Anna Enquist shows how powerful an inner voice can be ★★★☆☆

A musical sidewalk whore. This is how Alice Augustus characterizes herself in Demolition. She has made a name for herself as a composer of chamber music and works for symphony orchestra and in the meantime earns good money making advertising tunes. But nobody should know the latter, it would damage her reputation as a composer of serious music.

curbside. That’s what her mother once called her when she heard that Alice had been spotted under a bridge ‘with your skirt tucked up around your waist and your sweater under your armpits’. Mother’s judgment was icy and inexorable: “That must have looked disgusting. Disgusting.’ The fact that Alice uses the same term years later is indicative of her low self-esteem and her mother’s great contribution to it. And what about her father? He was of no use to her, he did not look back at her.

Her first partner also stopped doing that after he left for Canada for a nice job. The second man in her life, a former teacher of hers who is about forty years her senior, lost her mind after she unexpectedly became pregnant with him. That heralded the end of the relationship, shortly afterwards she had a miscarriage. The third is called Mark and turned out to be a keeper. He is an oasis of understanding, stability and good sense, and yet her mind finds no rest in him either.

Even if it works, it doesn’t work

That’s how it goes with Alice: even if it works, it doesn’t work. Also in music. She is exceptionally successful and, most importantly, her work allows her to be completely immersed in a parallel world. But redemption is always short-lived. Again and again there is the voice in her head that tells her that she does not matter, that she is no good.

However, Alice is not the type to give up. She becomes obsessed with a new project: she wants a daughter. Expectations are high: ‘To be born again (…). And then make sure everything goes right this time, not the way it went with me.’ Unfortunately, that daughter does not want to come, not through natural means and not with medical help. But in Alice’s head the unbegotten already can be heard. Here’s what she has to say to her mom: ‘It wasn’t about me at all. You just wanted a kid, no matter what kind. You didn’t know it was me, did you? Well then! You did it for yourself.’

Commute between present and past

That’s how powerful the voice in Alice’s head is. Up to and including the dramatic final scene on the stage of a concert hall, there is the same message over and over: you’re not doing it right, you’re not doing it right. Enquist has cemented this bleak determinism into a plot that oscillates unemphatically between past and present, making the ubiquity of Alice’s negative self-image palpable. The many guises of her inner voice have a similar effect, which not only reproaches her but also admonishes, exhorts, instructs her.

Usually that works, sometimes it doesn’t, like here: ‘I don’t know any better than that the people who were important to me didn’t understand what I wanted. Or disapproved. My parents first. The only solution is that I do it myself. Refrain from approval, don’t expect applause. Never tell me what I’m up to. But is that good? If you never say anything about your motives to your friends, your husband, you don’t let yourself be known.’ Here no inner voice speaks, but a therapeutic lesson is recited.

Even in the many passages in which Alice mirrors herself to Haydn – the composer in whom she sees both a fellow sufferer and soul mate as an example and teacher – I sometimes missed the stylistic and psychological intensity that Enquist maintained so tightly in Counterpoint, in which Bach acts as a mirror and anchor point.