Linnea Axelsson’s New Epic Opens Fissures Toward the Spiritual

Two teenage friends no longer speak to each other, while a land conflict divides their families and exposes deeper fractures in a Sámi community. That is the starting point for Linnea Axelsson’s new 912-page work, “Saivo.”

The novel takes place in Silbadalen, a fictional settlement in Sápmi, during the days before the summer holidays in 1987. The Chernobyl disaster hangs over the village like a dull shadow. The fallout has made crops and reindeer unfit to eat, while snow falls as if the earth itself has forgotten the season.

At the center of the story is a dispute over land. The state plans to build a repository for spent nuclear fuel on Sámi territory, and forced relocations loom. Instead of uniting the village, the conflict has opened a rift between northern and southern Sámi people. The divide reaches beyond immediate politics, touching the boundary between Sámi and Swedish identities, tradition and modernization, and superstition and an increasingly hard-edged reality.

The plot follows Nina and Rosa, whose families stand on opposite sides of the dispute. Rosa’s disabled and ostracized younger brother Gustuu and their father Simon, a newly divorced man facing a midlife crisis, are among the figures caught in the conflict. Nina’s northern Sámi mother Miliana and grandfather Johannes are grieving Sunna, Nina’s grandmother, who has recently left the earthly world.

The title refers to saivo, a concept in Sámi folklore describing a sacred mountain region, or sometimes a two-layered lake, where the physical world borders the spirit world and the living can encounter the dead. Bremmer sees the novel as clearly related to Axelsson’s August Prize-winning “Aednan,” particularly in its return to a maximalist lyrical prose arranged in stanzas.