In Every Moment We Are Still Alive

December 4, 2017
Malmquist presents a moving portrait of the disorientation of grief in this heady debut novel. It opens with a frantic, prolonged blow-by-blow account of the emergency hospital visit during which Tom’s pregnant partner, Karin, is diagnosed with fast-acting leukemia. Days after her diagnosis, Tom becomes a bewildered new parent to premature daughter Livia, while mourning his partner, who dies shortly after giving birth. Tom stumbles forward while flashing back to earlier, happier times with Karin. He frankly recounts his jealousies and her fears of abandonment. The slippage in time illustrates the strange logic of grief, which catapults the bereaved back through random memories. In the midst of these moments, Malmquist offers a stinging satire of the bureaucratic processes ill-equipped to cope with an unmarried single father whose partner has died.
A final note of hope that avoids making sense of pain rounds out this beautiful, raw meditation on earth-shattering
personal loss.

December 1, 2017
A Swedish woman becomes deathly ill as she is about to give birth to her first child, and her longtime partner must learn to traverse parenthood and grief at the same time.When Karin is 33 weeks pregnant and struggling to breathe, her partner and fellow writer, Tom, rushes her to a nearby hospital. Karin is diagnosed with acute leukemia, and a baby girl she names Livia is delivered by emergency C-section. Tom struggles to be present for his premature daughter as Karin becomes increasingly unresponsive over the next few weeks in the hospital. Translated from the Swedish by Koch, the first part of Malmquist's autobiographical novel moves swiftly through hospital passages, and the days meld together in his prose. Like Tom, we are plunged into medical terminology and family tensions that build in urgency until Karin's death. After her loss, the narrative begins to piece together memories of Tom and Karin's life together before the illness. These sections are often untethered from each other, out of chronological order, as if fragments from a dream; it is in this part of the book that Malmquist's background as a poet shines through, even as the heaviness of the memories is often suffocating. Tom's efforts to care for Livia and navigate his other familial relationships are woven between these flashbacks from his courtship with Karin and her earlier health scares. Tom works through the complicated bureaucratic system to establish his legal relationship with Livia, as he and Karin weren't married; he struggles to resolve tensions with Karin's parents due to the privacy she wanted during her illness; and his own father's health rapidly declines after 10 years of living with cancer. By turns raw, unsettled, and touching, Malmquist's book is an extended meditation on what it means to love and to mourn.A deeply emotional and affecting novel.

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November 1, 2017
In this wrenching, autobiographical first novel, Swedish poet Malmquist follows a narrator who shares the author's name and personal history through a horrifying experience. Tom's longtime partner, Karin, at 33 weeks pregnant, suddenly becomes critically ill and is rushed to the hospital. Tom watches helplessly as her condition worsens, and after their baby is delivered, he spends sleepless days shuttling between Karin's room and the unit where baby Livia is struggling to hold on to life. Malmquist tells the story in claustrophobic, shell-shocked present tense, only later widening out to reveal his relationship with his parents and Karin's, the couple's past, and Tom's Kafkaesque struggle with hospital and government bureaucracy. The reader is immersed in the minutiae of Tom's experience, as he focuses on one detail or anothera beige suspended ceiling in the corridor here, or a doctor's chestnut leather briefcase therehoping to ground himself in reality. Not an easy book to read, but remarkably credible.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)