BLINDNESS

Author: José Saramago
Year: 1998 (1995)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

In Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “Seams” (in the short story collection “Tales of the Bizarre” reviewed in January 2020) a man wakes to discover subtle but uncanny alterations in his world. Socks that suddenly have seams, stamps that are now round instead of square, the familiar blue ink in his pen inexplicably replaced by brown. Socks aren’t supposed to have seams, are they? These small deviations from the expected unravel his sense of stability. He is bewildered, but those around him find nothing unusual. For them, round stamps and brown ink are the natural order of things. Through these quiet distortions, Tokarczuk exposes how fragile the category of “normality” really is, how dependent our sanity and social coherence are on countless unnoticed details that we assume to be permanent. If such trivial shifts can destabilise us, how deep are our roots in what we call reality? How thin is the membrane separating order from chaos?

José Saramago’s “Blindheten” (“Blindness”) poses this question on a catastrophic scale. Whereas Tokarczuk’s protagonist falters before the dissonance of socks and stamps, Saramago strips his characters of sight altogether, and with it, the entire apparatus of modern life. The sudden epidemic of blindness tears through an unnamed city, dissolving the seams that hold civilisation together. Law, government, decency, even the simplest routines of cleanliness or trust collapse within days. If Tokarczuk reveals the precariousness of order in miniature, Saramago demonstrates its total implosion. Civilisation, it seems, is not an edifice of stone but a scaffolding of habits, agreements, and illusions that threatens to collapse at the slightest tremor.

Among the many who stumble through the blindness, two figures form the novel’s most striking contrast. As all other characters they remain nameless: the doctor’s wife and the girl with the sunglasses. They appear at first as opposites. The doctor’s wife embodies middle-class respectability, a figure of family stability and conventional decency. The girl with the sunglasses, a part-time sex worker (not by financial necessity but by sexual promiscuity) belongs to the margins, shielding herself from social stigma behind her tinted lenses. Yet in the moment of disaster, their paths converge, and in their juxtaposition Saramago reveals two poles of human response to catastrophe: one grounded in responsibility and altruism, the other in intimacy and rediscovered dignity.

SPOILER ALERT

The doctor’s wife, uniquely spared from blindness, steps out of her prominent husband’s shadow and becomes the group’s reluctant leader. Her immunity to blindness is never explained. It is allegorical, a reminder that to see is not only to perceive but to bear responsibility. She becomes a kind of inverted panopticon. In Foucault’s famous image, the one who sees from the central tower exerts power over the many who are seen. Yet here, the doctor’s wife does not discipline but suffers. Her vision is a burden. She alone must clean the excrement-covered ward, lead the group through chaos, bury the dead, and carry the memory of all she witnesses. Seeing, for her, is not empowerment but an ethical wound, an obligation to act when others cannot. For this reason, she keeps her ability a secret from the others.

The girl with the sunglasses undergoes a transformation of another sort. Stripped of the markers of her profession, she is no longer defined by society’s hypocrisy. Her beauty, once a commodity, becomes irrelevant; her sunglasses, formerly a mask against judgment, lose their function in a world where no one sees. In their place emerges a person of compassion and tenderness. She nurses the old man with the black eyepatch with a love that is untainted by transaction, discovering an intimacy that had eluded her in her previous life. If the doctor’s wife embodies the pain of clarity, the girl with the sunglasses embodies the possibility of moral vision even within blindness.

Together, they lay bare the thinness of the veneer that Thomas Hobbes diagnosed centuries earlier. In “Leviathan” (reviewed in April 2022) Hobbes warned that without strong institutions, life reverts to a brutish war of all against all. Saramago stages this collapse with merciless precision. Within days, the quarantine asylum devolves into violence, hoarding, and sexual exploitation. Food becomes currency, women are traded like rations, cruelty and cowardice reign. Western civilisation, so confident in its legal codes and humanitarian principles, is revealed as the emperor’s new clothes. It rests not on unshakable foundations but on such invisible seams as agreements, routines, shared perceptions, and as Hobbes would argue, the fear of repercussions. Once sight is lost, the seams disintegrate.

