Sofia’s tape recorder and cassette archive

Sofia Zetterlund’s tape recorder and cassette archive turn memory into something she can capture, replay, and keep. Initially, recording is a way to examine the experiences of others; later, as her own identity becomes unstable, the recorded monologues take on a different force. Tapes collected neatly on a shelf become more than notes: they are a personal record that can guide her when her sense of self and the past falter.

Recording as a Method

Sofia uses the recorder to speak through memories rather than simply to preserve a finished account. In one early recording, she looks down into the street and sees a woman walking a black-and-white Border collie. The dog brings Hannah to mind: shortly after returning from interrailing, Hannah was bitten so badly by a similar dog that she had to have a finger amputated, yet she remained devoted to dogs. The sight prompts Sofia to question why she cannot feel the same tenderness and love for animals as other people. The recording begins with an immediate, personal uncertainty, not with a settled explanation.

As she continues, memory moves associatively. A recollection of a dog attacking a rabbit leads into the story of a three-year-old child bitten in the face after feeding the dog ice cream. From there the remembered sequence turns to horses and riding lessons, adolescent longing, smoking, Valium, and drinking too much. It also returns to a moment of wanting to be young again, sit in her mother’s lap, and feel her embrace, while recognizing that her mother was frightened of him too. The cassette holds these shifts together without making them a neat chronology: one image opens onto another, and the act of speaking allows painful family circumstances to surface alongside ordinary details.

The Archive and Its Private Setting

After one recording, Sofia switches off the machine, goes to the kitchen, and sits at the table. She rewinds the tape and removes it. By then, she has built a sizeable collection of memories, arranged neatly on a shelf in the study. The physical routine matters: speaking, stopping, rewinding, and putting away the cassette gives the remembered material a durable place outside her immediate thoughts. The archive accumulates through repeated acts rather than through one complete account.

The recorder also appears in relation to the concealed room where Gao Lian sits drawing. Sofia enters the room, sits on the bed, and puts in a fresh cassette. The room is described as a den and a refuge where she can be herself. In this setting, the device belongs to a private practice rather than a public explanation: it is present alongside Gao Lian’s drawing and the shelter of the room. The scene establishes the recorder as part of Sofia’s continuing work with memory, while leaving the content of that particular cassette unspecified.

From Clinical Tool to Personal Guide

The function of recorded monologues changes as Sofia tries to understand Victoria Bergman. At first, those monologues act as catalysts in Sofia’s effort to understand Victoria. Later, when the voice she associates with Victoria becomes more immediate, the direction reverses: the memories no longer serve chiefly as material for studying someone else. They include explanations and answers, and Sofia experiences them as a manual or guide to life. The same practice of recording therefore shifts from observation toward personal reliance.

That shift takes a stark form when Sofia speaks aloud that Victoria Bergman does not exist, while recognizing that the voice is present and stronger than before. The recorder’s red lamp shows that the machine is recording. With her hands trembling and sweat on her, Sofia experiences herself as outside her body and in two places at once: beside the table and inside the girl’s head. The recorder does not itself explain what is happening, but its visible recording light fixes the moment as something being captured while her usual boundary between observer and remembered self breaks down.

A loud noise from the street interrupts the episode; the voice vanishes, and Sofia switches off the machine. The interruption gives the scene a sharp change in state: an inward experience that had seemed to occupy both Sofia and the kitchen ends abruptly in response to an external sound. The recorder thus records neither a stable testimony nor a complete recovery of the past. It accompanies experiences whose meaning can alter, intensify, or stop without warning.

Memory, Evidence, and Limits

Sofia’s written reflections on Victoria make the uncertainty surrounding these records explicit. She considers whether Victoria’s lapses are ordinary memory gaps or signs of dissociative identity disorder, notes that they often arise around childhood and earliest memories, and wonders whether the memories are real or mixed with Victoria’s later thoughts. She also records Victoria’s account of Crow Girl as a mixture of the others, apart from Sleepwalker. These questions belong to Sofia’s written observations, not to a claim that the tapes independently verify Victoria’s memories. Together, the records show her confronting the problem of how a remembered account is formed and who is speaking through it.

A separate gap in Sofia’s clinical paperwork sharpens the distinction between preserving an account and possessing a complete record. When she opens Samuel Bai’s file, she finds only one sheet containing notes from the first exploratory session and a few lines from the next two meetings, although her appointment diary shows that they met forty-five times. The missing written notes do not establish what was or was not captured on tape, but they underscore that records can be partial. The cassette archive’s importance lies instead in its repeated, intimate collection of memories—and in the changed role those memories acquire as Sofia’s own past and identity become harder to keep at a distance.