Originally published in Swedish, Bloody Awful in Different Ways marks a tender, razor-sharp debut from Andrev Walden, now brought to English readers through the crisp, considered translation of Ian Giles. Put simply, it’s a novel about seven fathers over seven years and one boy who watches them come and go like passing storms.
Walden’s prose walks the tightrope between heartbreak and hilarity. Narrated from the child’s point of view, the novel is unexpectedly funny. Scatological jokes fill a good couple of pages, but they never feel forced or juvenile. This is not a sentimental book, but it is tender. There is a deep, aching awareness of how children absorb absence. How easily they attach, how quietly they learn to detach.
Names are never given to these father figures. Instead, they’re referred to as the Priest, the Thief, the Plant Magician, the Murderer, the Indian who writes letters from afar etc. Some drift in and out like weather, barely leaving an impression. Others stamp themselves into the boy’s memory with a weight that lingers long after they’ve gone.
The Plant Magician, the first we meet and the father of Andrev’s siblings, lingers the longest. He is manipulative, flawed, but not without complexity. Andrev’s tone toward him carries something close to fondness, or perhaps just the recognition that even imperfect presences can be formative. There are small moments of care, subtle signs of something like affection. Not all the men earn such nuance. Some leave only wreckage, remembered not for who they were, but for what they destroyed — or in the case of The Thief, what he has stolen.
In many ways, Walden’s novel reminds me of Emma Donoghue’s Room. Not in plot, but in its evocation of a child’s resilient interiority. The way innocence persists even when the world is unstable, even when the adults are failing. At times, the child’s voice can veer toward grating. But when you remember their circumstances, when you consider the lens through which they understand the world, you come to adore them again. The voice never loses its authenticity. It is charming and bruising, often at the same time.
In the end, Bloody Awful in Different Ways lingers not for its plot or dramatic turns, but for its quiet accumulation of feeling — the sense of a childhood shaped more by the absences of men than their presence. It isn’t a man-hating novel, but it does hold a mirror to the damage they can do. It refuses to romanticise fatherhood, but neither does it strip it of all meaning. Walden offers no clear answers, only open-ended questions that echo long after the final page: What makes someone a father? How do we measure love in relationships defined by coming and going? In the gaps between arrivals and departures, what kind of person is a child left to become?
Words by Georgia McInnes
Want more Books content from The Indiependent? Click here