THE GREAT EXHIBITION

Author: Marie Hermanson
Year: 2018
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish 

By 1923, Gothenburg on the Swedish west coast had established itself as the second city of the realm and following the success of the Stockholm Expo of 1897 and the Baltic Expo in Malmö 1914, the political leadership in this port city was eager to show that their city was ready to play in the big league.  The 300 year anniversary of Gothenburg two years earlier coincided with the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded to Albert Einstein and it was decided that Einstein, who had been prevented from collecting his prize money until then, would give his Nobel lecture in Gothenburg during the exhibition. He arrived in the spring of 1923 amid political unrest, economic distress, and a sharp rise of anti-semitic sentiments raging in his native Germany.

This sets the stage for Marie Hermanson’s latest suspense novel “Den stora utställningen” (not available in English but a verbatim translation would be “The Great Exhibition”). It is a composite story of historical facts mixed with the spawn of the author’s imagination seamlessly sewn together to what ends up being a rather satisfying tale. From the angles of four different observers who are all in one way or another involved with the exhibition, the fabric is woven in an accessible, entertaining, and interesting way. Otto, who is the only person who tells his story from the first perspective, reminisces about his childhood in the 1920s. Einstein himself is another voice, engulfed in what turns out to be a fight for survival. The last two, Ellen the journalist and Nils the police constable, are fictitious characters.  

Similar to how it is sometimes liberating to squeeze in an odd pizza or chocolate bar between elaborate culinary masterpieces it is sometimes liberating to squeeze in an odd pizza or chocolate bar or how the emotional depths probed by Mahler’s symphonies or Mozart’s Requiem occasionally benefit from being interrupted by the less demanding tunes of Ariana Grande or Robbie Williams, the world of literature, too, has plenty of room for folksy entertainment. Shelves at bookstores around the world buckle under the weight of crime fiction, fantasy, up lit, and romance. As in all other genres, the quality is highly uneven and chances are that more often than not the book you pick at random will turn out to be a dud.

Last time I read a book written for entertainment purposes only was in October 2018 where I allowed myself to suffer through the agony of making acquaintance with one of Britain’s most celebrated scribbler, whose name I will graciously omit. This time around, I had been more scrupulous in my selection when I cuddled up on the sofa in my snuggery to read Hermanson.

It paid off. Even though “Den stora utställningen” is probably best characterised as suspense fiction, the plot is neither novel nor unpredictable and as suspense goes, it was far from spine-chilling. Still, this is exactly part of the charm of this book. It chugs along at a moderate pace which allows the reader to enjoy the scenery comfortably seated as if in a railway car during a soothing ride through the comely vastness of a countryside landscape. There are no sudden stops or sharp turns, and although a modest degree of acceleration can be felt toward the climax of the book the experience is still closer to a Ferris wheel than a rollercoaster.

Particular accolade is due for Hermanson’s research in preparation of this book. Geographical accuracy and historical events are smartly anchored in the story. Gorgeous little details such as the latest music hits playing in the background contribute to my trust in the author and I have no hesitation to splash into the polished and temperate authenticity of the novel’s universe.  

As much as I regretted my choice in 2018, I am equally satisfied with having read Hermanson in 2020. Hers is not a production that will be remembered by posterity, but in the moment it is deliciously gratifying.  Her place in the history of literature is that of a chocolate bar’s at a World Exhibition.

 

A TICKING BOMB

Author: Linnéa Lindquist
Year: 2020
Publisher: Books on Demand
Language: Swedish 

Public education is arguably the most crucial issue for Western society right now; not least for Sweden. How is it possible that a 15-year-old can graduate primary school without knowing the difference between the government and the parliament? Why do we teach our children to question but not to analyse? How come the terms fact and opinion have been conflated? Who benefits from education being biased toward the mediocre rich at the expense of the brilliant poor?

Anybody who has spent ten minutes discussing political issues on social media will have suffered the bastard monstrosity that is generated from the fusion between ignorance and misguided fortitude. The right to question without a corresponding obligation to understand, interbred with obtuseness and misbegotten loquacity is cute in a five-year-old, embarrassing in a 25-year-old, and calamitous in thousands and thousands of grown-ups in all spheres of our community. If you wish to see the failure of the educational system for yourself, log in to Twitter and in seconds you will be engulfed by it.  

In my personal analysis, which I have mentioned on earlier occasions but do not have enough data to firmly support, society’s ongoing alienation from knowledge is at the core of the matter. The gap between the accumulated knowledge as produced by our science and research institutions on the one hand and the average Joe on the other has expanded to unbridgeable proportions. In simple terms, people no longer know how little they know. We are all capable to comprehend the complexity of a car engine and we have a reasonable understanding of the ratio of our knowledge to that of a trained mechanic. When it comes to social science, pharmacology, evo-devo, geology, and many other scholarly disciplines, however, the rift between what we know, what we think there is to know, and what humanity actually knows, has widened to a virtual canyon. The segregation between those who know and those who do not know is widening daily at the same pace as science makes progress. And, not surprisingly, the asymmetric distribution of knowledge seems to follow the ancient and essentially indelible boundaries of the distribution of wealth, i.e. social class.

