The Sense

The Sense is an involuntary perceptive ability shared by Flora and Elvy, allowing them to discern emotional states and lingering impressions around people and places. It turns private distress and past events into something they experience as nearly physical evidence. The ability gives the two women an understanding unavailable to those around them, but its constant exposure to other people’s unhappiness makes that understanding painful rather than empowering.

Definition and Scope

The Sense is difficult to describe precisely: it comes across as a scent-impression, something present in the air that cannot be pinned down like an ordinary object. Flora and Elvy can detect an impression around both people and places, and the experience can carry information about what happened or what someone feels. Its uncertainty of form does not mean uncertainty in their response. They recognize the impression directly, before either has constructed a reasoned explanation for it.

The ability also differs from simply guessing how someone feels. Flora experiences it as knowledge of the people around her: she senses their states of mind and finds that their outward accounts do not conceal them from her. Emotional distress becomes almost olfactory, as if the air itself carries evidence of what a person is trying not to say. The novel does not provide a technical explanation or a way to test the Sense; it presents the ability through what the women perceive and the consequences of living with it.

Recognition Between Flora and Elvy

Flora and Elvy first discuss their shared ability after they independently avoid a stretch of waterfront near City Hall in Stockholm. When Elvy asks whether Flora had wanted to walk there, Flora says she had not. Elvy then admits that she felt the same thing: something bad had happened there, and she thinks someone drowned. Flora adds the details she senses—that the man had intended to jump from a boat and then struck his head on the edge of the wharf. Neither checks whether their impressions are correct. They know, and spend the rest of the afternoon exchanging stories.

The recognition matters because Flora has believed herself alone in this experience. Elvy has encountered other people with the ability, but Flora has known no one else like herself. When the two women first spoke about it a couple of years earlier, their shared recognition relieved Flora: another person could accept that the Sense was real to her without treating her as crazy. Their connection begins not with an explanation but with confirmation that each has encountered the same otherwise isolating perception.

The Cost of Perception

Both women began experiencing the Sense in their early teens. For Flora, its burden is the way it makes other people’s concealed unhappiness impossible to ignore. At school she is surrounded by students who are unhappy, including some who do not recognize their own unhappiness. Serious conversations with teachers become especially distressing: as a teacher criticizes her conduct, she senses the speaker’s anxiety, worry, fear of her, and dissatisfaction with his own life. What makes the encounter painful is the gap between the authority of the person correcting her and the distress she perceives beneath his words.

Elvy places this sensitivity in social rather than heroic terms. In another society the women might have been treated as shamans, or burned at the stake; in contemporary Sweden, she observes, people call them hysterical, self-destructive, or overly sensitive. She also tells Flora that lying is part of how people maintain social life, sometimes as a form of consideration, and that unfiltered truth can be self-centred. Flora understands the argument but still finds deception revolting: when people lie, she senses something foul in the air around them. The Sense therefore unsettles not only individual relationships but the everyday social practice of concealing, smoothing over, or withholding feelings.

Elvy warns that the ability cannot be switched off. Her comparison is not to a gift that can be mastered, but to a smell one eventually stops noticing after sitting in an outhouse; even she sometimes wishes for a clothespin over her nose. She calls the experience a kind of purgatory and tells Flora she must get used to it if she wants to live. The advice offers no cure. Its value is that Elvy speaks from the same condition and recognizes the cost without pretending that willpower can make the perceptions disappear.

Consequences and Later Manifestation

The conversation changes Flora’s immediate life. She stops cutting herself and begins visiting Elvy more often, taking the bus to a church in Täby Municipality even during the week and returning to school the next morning. She also volunteers to help care for Elvy’s husband, Tore. There is little to do, but Elvy lets Flora feed him porridge so she can feel involved. The Sense itself is not shown as a treatment for Flora’s distress; rather, being understood by someone who shares it helps her move toward company and practical care.

Their closeness has limits. Elvy tries to begin conversations about God, while Flora is an atheist; Flora, in turn, plays Marilyn Manson for her grandmother without success. They do not have to share a faith or taste in music to sustain their bond. Elvy can tolerate Flora’s horror films in modest amounts, and their ability to speak openly about the Sense has already given the relationship a form of mutual recognition that disagreement does not undo.

Later, as Flora leaves in an ambulance, Elvy remains at the gate. A trace of Tore that had lingered in his room and slowly receded suddenly returns in Elvy’s mind at full force. Her fingers spread, her eyes widen, and the feeling drives through her body; she braces herself against a fencepost. She hears Tore’s voice inwardly, pleading for his mother’s help, saying that he is stuck, does not want to go away, and wants to stay home. The episode extends the Sense beyond the women’s earlier recognition of emotional states and past impressions: it can also make a person’s urgent experience present to someone else. Elvy’s bodily reaction comes before any explanation, sustaining the Sense’s central ambiguity. It is never turned into a controllable instrument; it remains an intimate, involuntary exposure to what other people carry.