And yet, the novel resists cynicism. For even within this Hobbesian nightmare, solidarity flickers. The doctor’s wife shoulders responsibility without succumbing to domination. The girl with the sunglasses discovers dignity in love rather than passion. Together, they sketch the possibility of a different humanity: one not guaranteed, but latent beneath the collapse. Saramago suggests that civilisation’s scaffolding may be fragile, but within the rubble there are still gestures of recognition and care that refuse to be vanquished.

The ending offers no easy redemption. Sight returns arbitrarily, just as it was lost. We may assume that civilisation will be rebuilt. The city remains there. But whether it will be less blind than before remains doubtful. The doctor’s wife, still sighted, has seen too much to trust in renewal. The girl with the sunglasses, by contrast, carries the fragile hope that love discovered in blindness might persist into sight. Between them, they frame the paradox of the human condition: responsibility and compassion, burden and intimacy, clarity and fragility.

Saramago’s novel may be a provocative accusation against the weakness and baseness of man, but it is without a doubt a triumph for literature. His prose flows like an unbroken current, lyrical, ironic, and humane, where his long sentences carry profound truths, while his short ones either prick or punch in just the right spot as is necessary. And it seems that when one looks at the world of today, one may feel a little like Tokarczuk’s protagonist wondering about abnormal seams. We used to berate liars, didn’t we? Fascism used to be a bad thing, didn’t it? One would be forgiven for entertaining the idea that in order to open certain minds to the truth, they first need to be gently pricked… or in some cases, forcefully punched.

THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

Author: Salman Rushdie
Year: 1999
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

Not long ago I found myself in a conversation with a friend on the subject of Salman Rushdie. She confessed with the charming candour which is the privilege of the truly well-read, that although she had cultivated a respectable level of acquaintance with post-colonial literature, she had not as much as brushed against a single page of Rushdie’s writing. My own first encounter with the author’s name was in 1989 when ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, a bitter old fart with a singularly unamused temperament, issued a fatwa, a vengeful prize on Rushdie’s head, thinly veiled as a religious obligation.

I was then thirteen years old and recall* that Sweden’s indignation, apart from condemning the cleric’s barbarous decree, was triggered by the meek response by the Swedish Academy, which is the college of intellectuals who, among other duties, elect the yearly Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Some years later, at the questionable intellectual maturity expected from an Upper Secondary School student, I finally came across the book that had vexed the ayatollah to the point where he reduced himself to a petulant child: The Satanic Verses. I bought it, read it, and I loved it.

Those acquainted with my reading habits, will be aware that I am a most unfaithful reader. Even with the authors I profess to adore, I rarely commit to more than one or two titles before curiosity of new ideas and new minds fling me onto the hunting path for the next name. Rushdie, however, is one of the rare exceptions of writers that I gladly read again and again. After conversing with my friend on the subject, I was overcome by a craving for Rushdie’s writing. I reached for “Marken under hennes fötter” (“The Ground Beneath her Feet”) which had been collecting dust in by bookcase long enough and merely a few pages in concluded, that it was bound to meet with all of my expectations.

Rushdie is one of the most erudite writers in the post-war era who comfortably commands the particulars of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, music, literature, and art among many other fields. To imbibe his prose is to experience that rare sensation of learning while one admires, and admiring while one rejoices. Not merely a man of infinite knowledge, but equally importantly of a magical ability to craft his characters and tell his story.

“Marken under hennes fötter” dramatises the instability of identity in a postcolonial world where the ground beneath the self is perpetually shifting. Through the intertwined lives of the introvert artist Ormus Cama, the extrovert diva Vina Apsara, and the melancholic observer Rai, the novel stages how colonial histories and global cultural flows fracture, hybridise, and creolise personal identities.

Ormus Cama embodies the diasporic artist who cannot be contained by national or cultural boundaries. Born in Bombay yet perpetually oriented toward elsewhere, he channels songs from a parallel world, suggesting that his creativity itself is transnational and borderless. His identity is never rooted in one cultural context but always fluid and in motion, making him emblematic of the postcolonial subject who finds both possibility and alienation in cosmopolitanism.

