Sleepwalking

Sleepwalking is a state in which Sofia Zetterlund can move through Stockholm and act without retaining a memory of the journey, leaving her to encounter its consequences as a gap in her own experience. The episodes connect bodily movement with an absent or divided awareness: she can appear to find her way home, yet remember neither the streets nor the decisions that brought her there. The novel makes this missing time tangible through the contrast between a precise urban route and the blankness that follows it, and through the Sleepwalker’s distinct presence within Sofia and Victoria Bergman’s divided identity.

Memory and the divided self

Sofia’s account of Victoria’s memory lapses raises questions rather than supplying a diagnosis. Victoria may forget what she said minutes earlier or days before, particularly when speaking about her childhood and earliest memories. Her story proceeds by association, one recollection leading to another; the uncertainty is whether a particular personality is speaking, whether she adopts the behavior of her twelve- or thirteen-year-old self to approach those memories, and whether the memories are accurate or mixed with her present understanding. The text places sleepwalking beside this wider uncertainty about memory and identity without establishing that every lapse has the same cause.

Victoria describes Crow Girl as a composite of the others, with one exception: the Sleepwalker has not realized that Crow Girl exists. This distinction makes the Sleepwalker more than a name for an ordinary blank spell. Within Victoria’s account, it belongs to a system of selves whose knowledge is unevenly shared. The Sleepwalker’s ignorance of Crow Girl also gives the divided identity an asymmetry: the parts do not all understand the same picture of who they are.

The first journey through the labyrinth

After an evening walk lasting about four and a half hours, Sofia reaches the door of her building and checks the time, but cannot recall which streets she has crossed or what she thought about along the way. The walk feels to her like trying to remember a dream. As she enters the door code, she thinks she is walking in her sleep; the echo of her boots on the stairs wakes her, but by the time she puts the key in the lock she has no recollection of the journey.

The narration supplies the missing route in detail. Sofia had been sitting in her office, imagining Södermalm as a labyrinth whose entrance was the door to her practice on St Paulsgatan and whose exit was the door to her apartment in Vita Bergen. She does not remember saying goodbye to Ann-Britt, leaving the practice, or meeting a man in the bar of the Clarion Hotel at Skanstull and going back to his room. Nor does she remember leaving the hotel without accepting payment, walking east along Ringvägen and down Katarina Bangata to Norra Hammarbyhamnen, or stopping to look at the water, barges, and warehouses across the quay. The account then traces her back along Ringvägen as it curves north and becomes Renstiernas gata beneath the steep rock faces of Vita Bergen.

That reconstructed itinerary culminates in Sofia’s own image of the labyrinth: it is not the neighborhood but the sleepwalker’s brain, with canals, nerves, signals, bends, intersections, and dead ends. The comparison turns a familiar city walk into a map of inaccessible mental space. Sofia has physically found the exit, and the key turns in the lock, but her memory has not accompanied her there. The narration lets the reader follow the route that the person who walked it cannot retrieve.

A recurring state after loss

The Sleepwalker returns after Sofia thinks that Linnea Lundström is dead. Despair overtakes her, and she decides to take the rest of the day off. She changes into a little black dress, a long grey coat, and high-heeled shoes that are too small and chafe her heels, then leaves the practice after a silent goodbye to Ann-Britt. As she turns onto Ringvägen toward the Clarion Hotel at Skanstull, the narrative identifies her as sleepwalking; soon the Sleepwalker no longer hears the passing cars or sees the people around her.

This episode makes the divide audible in Sofia’s thoughts. She directs herself to go home, then imagines that Sofia has already gone home and is instead going to Folkungagatan to buy groceries and make dinner. The imagined destination is an ordinary evening alone, set against the actual movement toward the hotel. She sits in the bar, orders a glass of red wine, and raises it to her lips as Victoria Bergman. At that moment the Sleepwalker is gone, and she looks around. The passage marks a shift in awareness, but does not explain what follows or provide a continuous memory linking the different names and intentions.

Form and significance

The episodes are presented through a productive mismatch between what Sofia remembers and what the narration can show. Her recollection stops at the office or returns only at the locked apartment door, while the account reconstructs the intervening actions, routes, and encounters. This form makes the lapse part of the reader’s experience: the city is traversable in the narrated sequence, but the connection between intention and action is missing for Sofia herself.

The labyrinth image binds the episodes together without making them identical. In the first, Sofia imagines the city as a maze before discovering that the deeper maze is the sleepwalker’s brain; in the later passage, grief precedes a journey whose apparent destination conflicts with her self-instructions. Repeated movement through Stockholm therefore carries both a literal route and a structural meaning: Sofia’s body continues through the world while her conscious account of where she is, what she is doing, and who is acting becomes discontinuous. The text preserves that uncertainty rather than reducing sleepwalking to a fully explained mechanism.