devastation rises to a crescendo as God’s final visit to earth reveals an apocalyptic landscape where the oceans have dried out and fire and poison have ruined all life. The text combines seriousness with a refreshing lack of respect; but the conclusion with its general reconciliation and convenient fresh start fails to do justice to the issues that have been raised.
  Quinnan och Dr Dreuf {Woman and Dr Dreuf. 1994). is a very different kind of work, triumphant in its sense of humour and ingenious control. Narrated in the third person, most of this text is a dialogue, with the sparse prose slowing down the pace and reinforcing the rhythm of the language.
The setting is the consulting room of Dr Dreuf, the famous psychoanalyst. The woman who comes to consult him is troubled by the countless female characters who seem to be crowding within her and demand her constant attention. Her analysis reveals these female characters to include Eve, a nun in the Middle Ages, a witch burnt at the stake, an upper-class lady around 1700, and a girl raped in a forest. The antithetical structure from Deliria is apparent here, but most striking is the intensity with which the analysand conveys the plight of these women, to the extent that she assumes the identity of each one of them and the smells and sounds of the scenes she depicts fill Dr Dreuf’s room. This physical vividness is in sharp contrast to the setting of the consulting room, where a shrunken, dwarf-like Dr Dreuf sits surrounded by the dusty, disintegrating volumes of Professor Popokoff from which he has derived the sum total of his knowledge about woman. And the triumphant climax here is the gradual revelation that the analysand who is so troubled by these female characters is in fact identical with the narrator, or even with the author herself. Allusions to texts such as Aliide, Aliide and Deliria unambiguously locate this narrative within Mare Kandre’s oeuvre, establishing the author as the hidden analyst who analyses Dr Dreuf as he analyses his woman patient. As information travels unhindered between the narrator/author and the woman patient, Dr Dreuf is irresistibly trapped, revealing prejudices that are characteristic of patriarchal society in general rather than of Freud’s thought in particular.

The analysand’s attempt to strangle Dr Dreuf brings into sharp focus the fact that the consulting room is effectively a mental hospital to which women are confined against their will. But it is the text as such that ultimately triumphs over Dr Dreuf and the system which he represents: anxious to be the one who is doing the writing,³⁹ he pours scorn on the analysand’s ambitions to write;⁴⁰ but it is clearly these ambitions which, on the level of fiction, have resulted in the book which so strikingly reveals Dr Dreuf for what he is. Inventive and funny, Woman and Dr Dreuf is further evidence of the versatility and range of Mare Kandre’s talent.

After the above was published Mare Kandre wrote three more books, Bestiarium (1999), Hetta och vitt (Heat and white, 2001) and Xavier (2002).
The scene of Bestiarium is 19th century London. Fatherless young Doré spends his days filling accounting books together with other men, all dressed in black. He spends his spare time in his childhood home were he unwillingly looks after his mother who lies unconscious after a stroke.
Then his mother dies and Doré suffers from a crisis which next to makes him succumb. By mere chance, or an ingenious destiny, he is directed to the moor landscape of the lake district where a few elderly women apparently have been waiting for him in their castle. And in the lake a monster is waiting whose eye brings unexpected consequences for Doré.
  Mare Kandre is not afraid of features which could have been fetched from a gothic horror novel.

Hetta och vitt (Heat and white) is a collection of thirteen short stories. The scenes are laid in timeless woods and spaces but also in contemporary cities and war scenes. Such as the refugee family whose life is gradually obliterated. Or the tortured man whose past never loses its grip. Here are women and girls who let go of everything in order to follow an impulse, a love, or a diffuse character. Here are found harrowing depictions of the ambivalent and provoking experience of expecting a child and being a mother. Hetta och vitt confirms Mare Kandre’s position as a gifted linguistic artist with a strong feeling for form and imagination.

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