Psychosis

Psychosis in the novel is framed both as an illness and as a rupture in a person’s experience of the present. Sofia Zetterlund calls it a fever of the central nervous system and connects Annette Lundström’s condition to the deaths of her husband and daughter within a short period. Annette’s repeated longing for Polcirkeln gives that rupture a concrete geography: she speaks as though the place, its house, and the people she associates with it could restore a lost life.

Clinical Framing and Loss

Sofia describes psychosis as an illness that can break out after a sudden change in a person’s life. Her explanation is specifically tied to Annette’s losses: both her husband and daughter have died within a short space of time. The fever metaphor makes the condition sound acute and embodied, while Sofia’s remark that treatment can take ten years places it on a much longer timescale. The contrast is stark: an illness may break out suddenly, but its treatment need not be brief.

The novel offers this account through a conversation between Sofia and Jeanette Kihlberg rather than through a clinical report. Jeanette asks what Sofia means by fever and then asks whether Annette said anything else. Sofia’s answer therefore connects a general explanation of psychosis to the particular language Annette uses. The scene gives the reader a framework for understanding Annette’s condition, but it does not provide a detailed diagnosis, treatment plan, or account of how her symptoms have developed over time.

Polcirkeln as a Retreat

Annette says she wants to go to Karl Lundström and Viggo Dürer in Polcirkeln and build a temple. Sofia reads her gaze as evidence that, in her mind, she is already far away, in eternity. The temple is presented as part of Annette’s stated destination, not explained as a completed structure or a practical plan. Its importance lies in the way it belongs to the world she is reaching toward, a world in which the people she names and the place she imagines can still be gathered together.

Sofia’s response also preserves a distinction between Annette’s mental state and the literal place she mentions. Jeanette observes that Polcirkeln is not entirely removed from reality. The conversation does not resolve what Annette’s proposed journey means, but it makes the place function on two levels: it is a real destination and the center of a retreat from her present circumstances. Annette’s words about going there are not simply a change of address; they express a wish to inhabit a version of the past in which life can be made whole again.

The Hospital Encounter

At Rosenlund Hospital, Jens Hurtig sees Annette in a state of profound physical decline. Her face is sunken and grey, her body so thin that he fears he might hurt her hand when they meet, and the hand itself feels ice-cold. The description gives her the ghostlike quality that shapes his first impression, but the encounter then turns on her direct request for help: she does not want to remain in the hospital and wants to be with Linnea Lundström, Karl, and Viggo, where everything can be as it used to be. Her longing repeats the earlier wish to go to Polcirkeln, now explicitly bound to the people and former life she wants back.

Annette imagines a house in Polcirkeln that needs attention. She asks to return because no one has checked it for a long time; the plants need watering and the apples need care. She also asks whether it is autumn. Hurtig tells her that it is winter there. The exchange makes her disorientation visible through ordinary details of household work and season, rather than through an abstract account of symptoms. The house remains vivid to her as a place of duties and familiar routines, even as her sense of the present season does not match Hurtig’s answer.

Hurtig tries to meet her within that familiar geography. He tells her that he comes from Kvikkjokk, not far from Polcirkeln, and mentions the winter there. Annette brightens a little and looks him in the eye, suggesting that the attempt briefly establishes contact. Yet Hurtig finds her gaze unnerving and distant. His effort changes the immediate tone of the encounter without dispelling the separation he perceives in her.

Present Time and the Limits of Return

Polcirkeln links Sofia’s account of Annette’s psychosis to the hospital scene. In both, Annette turns toward the same place and toward the people she associates with the life that has been lost. In the conversation with Sofia, the destination includes a temple and an apparent movement into eternity; at the hospital, it is also a house, an autumn, plants, and apples. The changing details make the imagined return intimate and practical as well as removed from the present.

The text does not present Annette’s wish as a recovery or show that she leaves the hospital. Instead, the encounter ends with a small change in her expression and a gaze that remains distant to Hurtig. That unresolved contact captures the tension in the novel’s portrayal of psychosis: speech can make a connection between Annette and another person, but the place she describes and the present they share do not become the same. Her account of a life restored remains inseparable from the losses that, in Sofia’s explanation, preceded the illness.