Review | ‘Small Comfort’ by Ia Genberg is all about the corrupting influence of money

Two people are asked to play Monopoly. Before the game begins, one player is given more money, resources and opportunities to move around the board. The other is left to make do with less. In the end, the richer player is ruder, more callous and less empathetic.

This was what a famous experiment by psychologist Paul Piff at the University of California, Berkeley, found in the 2010s. Swedish novelist Ia Genberg examines this revelation by making it the central argument in her anthology, Small Comfort , longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize . Translated by Kira Josefsson, the book is a strange, exhilarating and sharply funny set of five interconnected stories about what money does to our moral, emotional and social lives.