Mirja Unge’s debut collection of short stories achieved considerable success when it was published in Sweden. The sixteen stories that make up the collection bear striking similarities and preoccupations. Largely written as first-person narratives, they articulate the female adolescent view on life and relationships.
The prose is sharp and abrupt and Unge does away with conventional rules of punctuation or dialogue. Her narrative mimics the fractured emotional world of her female protagonists, who are mainly weary and vulnerable, out of sorts with themselves and the people around them. There are flashes of vivid visual brilliance. In ‘Four Hundred Kronor,’ the opening lines describe the protagonist’s coat, as it ‘swung round her legs,’ and ‘her handbag gleaming and the hand that held it hard.’
Unge’s stories portray a cityscape that is perpetually cloaked in winter and where sex, violence, drugs and poverty are symptoms of alienation and estrangement. In ‘Oranges’ for instance, a young girl listlessly receives some oranges as an eighteenth birthday present from her divorced father. In the title story, ‘It was just Yesterday,’ another school girl passively describes how she casually lost her virginity to a stranger, while the ‘My Bruv’s Had Enough,’ has a girl confronting an old drug addict brother who has escaped from hospital.
It Was Just Yesterday is both atmospheric and menacing. We are always aware of danger lurking with no possibilities or redemption or resolve.