The Eighth House: A murder, a mother, a haunting by Linda Segtnan (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel)
Review by Kate Vine
A memoir, yes. A ghost story, for sure. Yet throughout Linda Segtnan’s latest work, the book’s greatest mystery (and thrill) lies in its refusal to conform. In the vein of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, historical researcher Linda Segtnan investigates the unsolved murder of nine-year-old Birgitta Sivander in 1940’s Sweden. Toying with genre and expectation, The Eighth House combines procedural investigation with motherhood memoir, to expose the fragility of the boundaries we ourselves create. The result in a fascinating dissection of life given and life taken away, the dark intricacies of modern womanhood.
‘An obsession takes root in my belly’
As Segtnan first uncovers Birgitta’s story, she is in the early stages of pregnancy. Two obsessions are born: one with the murder of a nine-year-old girl, the other with her new daughter. Following an earlier miscarriage, Segtnan is well acquainted with the tender line between new life and its sudden end. It’s this thread that binds her diverse memoir.
Time, for Segtnan, becomes fluid. Of Birgitta, she wonders, ‘maybe we were meant to meet when she was an old woman and I, a young one,’ conjuring a startling image of this small child stranded in time, unable to progress. On meeting Birgitta’s brother Karl, he too seems suspended by the tragedy: she sees the same boy in front of her as in old photos of the funeral.
This fluidity is echoed in her own experience. With her newborn daughter: ‘Time stands still as I run my eyes over all her rolls and curves…I’m in love, infatuated.’ Yet time steals from her as much as it gives. In an eternal dilemma, she is torn between past and present, woman and mother, painfully aware that time focussing on Birgitta is time lost with her family.
‘You need to know your enemy’
Silence, for Segtnan, proves more powerful than great noise. She says little of her miscarriage, yet it’s ever present in her obsession with Birgitta’s death – ‘she could have been my child’. In one the most powerful passages, she recalls when her daughter stopped moving in the womb, the technician initially unable to find a heartbeat until finally they hear ‘a familiar, swooshing rhythm…My beloved. That beloved heart. Never leave me.’ Silence, absence – but then, the sound of life.
The unsettling quiet is one of many horror tropes here born anew. She describes Birgitta’s schoolfriends at her funeral, carrying her coffin: ‘They wear matching white dresses and white shoes with white socks.’ The text is infused with the language of horror, of haunting, the dead among the living. Segtnan fixates on haunted houses of her childhood, actively engaging with her fear. Ghost stories ‘attract and repel. You need to know your enemy.’
‘An instrument of vengeance’
Where the text truly thrives is Segtnan’s seamless blend of the gothic with contemporary motherhood. She lies in bed listening for ‘panicked screams and howls of grief’; trying to relax on her balcony, she’s instead terrified her children might fall. Segtnan questions her partner’s enthusiasm for their son’s violent video games, fearing that men still ‘want to pass on their violence and sexism to the next generation.’ Above all, she fears for daughter, rendered fragile by her gender.
Less effective are the passages imagining the lives of Birgitta and her family. Novelistic in style, they lack clarity as to where her investigation ends and pure fiction begins. At times, Segtnan acknowledges her creative licence – ‘I find it difficult to think about that. So, I transform it in my mind’ – but this doesn’t necessarily justify chapters devoid of Segtnan’s voice, her analysis, the penetration of her own experience.
Nonetheless, the reader is left haunted both by grief for the past, and the precarity of the future. Asked about her ambiguous project, Segtnan calls it ‘An instrument of vengeance,’ and this is perhaps its most ample definition; haunted by lives stolen, the best revenge is justice – and ultimately, an end to women’s silence.
The Eighth House: A murder, a mother, a haunting is published by Ithika Press, 25th April 2024