Translated by Henning Koch. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2018. 232 pages. $25.99.
When the eponymously named narrator of Tom Malmquist’s novel arrives at the hospital with his sick, pregnant partner, Karin, he suspects she has a case of pneumonia. It turns out to be something much worse—Karin is diagnosed with leukemia and her situation is so precarious that doctors deliver the baby by emergency C-section the next day. And thus it is that Tom suddenly finds himself with a partner in the ICU and a newborn daughter, Livia, in the NICU.
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive follows Tom into this hellish situation, and then through the weeks and months after Karin’s death as he navigates the roles that have suddenly been thrust upon him: that of new father and bereaved spouse. (Before the novel’s end, he also loses his own father to cancer.) It is the kind of book that swallows you, but its grasp on the reader is not entirely due to the heart-wrenching events at its center. Rather, it’s the way that Malmquist tells this story that creates such sway. This is a book that comes to embody the very experience it narrates, resulting in a book that feels painfully real and alive.
The novel begins with Tom standing by in the ICU as the doctor gives his intake report. From that moment on, Tom is plunged into a strange new reality, a reality that unfolds so rapidly he has no time to process what’s going on. Tom must simultaneously track Karin’s medical care, deal with the friends and family who come to offer support, and also tend to his newborn daughter.
It is an overwhelming situation, and the novel perfectly conveys that with text that one could almost drown in. Other than occasional white space for section breaks, the story spills out in overflowing paragraphs that stretch over as many as six pages at a time. Dialogue is woven through these unlineated paragraphs without any quotations marks or sometimes even any speech tags. The text does not pause to offer the reader any explanatory asides, or to orient the reader to the passing of time or space; indeed it does not even identify new characters when they appear on the scene. Meanwhile, the sentences continue to spill forth, and Karin grows worse.
Pared down to its essentials, the text embodies the urgency of Tom’s experience. This is the story of a person suddenly facing a vitally important moment, someone who does not have time to organize information into concise paragraphs, or to enhance the narrative with context and reflective observations. The reader must make her way through the story the same way Tom does: somewhat breathless, somewhat disoriented, just trying to keep afloat.
After Karin’s death, Tom spends his days attending to the mundane activities now required of him, from picking the song that will be played at Karin’s burial to meeting weekly with a pediatric nurse. The text catalogues these moments with the same deluge of sentences as before, reflecting not only Tom’s numbness, but also the painful truth of life after loss: real life doesn’t stop just because you’re grieving.
Malmquist does provide small breaks for both Tom and the reader from the relentless demands of the present by including flashbacks of Karin. In one sense, these segments operate conventionally: as vehicles for deepening the reader’s understanding of the characters and all their complexities. But there is something unusual about these moments from the past: they are all narrated in the present tense. Indeed, the only difference in these episodes is that each piece of dialogue is granted its own line. In most instances, that shift to lineation is the only formal indication that the text has jumped backwards in time. Here again, Malmquist breaks down formal narrative structure in a way that brings the story to life. The text begins to function much like memory itself, as the past literally becomes part of the present experience.
For so much of the book, Tom is a character who is acted upon, someone who is at the mercy of the terrible circumstances he finds himself in and the large cast of characters that come with it. But in the novel’s final pages those other characters fall away, the sense of crisis subsides, and for the first time, Tom’s feelings are allowed out on the page, alongside the cataloguing of his daily life with Livia:
She is naked and jumps into a cloud of water from a sprinkler, she stands with her legs wide apart behind a forsythia bush to pee, she has a black ant in an insect tin, she wants a plaster on her finger. I love listening to her role-playing, the shifting nuances of her voice when she plays on her own, I remove the stabilisers of her bicycle and run behind her as your father once ran behind you, and she makes drawings and asks me to send them to you.
I have never hated as I hate now, it has no direction, no meaning, and every time I try to understand it, attach words to it, define it, control it, I start crying so violently I am afraid of waking her even if I am in a different room, and I put my hand over my eyes and I hear myself saying: It’s only make-believe.
By allowing bits of self-reflection to break through, the text is re-enacting the timeline of grief. Tom is no longer in pure survival mode; his raw pain has begun to emerge. The novel’s beautiful final pages contain one other stylistic leap, when Tom imagines Livia as she’ll be in the future. In keeping with Malmquist’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, the segment is told in the present tense. But the fact that Tom is able to imagine a future, even a future that is tinged with loss, is a huge shift. It is shift registered by the text itself, and by the reader as well.
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Any quick Google search will tell you that the events in this novel come from the author’s own life; even the book jacket proclaims that the book is “based on a true story.” There are certainly questions to be raised about the function of so-called auto-fiction and how it compares to more rigid conceptions of fiction and memoir. But to get distracted by these questions is to risk overlooking the tremendous accomplishment of Malmquist’s story. Indeed “story” feels like the wrong word—what he transmits in this book is an experience.
“Artless / is my heart” writes Brenda Shaughnessy. It is a fitting description for the way Malmquist’s book is written; by stripping the text down to a rush of straightforward sentences, by removing exposition, reflection and even the past tense, it’s as if Malmquist sidesteps the artifice of storytelling, breaks down the barriers between reader and text, and lets us straight into Tom’s heart. The irony is that the very things that make that make the text feel “artless” or unvarnished are actually sophisticated craft choices of a talented writer. That is what’s so momentous about this novel: not the amount of “truth” or “fiction” in the text, but how its very artifice allows the story to feel so real.
