Andersson (Willful Disregard, 2016) charts the course of an exhausting affair between a writer and a charmless, married actor.Ester Nilsson, a poet/philosopher/translator, meets actor Olof Sten at the read-through of her first play, a "melancholy reflection on the agonies of love." The play, called Threesome, is about a "man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife," which--conveniently--is also the plot of this novel. After this first meeting, Ester and Olof fall into a hesitant noncourtship, made up of agonizing phone calls and text exchanges and sometimes drinks but never physical consummation. "His marriage was disintegrating; there was no doubt about that," Ester decides. "All she had to do was wait." Unfortunately for Ester, Olof seems not to have reached the same conclusion and instead insists that they do not have a romantic relationship and also that he has no intention of leaving his wife. This stance becomes somewhat complicated when, after several months, he and Ester do inevitably sleep together--when Olof in fact invites Ester to visit him for a weekend of skiing--but the affair never quite takes off in earnest on account of how Olof will never wholly concede that it is happening. As a result of their mutual attraction but nonmutual commitment, he and Ester break up and reunite repeatedly, with Olof offering just enough validation to keep Ester believing, despite some lack of behavioral evidence, that he is just about to leave his wife. Andersson's writing, crisply translated from the Swedish by Vogel, is wry and refreshingly unsentimental, but the drawback of a 300-plus page novel charting the minutiae of an underwhelming relationship in excruciating detail is that it is excruciating; the relationship has little going for it, and while this is all too realistic, Andersson's sharp eye and quick wit cannot quite redeem the experience.Sharp, if relentless.

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March 1, 2019
This piercing, chilly novel by Swedish journalist and novelist Andersson (Willful Disregard, 2016) follows intellectual Ester Nilsson through a terminally unsatisfying affair with married actor Olof Sten. A poet and playwright with a background in physics and philosophy, Ester uses her finely tuned mind to twist thoughtless, narcissistic Olof's every word or act into a romantic narrative that suits her desires. Convinced against all objective evidence that he is forever just on the verge of leaving his wife, and acting against the advice of her long-suffering girlfriends, she spends three years vacillating between following him around Europe and waiting impatiently for him at home in Stockholm. As dryly comic as it is horrifying on an emotional level, the novel will ring true to anyone who has ever loved unwisely. While readers recovering from a breakup may find it hitting too close to home, those ready to swap a propulsive plot for a razor-sharp examination of a deluded mind should find this irresistible.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)