Sofia’s labyrinth

Sofia’s labyrinth is the metaphor Sofia Zetterlund gives to a walk through Södermalm that she cannot remember. The streets seem to offer a route from her clinic to her apartment, but the image’s real subject is the sleepwalker’s mind: a maze of signals and dead ends in which purposeful movement does not guarantee conscious knowledge or memory.

The city mapped as a mind

Sofia first imagines Södermalm as a labyrinth while sitting in her office. In this mental map, the door to her practice on St Paulsgatan is the entrance, and the door to her apartment in Vita Bergen is the exit. The arrangement gives the city an apparently simple direction: she has a point of departure and a destination. Yet the image is unstable from the start. It turns ordinary streets into a structure whose route can be traversed without being understood or retained.

The metaphor soon shifts from urban geography to the brain. The labyrinth is not Södermalm itself, but the sleepwalker’s mind, with canals, nerves and signals, innumerable bends and intersections, and dead ends. This comparison makes the streets legible as an external figure for mental navigation: paths exist, and the body follows them, while conscious recollection fails to register where they lead. The city is not literally a maze; its labyrinthine quality lies in the mismatch between movement through space and access to the experience of moving.

A journey without recollection

After imagining this route, Sofia leaves the practice without remembering saying goodbye to the receptionist. She meets a man in the bar of the Clarion Hotel at Skanstull and goes back to his room; she later cannot recall either the encounter or his surprise that she does not want payment. The memory gap encompasses not only the streets she walked but also significant actions and an interaction with another person. Her own comparison is to trying to remember a dream, an analogy that makes the episode feel both intimate and inaccessible rather than like a route she could reconstruct from a map.

The forgotten itinerary is nevertheless described in concrete geography. Sofia leaves the hotel, walks east along Ringvägen and down Katarina Bangata to Norra Hammarbyhamnen, where she looks at the water, barges, and warehouses across the quay. She then walks back toward Ringvägen, follows it as it curves north into Renstiernas gata, and passes below the steep rock faces of Vita Bergen. These landmarks give the reader a route that Sofia herself cannot recover. The narration thus holds two kinds of knowledge apart: the journey can be charted from outside, but it is absent from the walker’s remembered experience.

At the end of the walk, Sofia reaches her building at about quarter past ten, after roughly four and a half hours out. She has no recollection of the intervening streets or even much sense of what she was thinking. The sharp echo of her boot heels on the stairs wakes her; she shakes rain from her coat, adjusts her damp blouse, and turns the key twice to the right. The ordinary, exact actions at the door mark the return to awareness, but they do not restore the missing journey. She has found the exit without remembering how she got there.

The labyrinth recurs

The image returns when Sofia is about to set out into her labyrinth again. After thinking that Linnea Lundström is dead, she feels despair and considers calling Jeanette Kihlberg, then puts down the receiver and decides she needs the rest of the day off. She leaves the practice in a little black dress, long grey coat, and high-heeled shoes that are too small and chafe her heels. The renewed journey begins in distress and bodily discomfort, not as a consciously planned exploration of the city.

As she moves toward the hotel, the narrative says the Sleepwalker no longer hears the passing cars or sees the people around her. Her thoughts lay out an ordinary alternative: go home, perhaps stop at the supermarket on Folkungagatan for groceries, then make dinner and eat alone. But this imagined sequence does not describe the action in the scene: Sofia enters the hotel, waits at a table in its bar, and orders a glass of red wine. The recurrence therefore sharpens the distance between an announced intention and the course her body takes. The excerpt does not establish what happens after the order; the contrast itself is enough to show how the labyrinth accompanies a break between conscious plan and lived movement.

Meaning and narrative function

The labyrinth joins two kinds of uncertainty. Its streets are specific enough to trace, but the mind that traverses them cannot reliably hold their passage in memory. In the first walk, the reader follows an itinerary Sofia has lost; in the later episode, the designation recurs as she again becomes detached from the traffic and people around her. Repetition turns the image from a one-time comparison into a way of organizing these episodes of disorientation, without making the city itself the cause or the mind’s routes fully knowable.

The image also complicates the idea of an exit. Sofia’s apartment is initially positioned as the destination that closes the imagined route, and she does physically reach home. Yet arrival does not give her the lost experience back: the door opens, but the walk remains inaccessible. In the later recurrence, even the prospect of going home divides into a mundane mental itinerary and a different action in progress. Sofia’s labyrinth is therefore not merely a puzzle with a solution. It names a passage through which she can move and emerge while remaining unable, afterward, to account for the way.