An increasing number of observers in the Kingdom of Sweden argue that this problem is exacerbated by the rapidly growing presence of publicly funded private schools. One of the most vocal of these observers and one who has received a considerable amount of attention in the last months is Linnéa Lindquist who, besides being a close personal friend of mine, is a Swedish primary school principal, recognised pundit, and tireless activist. In her recently published book, she calls the ballooning educational segregation “a ticking bomb”, which is also the title.

From the vantage point in her vast experience as a teacher and principal in socially disadvantaged areas around Stockholm and Gothenburg, she has written a devastating testimony about the Swedish school system. This short read of a mere 102 pages takes a few hours to read but is rife with insights and observations from half a lifetime in the service to education. The book covers all aspects of the reality of the modern school such as financing, recruitments, language didactics, and free school meals. Lindquist connects the dots which all lead to the centre-right government’s 1992 decision to open the publicly funded school system up for private entrepreneurs. A decision whose effects were exacerbated by the centre-left government’s decision two years later to even out the funding per student for all types of schools.

Much of the debate from the left so far has been focused on the ethics of allowing private investors to profit from a publicly funded welfare institution that furthermore is mandatory for all residents until the age of 15. Lindquist, however, puts the purpose of the school in the centre of her argument and pokes her finger in all the wounds the current school system has inflicted on education: how instead of students choosing their schools, the schools choose their students; how the high turnover of students at municipal schools depresses the school’s funding and increases its costs. There are many other examples.  

One of the most touching episodes is where Lindquist writes how provoking it is to her each time a sports club or cultural association approaches her with proposals of coming to her school in the suburbs to offer the students pro bono workshops in dance or graffiti painting as if that is what youngsters in “da hood” (my term, not the author’s) really crave, rather than proper Swedish language skills. “I wonder if headmasters in Östermalm [a well-to-do borough of Stockholm, my remark] receive as many propositions about graffiti and dancing for their pupils”, Lindquist quips. My thoughts go to the community or writers and novelists. How often do they avail themselves to schools to help nudge the youth in the general direction of the written and spoken word.

I agree with what I understand to be Lindquist’s argument that it is irrelevant who runs the schools: be it the state, the municipalities, associations, congregations, or private investors as long as the outcome of the schooling system as a nationwide whole is not compromised. Hers is a holistic view and, despite frequently citing examples from her own schools and students, is little concerned with anecdotal evidence or local issues. “En tickande bomb” is not a critique of individual schools, but of the system that allows or forces schools to act in one way or another.

At present, the reaction to the current market-driven school system in Sweden is snowballing and even some of its architects are beginning to doubt the efficacy of putting money ahead of children. “En tickande bomb” is one of those books that are born from a movement but it is also powerful enough to help steer the direction of the debate. No matter where you are on the political left-right spectrum, this book will give you access to the wisdom of an education professional. What you do with it and what your priorities are may depend on your political persuasions, but I strongly suggest that we leave disregarding reality to the incorrigibly asinine clodpates on Twitter

 

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Author: Margaret Atwood
Year: 2019 (1985)
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish (translator Maria Ekman)

 ”Gott hätte keine Welt geschaffen, wenn sie nicht unter allen möglichen die beste wäre” wrote German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his work on good and evil (”Théodicée” 1710). He argued that in every single moment, by the grace of God, we live in the best world possible at that particular moment.  This idea takes into account death, disease, natural disasters, and the fact that the universe is in constant flux and that our sun is expected to expand into a red giant in five billion years swallowing planet Earth in the process. But Leibniz also tries to fit in war, oppression, crime, and other manufactured forms of suffering caused by human malevolence and imperfection. Leibniz argues that in an interconnected reality where each phenomenon is caused by and gives cause to other phenomena, the removal of a particular torment would generate a ripple effect throughout the system provoking more severe torments elsewhere in the world. In economic terms, Leibnitz would consider the world to operate at Pareto Efficiency.

Even though Leibniz has been thoroughly taken to task by other thinkers in the centuries after the publication of his book, an ocean of dystopian literature seems to at least partially vindicate him. All things considered, despite its apparent weaknesses and horrors (historic and present), the world could be a lot worse.

The history of fiction teaches us that there are numerous ways that this world can go down the tubes: Abuse of technology, war, environmental destruction, fascism, communism, or religious fundamentalism, to mention only a few. One example of the latter, with a super-sized side order of fascism, is Margaret Atwood’s ”Tjänarinnans berättelse” (”The Handmaid’s Tale”).