Vina Apsara is constructed as both a person and a mythic icon. Her fame and sexual charisma transform her into a commodity of global culture, consumed through images and stories. For her, identity is a performance staged across multiple audiences, from India across Europe to the Americas, each demanding a different version of her. She epitomises the postcolonial predicament of being seen not as a coherent self but as a projection of the desires of others, whether they stem from colonial fantasies, mythic archetypes, or pedestrian clickbait journalism.

Rai, the narrator-photographer, wrestles with identity through mediation. As a Parsi in India and later as an exile in the West, he experiences marginality and unbelonging, which he manages by constructing narratives and images. His photographs reveal that identity in the postcolonial context is always framed, never raw, captured through lenses shaped by history, politics, and personal longing, personalised, although not necessarily internalised.

Together, these three figures show that in Rushdie’s postcolonial universe, identity is not essence but fabrication: a shifting collage of myths, histories, and performances, precariously balanced on unstable ground. Rushdie’s depiction of fluid, fabricated identities resonates with Anthony Giddens’ account of identity in late modernity. For Giddens, the self is no longer grounded in tradition but must be “reflexively” constructed through ongoing choices, narratives, and relationships. Similarly, Rushdie’s characters live without essentialist anchors, improvising selves from fractured cultural inheritances and unstable geographies. Where Giddens emphasizes the individual’s responsibility to “keep a coherent story going,” Rushdie complicates this with myth and tragedy, suggesting that personal identity, though fabricated, is also subject to forces—earthquakes, media spectacles, colonial legacies—that resist individual control.

By bowing to Rushdie’s compelling argument and acknowledging the malleability of the terrain wherein we so desperately try to set our roots and feign stability, we must realise that the ground is moving not only under her feet, but also under our own.

It is my humble proposition, that the sole reason that the Nobel Prize in Literature has not yet found its way into Salman Rushdie’s prize cabinet, which already contains the Booker Prize, The PEN Golden Award, The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, several honorary doctorates, and a knighthood, is the Swedish Academy’s embarrassing history with the author. It is not unreasonable to suspect, that bestowing this honour on him now would bring back to the limelight the obeisance to the Iranian ayatollah as unbecoming to men of taste as their silence was to men of wit. The Academy’s recent scandals surely reinforce their hesitation. How much more splendid then, to seize the occasion to right an unfortunate wrong and to save itself from the eternal disgrace of having ignored one of the finest writers of our age.

 

* I furthermore recall Margaret Thatcher saying in an interview that she did not even find the book particularly well-written.

BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY

Author: Helen Fielding
Year: 1998 (1996)
Publisher: Egmont Richter AB
Language: Swedish (translator Carla Wiberg)

Within the rich treasure trove of Polish cinema, there exists one movie* that has reached cult status in Poland yet is little known beyond its borders, owing most probably to the language barrier. Its hapless hero is a gentleman of forty-nine, a scholar of linguistics whose exquisite sensitivity would, in our present age of classifications, doubtless be catalogued under the autism spectrum. Change is to him unbearable, grammar a battlefield he is prepared to die on, interaction with others an infernal struggle, and the world as a whole a chaotic performance to which he seems to have tragically misplaced the script.

The Polish public, whose sense of humour I flatter myself to understand, has seen fit to classify this movie as a comedy, and indeed it was under that cheerful pretext that I was persuaded to watch it some years ago. To me, however, it was a dark manifestation of a deeply troubled person’s hysterical attempts to stay afloat in a social environment that he perceives as intrusive, incomprehensible, and intolerably cruel. Where others discovered wit, I saw only torment. The protagonist’s suffering was so absolute, so relentless, that it banished comedy much like thunderclouds banish the sun.

My encounter with Helen Fielding’s widely acclaimed novel “Bridget Jones dagbok” (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) summoned a very similar sensation. Although, according to the book cover, Nick Hornby touted it as the product of “a comedy genius,” and Salman Rushdie assured us it was of such brilliance that “even men will laugh”, I found myself reading not with amusement but with a lump of lead lodged in the pit of my being.

