Soviet-born dominatrix navigates Stockholm’s suburbs in an erotic novel credited to Ana From Sweden.
Anastasia, aka Mistress Ana, is a Soviet-born single mother raising two children in Sweden—packing school lunches, planning dinners around supermarket sales, and excelling as a corporate financial analyst. Every other weekend, when her children visit their father, she drives across greater Stockholm to flog, dildo, and otherwise tend to the needs of a rotating cast of submissive men (and others). Framed as weekly chapters, her “diary” entries cover events in 2022 and ’23. Ana shows herself to be fixated on Gabriel, a handsome, evasive German expatriate who arrives as a submissive and gradually reveals himself as a subtler manipulator than any of her “bottoms.” Their dynamic involves her controlling the sessions and him controlling the emotional temperature between them; their story resolves with a twist that lands with quiet force. Charming, pathetic, and/or disturbing minor figures orbit around Ana’s and Gabriel’s lives, including the emotionally obtuse Sven, and Alpha Tobias, a married Swede who comically overestimates his own dominance. The book’s most moving chapter is a raw account of Ana’s father’s death, which reframes her sense of toughness and profound isolation. The protagonist’s dominance extends from her sex life to meal planning to her refusal to take sick days, as well as her cool contempt for (and partial participation in) her adopted culture’s emotional evasiveness. The novel is illuminating as a story of female dom behavior and grief, and it offers an outsider’s perspective on the peculiarities of her current home. Ana refuses payment on principle but is frank about the overhead cost of her work: how much equipment costs, the mileage accrued in traveling to neutral meeting points, and the logistical gymnastics of scheduling sessions into child-free weekends. The descriptions of the sex itself are relatively restrained; what preoccupies the protagonist is power and refusal. Readers seeking ultra-graphic transgression will be disappointed, but those curious about the delivery of steady desire (budgeted and on schedule) will find some satisfaction.
An informative tale of a dom’s life with an ethnographer’s eye for Swedish culture.
Originally published at: KIRKUS