Lena Andersson’s Willful Disregard offers witty satire in her self-proclaimed “novel about love.”  Written in 2013 and translated in 2015 from its original Swedish by the acclaimed Sarah Death, Willful Disregard follows essayist Ester Nilsson, who falls for the older activist-intellectual-artist Hugo Rask.  With a strong, independent female-lead bored by her safe relationship, a male-lead around just enough to keep the former miserable but hopeful, and a sensible “girlfriend chorus” of friends, Andersson dryly mocks all of us who have been consumed by love.  Not one to pull punches, the droll of leftist socialites, supplied by Hugo’s posse, renders uncritical intellectualism a stale social currency.

The narration is clean.  Dialogue is rarely obfuscated, and if it is, Ester and the narrator lay out possible readings as well as what the speaker actually meant.  For instance, mocking Ester’s hope after Hugo’s promise to “maybe speak when you’re back,” the narrator quips: “Like anyone in love, Ester Nilsson laid too much emphasis on the content of the words and their literal meaning and too little on the plausibility and her overall judgment.”  In these meditations on meaning, Ester’s inability to accept that her love is one-sided unfurls into paragraph-length sentences.  Dialogue often punctures the smooth veneer:  “An inadequacy that had ossified into an abstract loathing of women for their eternal amorous demands on a person like him, with bigger things to think about, their prattle and possessive impositions tossed out like lassos, always excused in their view by their tenderly throbbing hearts. / ‘It was passion’.” Despite the novel’s grounding in the romance genre, Ester’s character arc is determined by her ability to break free from dogmatic, masculine coded political ideology.  Ester is often told to “educate” herself:  As Ester’s conformity to Hugo’s politics breaks down, so too does the paragraph form.  Using contrasting sentence lengths and paragraph structures that recall the organization of brief poetic stanzas, the rhythm of the novel shifts with Ester’s character.   

Andersson’s writing is fundamental to her novel; Death’s translation does it justice. Death’s translation accentuates Andersson’s directness while still allowing the cascades of thoughts to flow.  Compared to the heavier translation of the sequel, Acts of Infidelity, Death’s translation allows for the minimal plot and (almost) pedantic conversations to be enjoyable.  Even when Andersson’s commitment to exploring intellectualism feels repetitive, the translation highlights the rigor of the content.  As a thinker, Andersson should not be underestimated; she succeeds in elevating the romance novel above easy tropes of duality.  Better halves and characters symbolic of the private or public have no place in her novel. Rather than subverting the romance genre, Andersson utilizes its history exploring the feminine experience and broadens its horizons.  Andersson foregrounds the inconsistent mind, rather than an imagining of fated sexuality.  Ester’s actions would be frustratingly self-destructive, if not for the poetic explanations that every reader will find regrettably relatable.  Andersson writes, “[her knowledge] stopped at a more superficial level where excuses feed on whatever they can get hold of.  In a never-ending battle between insight and hope, hope won, because insight cost too much to incorporate and hope made it easier to live.”  But this focus on the mind does not make Andersson shy away from the physical: “her aching heart, her desire for a body, a skin and a pair of embracing arms could not be relieved by masturbation.”  Ester’s issues with her memories of Hugo are ones of embodiment: while she “knows” that the “girlfriend chorus” is right that Hugo does not love her, as her mood changes, so does her memory of Hugo. Ester does not “misremember,” but she also does not operate in the realm of “truth”.

The brain-fog that envelopes the majority of the novel finally gives way to exacting clarity.  As the end of the novel nears, Ester is faced with a servile biopic on Hugo and his work.  The film prompts defamiliarization allowing Ester to see Hugo in the same light as the “girlfriend chorus.”  Ester is sharp and poised, an image she had tried to affect for Hugo’s attention the entire novel. However, the ending of the novel goes beyond the expected resurrection of Ester’s self.  Without ruining the ending, in a cruel showcase of sensitivity, Andersson reminds the reader that her work truly is “a novel about love.”