This novel follows the form of the private diary of Bridget Jones, a single, professional woman in her thirties, navigating the perils of her London existence. She struggles with extremely low self-esteem, unhealthy body ideals, elevated consumption of nicotine and alcohol, and a destructive attitude to relationships with her family, but first and foremost, with men. The diary itself is sometimes confessional, sometimes incoherent, mostly emotional. She writes when drunk, she scribbles when under stress, and occasionally her notes are inexplicably absent altogether.

Bridget’s angst bleeds through every page, and even the misunderstandings, antics, and pitfalls, that most promise comic relief are blackened by Bridget’s palpable misery and obvious need for urgent help. One begins to wonder, not about Bridget, who is after all a fictional character, but about the curious cruelty of those who find amusement in her despair. To laugh at such anguish, however prettily disguised as comedy, seems less a tribute to wit than an indictment of empathy. As for me, the laughs were few and far between.

As a piece of literature, “Bridget Jones dagbok” also has some notable shortcomings. Born as a newspaper serial in The Independent before assuming the costume of a novel in 1996, it still bears the marks of its episodic parentage. One suspects that Bridget herself was created to critique the hysterical hunt for social conformity that many women in London seem to experience. Bridget is pressured to desperately chase careers, collect lovers, and amass party invitations, all the while betraying her own natural lazy self. This critique, if indeed it was at all intended, might have gleamed with sharper irony, had Fielding bestowed upon Bridget some genuine passion incompatible in its absurdity or even nobility with society’s demands.

And so, all things considered, the novel is not particularly well-written. The diary form, though not in itself problematic, demands a rigour of execution that Fielding too often falls short of. In the hands of a master, such intimacy can strike with devastating force as titles such as “The Color Purple” (see my review of April 2020) or “Doctor Glas” (see my review of August 2023) testify to, but here the illusion falters. Whether from the remnants of its serial inception, the imperfections of translation, or the author’s ineptitude, the pact with the reader is repeatedly broken. A drunk woman may well stumble in speech, but she does not misspell her diary to mimic her slurred diction. Long conversational meanderings are rarely transcribed in full, in particular if the writer is trying to make a completely unrelated point. And when the dinner collapses into the drain, and one is scrambling to rescue whatever can still be salvaged, one does not pause mid-calamity to jot it down.

I understand that these inconsistencies were committed in the name of comedy, yet they betray the cruel truth that the epistolary novel is a treacherous form, mastered by few and mishandled by many. Indeed, I hazard the heresy that this is one of those rare occasions when the movie, at least in the sense of a comedy, eclipses the book.

 

 * ”Dzień świra” from 2002, directed by Marek Koterski.

SOKRATES

Author: Louis-André Dorion
Year: 2006 (2005)
Publisher: Alhambras Pocketencyklopedi
Language: Swedish (translator Jan Stolpe)

It was one of those golden late Friday afternoons in spring, when the very air seems to dictate idleness, that my supervisor and I were walking hurriedly through the corridors of the Department of Social Anthropology at Free School Lane hoping to not be late for the weekly senior seminar. We arrived just in time to spare ourselves the indignity of bursting in on the introductory remarks of the usually highly regarded external guest and mumbling our apologies while trying to hunt down some empty seats, which would invariably be located in the very centre of the room. As I was still catching my breath after the brisk walk, my supervisor leaned over to me and said “Listen carefully to this man. I don’t agree with a word he says, but given the assumptions he makes, his conclusions are absolutely brilliant.”

Now, almost two decades later, his words come back to me as I read Louis-André Dorion’s short but useful introduction to one of the ancient world’s most famous thinkers: Socrates.

In a famous event in Socrates’ life, a friend of his asks the Oracle of Delphi who the wisest man in Greece is. The Oracle, with that mischievous cruelty peculiar to divinities, indicates Socrates. On hearing this, Socrates, knowing very well that men parading their wisdom usually possess little more than gilded ignorance, concludes that the single thing that makes his wisdom superior to theirs is that he is aware of his lack thereof. “I know that I know nothing”*. Armed with this paradox, he sets off to enlighten his fellow Athenians by convincing them that they, too, know very little.

