In Days & Days & Days, anxieties of money are ever present; money haunts everything. Bibbs, a Swedish actress and celebrity famous for blogging and reality TV, lives a life of financial security with her boyfriend, Baby, who “didn’t have a degree and hadn’t gone to university, but each month he was paid the same salary at the same time, even if he’s been sick.” One day, seemingly out of the blue, Baby breaks up with Bibbs and immediately begins a relationship with Nina, an actress whom Bibbs considers a younger version of herself. In her ensuing financial precarity, Bibbs finds herself driven to increasingly dire decisions, as she must come up with 300,000 kronor to keep the apartment she and Baby shared.

A novel about aging, financial precarity, and gender, Days & Days & Days examines, in lyrical prose, the meanings of living, lying, money, and fame. Rooted in Bibbs’ lived experience of Stockholm, the novel explores her existence on the precipice of losing both fame and money, until this point the two constants in her life. As Bibbs makes her way around the city, she must reckon with her newfound independence and how it is intertwined with the different ways she must move through the world now that her finances are in flux. 

“I didn’t work hard for my money,” Bibbs says, “and we never thought the happiness would end.” She and Baby conceived of happiness only in relation to themselves, individually and as a couple. Past, present, and future collapse in the face of Bibbs’ precarity, yet she moves around Stockholm safeguarded by anonymity and of being in a geography where she belongs. For her, moving through the city feels natural, an embodied daily experience. But she is also aware that, on the precipice of losing both fame and money, she is in a liminal space that renders any ideas of anonymity meaningless as she runs into people who almost know her. 

Money is the center of this novel. It is also at the center of how Bibbs understands the world. Recognizing that familiar luxuries are no longer accessible, Bibbs attempts to negotiate some financial security through friends she shares with Baby. In these conversations, she must reckon with the ways in which her relationships are and are not transactional. Desperate to hold onto her life, to keep control over the geographies that were once hers, Bibbs is driven to telling lies that spiral out of her control. A conversation with Kenneth, one of the friends she shares with Baby, becomes the driving force of the novel’s second half: Bibbs lies to him, saying that Baby raped her, a lie that will define and shape her sense of self. Playing on Kenneth’s desire to be perceived as good, she manipulates him in order to get the money she needs to keep the apartment. 

As she is forced to move from the centers of money, success, and fame into the peripheries of all three, Bibbs becomes uncertain about everything. Vogel’s fluid translation renders her slippage in language, showing the multifaceted quality of Bibbs’ experiences on the edge of her usual ways of living, talking, and being. Halfway through the novel, Bibbs declares: “Living is above all the ability to make decisions, and to stand up for the decision you have made, and for some time now, I’d been plagued by an enormous uncertainty.” Of the lie she tells Kenneth, Bibbs says: “When a lie steps into the truth, it dissolves.” Days & Days & Days examines what it means to narrativize one’s life, to look back and frame history anew through the lens of a coming-of-age shaped by the sudden, unsought loss of a formative relationship.

In contrast to Bibbs’ uncertain sense of self, supporting characters are rendered with precision and clarity. Even as he wavers over giving her the money she wants, Kenneth remains clearly understandable. Another friend, Elahe, who shelters Bibbs when she is forced to leave the apartment, is sharply and clearly drawn even though she only ever appears in Bibbs’ memories. Even though Baby is the object of desire, and so always mediated through Bibbs’ perceptions, he too remains a compelling and startlingly sympathetic character.

Unbroken except by meditative asides, Days & Days & Days feels like a ceaseless current, shifting and malleable—in flux, like Bibbs herself—but also hard and ugly and beautiful and tender too. The novel’s tensions of excess and thrift remind us of what it means to be on the precipice of loss. Bibbs remains in a perpetual financial liminal space. Even as Bibbs and Baby reach a shaky détente, financial precarity persists as an undercurrent of Bibbs’ life as she realizes how deeply she is both psychologically and materially intertwined with Baby. In long paragraphs propelled by the sheer force of Bibbs’s desire to keep what she feels to be hers, Days & Days & Days makes the familiar unfamiliar and the transparent opaque, allowing the reader to linger in the liminal space between absence and presence, with sympathy for Bibbs regardless of her choices.

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Tone Schunnesson (Malmö, 1988) is a Swedish writer. She studied Creative Writing and debuted in 2016 with Trip Reports which received critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize. Her first non-fiction book, Tone: Round-Trip Ticket (2022), is a collection of political gonzo essays. Days & Days & Days is her second novel.

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Saskia Vogel was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in its sister city, Berlin, where she works as a writer, screenwriter, and translator from Swedish and German into English. In 2021 she was awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature, an English PEN Translates Award, and was a PEN America Translation Prize finalist. She was Princeton’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence.

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Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Creative Writing (prose). Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.