Johanne Lykke Holm’s incantatory writing works like a slow irresistible poison.
Strega is a village in the mountains bordered by a black lake. Nine nineteen-year-old women ride the cable car to the Olympic Hotel. Daughters of working mothers and invisible fathers, they have been sent there by their parents to learn to become housewives, training to serve customers who never come. Time drags on, a resilient sisterhood settles like a dream in the luxury of empty rooms. Liquors and cigarettes accompany the indolence of these young rebels who live in the bright light of the hotel’s large park. Then one of them disappears. She has been murdered, they all know it, because since childhood they have known that a woman’s life can turn into a crime scene at any moment.
In an exceptional style, with a sensual dreamlike quality halfway between the world of Zelda Fitzgerald and the cinema of Sofia Coppola, Strega tells the story, full of milk and blood, of nine women struggling with an elusive evil spell.
