Andromeda by Therese Bohman

Andromeda

By Therese Bohman

Translated by Marlaine Delargy

Other Press 2025

Therese Bohman’s slim 2022 novel Andromeda has now been given an English-language translation by Marlaine Delargy for Other Press, with a (uncredited, curiously) cover image showing shelves and stacks of unbound manuscripts, appropriately enough, since Andromeda is set in the world of publishing.

Two worlds, actually, since the book has two sections, set in two different eras of Swedish publishing, narrated by two different people, our two main characters. The first half is Sofie Andersson telling her own story, how she’d entered the lower ranks of the major publisher Rydens in Stockholm and rose to greater in-house prominence when she impressed Gunnar Abrahamsson, the head of the prestigious Rydens imprint Andromeda. Gunnar is twice Sofie’s age, a greying, self-assured, dapper, soft-spoken titan in the publishing scene, a figure standing in sharp contrast to the callow younger men coming up in the industry, as Sofie herself is quick to notice:

I often thought about how incredibly shortsighted contemporary society was, about how everything Gunnar had taught me was on a completely different level from what anyone of my own generation had to offer. Those who were supposed to represent the cultural establishment of the future preferred to think rather than act, their conversation was littered with banal signal words, and they engaged opportunistically with whatever trivial issues might be trending. None of them was capable of creating something like the Andromeda imprint – not that any of them would want to.

Sofie risks offering a frank opinion about one of Ryden’s new releases, and her insights impress Gunnar, who laments with her the rarity of such insights in the book world. “If the publishing world had ever been populated by intellectuals who understood what literature was,” she characterizes him thinking, “then that was definitely no longer the case.”

In this first half of the book, Sofie and Gunnar grow closer together, share tipsy lunches and increasingly personal opinions, and maybe even become friends, or, as the portentous publishing patter has it, more than friends. Sofie eventually feels a bit awkward in some encounters, and Gunnar eventually grows ill and fades out of Andromeda’s world, and promptly the book shifts to its second half, which is Gunnar narrating his own story, starting long before he met Sofie and likewise ultimately describing a vanished publishing world. “Literature had become a political cudgel again,” Gunnar laments as times change, “but I felt as if it were different this time, as if it lacked a kind of jauntiness that used to be there, maybe even a kind of joy.”

Which makes Bohman’s decision to split the book into two slightly overlapping narratives a bit puzzling. Both narratives agree almost completely on events, people, personalities, timing, and nuance. Both Sofie and Gunnar remember their first meetings the same way.

And as can be readily seen, Sofie and Gunnar share the same opinion of the deplorable state of modern publishing. Indeed, as both of them note, the fact that they share this opinion is what drew them together in the first place, and when Gunnar is gone from her life, Sofie grimly notes that the fruits of this relationship go too, “our mutual understanding of the world was gone, the whole world seen through our eyes was lost.” This is a genuinely touching moment, but it also underscores the superfluity of telling this story twice.

Publishing-world people will no doubt nod in agreement at Gunnar’s description of the industry’s last great period; when he reflects on the eighties and early nineties, he remembers a time of remarkable new energy, “a time when literature felt glamorous, and the world surrounding it was desirable.” And anyone from any world who’s lived long enough will sadly agree with his verdict that “It is unfortunate that we are never fully aware when we are experiencing a golden age.”  But Gunnar isn’t likable or sympathetic or even all that interesting in either Sofie’s or his own account, nor is Sofie herself more than a few stitched-together character quirks. And despite the book’s title, the Andromeda imprint is never given enough practical day-to-day details to feel real.

Hence there’s a wispy unreality to Andromeda as well. One hesitates to call something this elegant and thoughtful a trifle, although Gunnar might have.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News