His foremost instrument was the dialogue, famously reproduced (and undoubtedly embellished) by his student Plato, and he is generally credited with establishing the most inconvenient of arts: critical thinking. This process of dialectic reasoning, whereby questions and answers in concert lead to the truth, demands above all else, definitions; for if words are not universalised they remain woefully parochial, and no philosophy can thrive in a provincial setting. This type of truth-seeking by dialogue is known as “elenchus” or simply The Socratic Method. A century later, Aristotle distilled this principle down to his famous syllogism** “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”

The ability to disentangle opinion from reason was in essence the whole of Socrates’ mission. And the lesson my supervisor wanted me to learn from the guest lecturer at Cambridge. Socrates is sometimes thought of as a midwife, possibly inspired by his mother’s profession, who helps to deliver other men’s logical conclusions that they may not have been able to reach without him, but which had dwelled unrecognised inside of them all the time. By this analogy, Socrates would never place his own thoughts in the heads of others, but merely help them clarify their own. This would be consistent with three important points Socrates is claimed to have made about himself:

1.      His famous declaration that he knows nothing. If you have no thoughts of your own, you have nothing to put inside someone else’s head;

2.      His insistence that he never tutored or lectured anyone. If you know nothing, you will be hard pressed to deposit any knowledge into someone else’s mind;

3.      His claim that his activity was commanded by the gods. Since the Oracle had proclaimed him the wisest of all men, it is implied that keeping this wisdom to oneself would be inconsistent with the will of the gods.

Dorion makes the interesting observation that Socrates seems to have played both midwife and prosecutor depending on the level of vanity in his victim. The modest man he offered gentle assistance, coaxing from him thoughts he scarcely suspected himself capable of possessing. To the self-satisfied loudmouth he administered a more invigorating treatment puncturing his inflated ego with surgical precision. Curiously, the tender midwife-inspired Socrates does not appear until comparatively late in Plato’s writing, which leads Dorion to the conclusion that the Athenians during Socrates’ lifetime may not have perceived him quite as noble and benevolent as the idealised image that posterity has created of him might suggest.  

Few writers could be more qualified than Louis-André Dorion to write an introduction to Socrates. He is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Montreal specialising in Socrates’ dialectic refutation and the Socratic writings of Xenofon, second only to Plato in recording Socrates’ life and deeds. Normally pocket-sized introductions to ideas or celebrities offer little more than the most conventional and uninspired basics. Yet Dorion being the enthusiast incapable of mediocrity, cannot help putting some well-needed meat on the bones, turning this modestly dimensioned volume into something as refreshingly surprising as a digest that actually requires digesting.  

* The correct quote from Plato is actually “For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing”
** Not to be confused with Hegelian dialectics

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Year: 2004 (2001)
Publisher: Phoenix
Language: English (translator Lucia Graves)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel “The Shadow of the Wind” is by any definition a wonderous and pleasant read. The writer takes the reader gently by the hand and carefully leads them into the world of intrigue, wonder, love, and friendship. But more than a novel, it is an elegant instrument in the disciplinary order of memory, literature, and identity. It is not simply a narrative about forgotten books and troubled writers, but a study of the circulation of power through language, bodies, and historical discourse. “The archive” as Michel Foucault would put it. Beneath its seductive aesthetics lies a matrix of panopticon and confession, wherein the subject is formed not through autonomy but through the interiorisation of surveillance and the repetition of fate as the narrative form.

The story is set in Barcelona shortly after the war as Francisco Franco’s falangist regime is still reeling from the post-war isolation and responding, as dictators do, with tightened control and brutal oppression. The protagonist Daniel Sempere follows his father to a place in Barcelona which even to the Barcelonians is mostly unknown: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Daniel is encouraged to pick out a book and become its guardian. He picks “The Shadow of the Wind” by Julian Carax, a name of whom he had thitherto been completely oblivious. Or rather, it picks him. Daniel’s relationship with the book, and his relentless search for its elusive author, will come to define his fate.  

