In Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, the unnamed narrator, a woman who is patient at a psychiatric institution, examines the rituals of collective life against and with that institution. The novel’s three sections consist of vignettes that document the narrator’s day-to-day as well as her interiority, focusing on her experiences of time and routine. Care takes on a collective life in What Kingdom, as the narrator collaborates with her fellow patients in creating a shared life shaped by generous witnessing of each other’s lives in this liminal setting. 

In poetic fragments of lyrical prose, Gråbøl’s narrator grapples with what it means to live within the system of the psychiatric institution. Time and space are complicated by the regimentation of the psychiatric institution and her and her peers’ experiences as patients in this setting. The institutional order is juxtaposed with the narrator’s rich interior life as she considers materiality, objects, and her built environment. Opening the novel, the narrator says: “Of all the hours of day and night I like the earliest morning best. That space of time that’s neither one or the other.” Liminal time becomes one of the structuring principles of both the book itself and the lives of the characters. Within the setting of the psychiatric institution, which removes them from the historical realities of their lives, they exist in a constant negotiation with both the past and the future.

Of the institution the narrator says: “The facility, which is to say the permanent living units as well as the temporary ones belonging to the young people’s section, is a kind of exploration into having a home.” Here, again, the liminality of the institution is central to the narrator’s reckoning with what home might mean in this in-between existence in this psychiatric facility.

The narrator is attuned to how she and her friends are understood in relation to their built environment, a landscape that shifts constantly. The narrator describes her peers and herself: “At night we are a concoction, disparate elements of the hours brought together; in the daytime those of us from the fifth floor are a small isolated unit.” Part catalog and part archive, this novel-in-fragments is also a diaristic documentation of day-to-day existence in a place that’s outside of the linearity of time. 

The narrator renders her peers with a startling clarity as she becomes a historian and archivist of this space. In one section, the narrator considers the relationship of her friend Marie, who has grown up in foster homes, to her mother who, unbeknownst to Marie, lives in the same facility: “But why hasn’t any social worker, any contact person, any mentor or psychiatrist told Marie that her mother, who Marie hasn’t known since she was six years old, is living under the same sheltered though debilitating conditions of social care and support?” The narrator understands the institution as a hostile and cruel backdrop to the systems of care that have broken this mother-daughter relationship. Against this she juxtaposes her own imaginative labor, finding solace in speculation about Marie’s future. “I’ve often imagined the meeting of Marie and her mom, as if it were mine to imagine.” It is as if, through speculation, it becomes possible to get beyond what’s broken. The narrator says: “As if I can build on top of this broken world, these interior ruins, as if I had the strength.” 

The narrative zeroes in on how the characters use everyday rituals to navigate the expansiveness that opens up in the quotidian. Gråbøl, in the third and final section, often switches to a collective point of view: “We hold each other by the hand because we’re scared; we close our eyes, unspeaking, drifting in and out of sleep.” Even though there is fear, a collective identity arising from this community of care is what allows these characters to bring their full selves and histories into what is, for many, merely a temporary situation. 

Formally disrupted by white space and by section breaks, What Kingdom is a necessary, compelling, and unflinching documentation of structures of care and the fragmentation of time they can occasion. The narrator describes the facility in which she lives as “this trial home, this impermanent halfway house”— yet against this home and all it symbolizes, she articulates a visionary future of collective life that includes her friends, their environment, and her own psychological landscapes. Gråbøl suggests that “[t]o preserve something” is “to give it a name, to feel it.” What Kingdom is a testament to this idea—what it means to preserve a time, through the narrator’s careful cataloging of the everyday, to examine a moment in time in all its expansiveness.

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Fine Gråbøl has previously published a collection of poetry, Knoglemarv lavendel (Bone-marrow Lavender, 2018), together with the poetry collective BMS, consisting of Dorte Limkilde, Mette Kierstein, Ronja Johansen, and Gråbøl. 

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Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Pia Juul, and his translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012, he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize. In 2019, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Love by Hanne Ørstavik.

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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 fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.