The Devil’s Grip by Lina Wolf
The Devil’s Grip
by Lina Wolff, translated by Saskia Vogel
Other Press, 2024; 288 pages; $23.95
Reviewed by Jessica Key
From the first sentence, Lina Wolff’s The Devil’s Grip makes it clear that it is a book full of lust: “When she gets to Florence, all the couples making love are what overwhelm her at first.” Against the amorous backdrop of Italy, how could our narrator not fall in love? but what follows is a madcap, blackly comic, psychological thriller that explores a toxic, abusive relationship.
The narrator is both unnamed and unreliable, but full of poignant insights about love and womanhood:
“Being a man, she thinks as she watches him sitting there, is like living in Guatemala. No seasons, no cycles, no swings — just sun and stasis in the body, seventy-seven degrees all year round. Being a man is like being a stowaway on the upper deck and simply enjoying the view. As for a woman, she’s struggling in the Arctic on a sputtering ship, its engines threatening to deadlock any second now, all the while she hopes that an iceberg won’t block her progress so she can keep sailing along for another few sea miles at a decent speed.”
The narrator and her partner, il pulito, fall into toxic relationship patterns within a few short chapters. She is jealous, possessive. “The sickness is at once sweet and brutal, dolce e bestiale allo stesso tempo, dulce y feroz al mismo tiempo. A poison that tastes of sugar but is also corrosive.” He is later flagrant in his infidelities. Then they both are. He is violent. They are both codependent. A couple’s therapist they very briefly see immediately recommends she leave him — she does not. until, finally, she does, following an American man she had an affair with back to New Orleans. New Orleans, like Ben, is initially alluring, but, unsurprisingly, escape is not escape, and she yearns for Florence and her devilish love.
During her brief solo visit with their therapist, they discuss Jungian psychology, as well as the narrator’s belief that her and il pulito’s behaviours can be explained by the fact that they’re inhabited by demons — therefore they’re not responsible for their own actions. After an adversarial session, the therapist, exhausted, tells her “There is no demon. There are only people. Confused, stressed, and thoughtless people, people who seek relief through their lust, their violence, their egoism, and their sickness. That’s all there is. No demon, no devil’s lair, just the two of you, the two of you acting like two monsters, nothing more.” The narrator simply demands their money back and leaves to reunite with il pulito.
The story itself often feels bleak, and the narrator’s behaviour often frustrating — she’ll come to an insight or decision and by the next page, do something that makes you want to scream. but the book remains engaging, even “page-turning” because of Wolff’s vivid prose, which make the narrator’s decisions, however maddening, feel authentic to the behaviour of victims of abusive relationships. The unsettling fascination the narrator and il pulito have with each other, and the grip that they hold on each other was captured in interesting, often poetic language, that tangles both English and Italian beautifully — a special testament to the translator, Saskia Vogel. The exploration of a toxic relationship portrayed as special and captivating — in addition to hurtful — felt interesting and nuanced, as well as lending to the mounting horror of the book.
This is a peculiar and beautiful book in the way so much of my favourite Nordic fiction is, with vivid writing, strange situations, and interesting characters. An intense and unrelenting love-meets-horror story played out in broad daylight on the streets of Florence.