At the centre of Zafón’s novel is the relationship triangle between Daniel Sempere, Julian Carax, and Inspector Fumero within a closed system of power. The narrative traces Daniel’s gradual descent into the life of Carax, but it is not simply the tale of a reader discovering a writer. It is the slow process by which Daniel is made intelligible as a subject through pursuit, confession, and surveillance under the persistent gaze of Fumero, the novel’s repressive figure of formal authority and informal malice.

Carax’ role in the novel less that of a living being as that of a dossier to be reconstructed through fragments, testimonies, and deduction. His life is retrieved through the operations of the archive, and his identity is constituted through gossip, rumours, letters, and third-party accounts

I could not help but read this novel through the lens of Michel Foucault’s power analysis, particularly as outlined in his groundbreaking book “Discipline and Punish”. Foucault names the shift from act to document as a crucial feature of disciplinary power, and Carax is the prototype: not a man, but a readable subject whose every gesture is translated into signs of deviance or resistance. For a relentless oppressor, every liberal act will look like insubordination. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Daniel, in seeking to uncover Carax, gradually assumes his narrative coordinates, becoming an object of observation himself. First for the reader. Then for Inspector Fumero.

The sadistic Inspector Fumero functions as the visible face of disciplinary violence. He is not merely a villain, but the embodiment of sovereign and bureaucratic power entwined—a fusion of spectacle and surveillance. Like the Foucaultian executioner-turned-warden, Fumero is a relic of an older, bloodier regime of control who nevertheless adapts seamlessly to the more modern modes of tracking and silencing dissidence. His obsession with Carax and, by extension, with Daniel, is not driven by personal vendetta alone, but by the imperative to restore narrative closure, to erase anomaly, to close the gap between deviance and punishment.

In this respect, Fumero finds a soulmate in Victor Hugo’s Javert from “Les Misérables” (see review from September 2022), who puts all original thinking and feelings aside in favour of becoming a dispassionate tool in the service of the system. Unlike Javert however, who submitted completely to the system and equated his personal value with it, Fumero makes the system a tool for his own personal campaign of vengeance and hatred.

In this triangular structure, Daniel becomes the hinge on which the door between the past grievance that pits Julian Carax and Inspector Fumero against each other, and the final showdown in the post-war present swings. Through his pursuit of Carax, he does not merely learn a hidden history; he is inserted into a chain of substitution. His desire to know becomes indistinguishable from the mechanisms of control that produced Carax’s erasure. That Fumero begins to pursue Daniel with the same fervour once reserved for Carax is no accident. Penelope Aldaya and Beatriz Aguilar, the love interests of Julian Carax and Daniel Sempere respectively, embody the parallelism between the two men, separated by generations yet united by discursive and biographical repetition.

This is why the novel’s long expository chapters, usually delivered through rather verbose confessions, feel less like storytelling and more like processing. The characters recount their pasts not as memory but as evidence. Structured, ordered, and precise. These passages resemble info-dumps more than literary flow, and to me manifest the transition from personal fate to archive. Zafón's narrative, as Foucault predicts, for all its emotional resonance, cannot escape the form of the report or the disciplinary file.

“The Shadow of the Wind” can, or maybe even must, be read in light of these mechanisms.

VOLOMARI VOLOTINEN'S FIRST WIFE AND ASSORTED OTHER OLD ITEMS

Author: Arto Paasilinna
Year: 2013 (1994)
Publisher: Brombergs förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Camilla Frostell)

A 2018 report by British researcher and educator Stephen Follows reveals that around 52% of all movies produced in the US and Europe so far in the 21^st century were categorised as drama, with comedy ringing in at 28% in second place, well ahead of other genres such as thrillers (12%), romance and action (11% each), and horror (10%).*

In literature a similar pattern emerges. Drama, thrillers and crime, and romance dominate the lists of bestsellers. Yet comedy is nowhere to be found.**

Why are there so few funny novels?

One possible explanation is that, unlike suspense and romance, which are largely propelled by plot, comedy, much like erotica, depends more heavily on the mode of narration. In this genre, the ‘how’ often matters more than the ‘what’. The effect lies not in events themselves but in their delivery. As a result, some might argue that such writing places fewer demands on events, relying instead on tone, timing, and voice to achieve its impact, making it infinitely more demanding to write.

