In Bread and Milk, iconic Swedish writer Karolina Ramqvist traces a girlhood through food - that which has the potential to fill her up, but also threatens to consume her. She remember the tangerines eaten in gluttonous longing before her mother's closed bedroom door; her grandmother's rice pudding connecting her to a time when eating your fill was a luxury not readily afforded; the plate of pancakes left on the kitchen counter signalling that tonight would be another night spent alone.
From the carefully restricted low-fat margarine on a slice of bread to the dried grease stains on an oversized dining room table, we follow several generations of women and their daughters as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, independence and motherhood. When Karolina finds herself a single mother to a young daughter of her own, food becomes the way for her to show her love, but also to instil a complicated inheritance.
Here, a mother's emotional absence is filled by the physical food she painstakingly provides; a daughter seeks a missing father's approval through tomatoes sliced just the right way; and a grandmother fills the freezer with pastries like embraces for a lonely child.
Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist's authorship.