Arto Paasilinna is frequently cited as a master of comic fiction and his books are hugely popular all over the Nordics and beyond. The title of one of his novels, “Volotinens första fru och annat gammalt” (“Volomari Volotinen's First Wife and Assorted Other Old Items”), is perfectly hilarious. While, as will become evident, accurately capturing the contents of the book, it nods playfully to an old, albeit arguably misogynistic, adage about women and ageing. I was understandably brimming with anticipation when I began reading, eagerly expecting to snort-laugh my way through it. After all, I have laughed out loud more than once at other books by other authors, though few and far between.

Set during the height of the Cold War, the story follows Volomari Volotinen, a Finnish insurance investigator, and eccentric collector of historical oddities. His pursuits, ostensibly harmless, soon entangle him in a series of situations, some of which will even have political ramifications for Finland’s delicately balanced relationship with the USSR. His wife Laura, twenty years his senior, ever so loyal and at times unexpectedly resourceful, sometimes needs to step in and assist when Volomari goes overboard in his enthusiasm.

Though presented as a novel, the book reads more like a series of loosely connected short stories, unified by recurring protagonists rather than a continuous narrative arc. Each chapter typically centres on a single object of interest, Volomari’s latest fixation, serving as both its title and narrative anchor. The episodes are largely self-contained, with storylines that begin and conclude within the bounds of each chapter.

Unfortunately, I was forced to conclude that the book falls short for precisely the reasons outlined earlier. While Paasilinna scrambles to construct humorous scenarios for his protagonist, he lacks the esprit and comic precision necessary to render them genuinely amusing. The episodes themselves, while potentially entertaining as anecdotes shared over a family dinner, are held back by a delivery that feels mundane and uninspired. The result is a collection of stories that rarely transcend their artificiality, leaving the reader more aware of the author’s hand than immersed in the humour.

What begins as an endearing portrayal of Volomari gradually gives way to something more unsettling. As the narrative progresses, his enthusiasm for collecting turns into obsession, and his antics shift from amusing to awkward. Far from the goofy but likeable nerd, Volomari emerges as a calculating and opportunistic manipulator, willing to exploit both his professional position and the trust of others to acquire objects that would otherwise remain out of his reach. His transformation bears an eerie similarity to that of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey.

On the whole, the reading experience proved underwhelming. The situations in which Volomari finds himself lack the absurdity required to elicit genuine farce, while the narration falls short of the wit and precision needed to provoke sustained amusement. The spontaneous, laugh-out-loud moments brilliantly delivered by comic masters like Jaroslav Hašek, Sir Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and to a certain extent Mikael Niemi, Tom Sharpe, P.G. Wodehouse, and Jerome K. Jerome, in “Volotinens första fru och annat gammalt” are, regrettably, entirely absent.

 

* Some movies have more than one label, which is why the percentages do not amount to 100.

** Instead, fantasy and sci-fi make up almost 25% of books published but seem to be far down the movie genre list.

THE SHACK

Author: William P. Young
Year: 2009 (2007)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Nowa Proza
Language: Polish (translator Anna Reszka)

William P. Young’s novel “Chata” (“The Shack”) has left a remarkable impression on countless readers around the world, offering a story of pain, hope, and reconciliation with God that resonates with the spiritual struggles of many Christians. Blending narrative fiction with theological reflection, Young’s book strives to explore the deepest wounds of the human heart while grappling with the mystery of divine love. Although its popularity is understandable, “Chata” raises serious questions about its theological vision, especially its portrayal of the Holy Trinity and its approach to the existence of evil. While it provides moments of comfort and emotional healing, its treatment of these profound mysteries may leave some readers with a distorted or overly sentimental view of Christian belief.

The story follows Mack, a husband and father whose family life is torn apart by a horrifying tragedy. Years later, still gripped by grief and bitterness, Mack receives a mysterious invitation to return to the scene of his deepest pain; a secluded shack in the Oregon wilderness. There, he encounters three mysterious figures who claim to be the three Persons of God, drawing Mack into a transformative, personal conversation about suffering, forgiveness, and the very nature of God. The novel unfolds as a journey of spiritual healing, in which Mack confronts his questions about God’s justice, the problem of evil, and his own ability to forgive.

Young’s central literary approach is to render the idea of the Trinity in vivid and surprising human form. God the Father is represented as an African American woman, the Holy Spirit as an ethereal Asian woman, and Jesus as a Middle Eastern carpenter in modern attire. This imaginative device is clearly meant to jolt the reader out of conventional images of God while at the same time making divine love more accessible to an everyday person like Mack. There is a legitimate pastoral aim here: to remind readers that God is not an old white man with a beard, and that divine compassion transcends cultural stereotypes.

However, this narrative strategy risks more confusion than clarity. Christian tradition, both in Catholicism and in many other denominations, carefully maintains that the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct, co-equal, consubstantial, and beyond human categories, even as they fully reveal themselves in Jesus Christ. The Father, strictly speaking, is not incarnate and does not take on a human form other than through the Son who became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Depicting the Father as a human woman, however well-intentioned, can mislead readers into thinking of God the Father as having a distinct incarnate identity apart from the Son, blurring fundamental Christian doctrines, and devaluing the great wonder and mystery of God taking on human form and walking among us as in the Person of Jesus Christ. Similarly, personifying the Holy Spirit as a visible, embodied woman may imply a separate incarnation, which goes beyond anything in Scripture or orthodox tradition. While these literary choices are meant to be symbolic, their impact can easily sow confusion about one of the deepest and most carefully articulated doctrines in Christian faith*.

In addition to its Trinitarian problems, the novel’s treatment of theodicy also deserves careful scrutiny. Mack’s personal suffering is horrific and deeply relatable: how can an all-powerful, all-loving God permit such overwhelming tragedy? In a pastoral sense, Young does well to allow Mack to voice anger and pain, refusing to trivialise the brutal reality of loss. That aspect of the book has truly resonated with people who have sought comfort in God in their own tragedies but felt abandoned.

Yet the book’s answers to the problem of evil remain, in the end, rather flat. Young’s God seems to explain away suffering in terms of human freedom and the necessity of love, but without acknowledging the truly terrifying weight of certain evils or the long history of theological wrestling over innocent suffering. The characters offer reassurances about divine love that are emotionally comforting, but they fall short of addressing the mystery of why a good God needs to permit suffering in the first place. The Church has developed a rigorous and sometimes painfully intricate theodicy that respects the tragedy of evil while clinging to hope. Much of that complexity is ignored in this book in favour of a warm, reassuring, cuddly message which, while consoling, may leave deeper questions frustratingly unexamined.

In fairness, “Chata” does succeed in reaching people who might never crack open a catechism or a theology text, which I suppose is the main purpose of the book. Its narrative has drawn many wounded souls into asking questions about God they might otherwise avoid. For that reason, from a churchly perspective it should not be dismissed entirely; there is genuine pastoral power in its language of intimacy, mercy, and healing. In particular, the novel’s consistent message of humility, unconditional love, inclusion, and boundless forgiveness stands as a great virtue. Many modern Christians, who often harbour bigotry, prejudice, and hard-heartedness in their faith lives, could learn a great deal by contemplating this element of Young’s story. The book’s passionate insistence on God’s universal love is a welcome antidote to the cold legalism, moralism, and tribalism that can creep into contemporary Christian practice.

Even so, those strengths cannot erase the book’s real theological shortcomings. Its confusion about the Trinity, its oversimplified theodicy, and its romanticised spirituality all call for a prudent, critical reading, preferably supplemented with sound theological guidance. For all its emotional resonance, “Chata” remains, in the end, an oversimplified, romanticised, and somewhat naïve vision of God’s engagement with human tragedy. Readers who embrace its consolations should do so with discernment and an awareness of the rich, complex intellectual heritage that Christian tradition continues to offer beyond the walls of Young’s fictional shack.

*Although admittedly, this is no worse than the all-too-common depiction of God as an old white man with a beard.