Atwood’s dystopian society is named “Gilead”, a totalitarian breakaway region of the formerly powerful United States of America in a not so distant future. The community is controlled by strict adherence to a highly arbitrary reading of the Bible where bits and pieces have been selected and amplified to support the regime, whereas most of the New Testament which preaches love, forgiveness, and communion, has been dispatched into oblivion. Due to pollution, fertility is critically low and large patches of Earth are uninhabitable. The citizens of Gilead adhere to a strict hierarchy where men rule in the capacity of Commanders through a highly effective and virtually omnipresent security police called the Eyes. The highest honour bestowed upon a woman is to become a Wife of one of the high ranking officials in the regime. Econowives are the spouses of less influential male citizens. Marthas are female servants and Handmaids are fertile women who, for any more or less random reason, are considered too sinful to be suitable as wives and are therefore distributed among the childless elites as babymakers.  Escape is unthinkable, movement between the classes only possible in one direction: downward. Although Handmaids formally outrank Marthas, most Marthas frown upon the sexually exposed Handmaids and many a Handmaid would much prefer to count among the Marthas. Still, as fertility is rare, no fertile woman can be sacrificed to cook, clean, and serve tea for her own convenience.

The story is told by the handmaid Offred; a woman with modern values and ideals who, like everybody else, is forced into submission by the rulers of Gilead. Being deemed fertile, she is deposited in the household of one of the most influential Commanders. Offred manages to record her thoughts and observations in a diary which is preserved for posterity. In fact, the final chapter recounts an academic conference where the conclusions of the then newly uncovered ancient diary are presented to a community of researchers some 200 years after the events described in the book.

There are a few symbolic features well worth considering in Atwood's novel. For starters, it is no coincidence that the story is set in what is today the state of Massachusetts. This is the most liberal state in the entire Union where more than 1/3 of the voters identify as liberal and where the Democratic Party has a crushing advantage over the GOP and other totalitarian and reactionary movements. It is one of the most urbanised states with the best-educated population. I believe that Atwood wants to warn us against complacency. If it can happen in a place like Massachusetts, it can happen literally anywhere.

In many ways, “Tjänarinnans berättelse” is a feminist book. The male dominance manifests itself long before the regime rolls out the full array of oppressive restrictions. Without notice, all women’s bank accounts are closed and the balance transferred to their husbands or male relatives. They are no longer allowed to work or own property. Women are barred from reading and studying and may not enter public space without male supervision. All this is introduced long before the institutions of the old society are dissolved and replaced with the new hierarchy and chain of command. This is another reminder from Atwood that the forces that allow this kind of upheaval are at all times dormant in our society, even today. When Offred’s (before she was renamed and handed to the Commander) bank account is closed and she informs her husband Luke, he responds by saying that things will be alright and that from now on he will simply have to pay for them both. As if this was a minor inconvenience. Despite his strongly liberal and progressive views, Luke’s patriarchal essence clouds his judgment and he becomes a symbol of the latent chauvinist that dwells in all men. Had it been the other way around, and that men were suddenly dependent on their female spouses and relatives, his reaction, supposedly, would have been much different.

But “Tjänarinnans berättelse” is much more than a critique of religious fundamentalism and the fascist theocracies that commonly follow in its wake. Atwood takes the opportunity to critique all behaviours that undermine the liberal society. Offred often brings up memories of her intellectual feminist mother before the creation of Gilead. At one point she is reminded of a demonstration her mother had organised where the activists burned pornography in the name of female emancipation. Atwood wants to warn us against using fascist techniques to reach seemingly noble goals. After all, fascists, blinded by hatred and ignorance, also believe that their causes are just. The ends, Atwood seems to say, do not justify the means. On the contrary, the means tell us a lot about the ends. And about us.

There is a lot to unpack in this novel but I would like to mention only one more observation, which is to a degree valid for most dystopias in literature and popular culture. In Gilead, no one seems to be happy. Not even the Commanders who organised the system and are watching over it, enjoy it. Everyone is miserable. And that is probably the scariest thing of all. In the fascist, illiberal, intolerant, non-democratic society that more and more people seem to idealise, no one is happy.

For the last five to ten years, Margaret Atwood is routinely mentioned among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. After having read “Tjänarinnans berättelse”, which to be fair is the only title I have read by this author, I am not unreservedly supporting her candidacy. Atwood is, no doubt, a terrific writer but compared to some of the recent masters of the craft unto whom this honour has been bestowed in the last decades, and also to some unto whom it has not, I am not convinced that Atwood quite qualifies. I was expecting linguistic fireworks á la Saramago or Naipaul, startling brainteasers and unexpected insights á la Tokarczuk, or profound psychological or sociological analyses á la Lessing but found none of that. What “Tjänarinnans berättelse” is, is a well written, agreeable, and highly urgent novel which, other than an open mind, attention to detail, and average emphatic skills, requires little from the reader to drive the message home: Our world may not be the best of all possible worlds but every day, we risk treading on the road to a dramatically worse one.

 

THE DINOSAUR HUNTERS

 Author: Deborah Cadbury
Year: 2002 (2000)
Publisher: Historiska Media
Language: Swedish (translator Ulf Irheden)

From time to time, I have reason to contemplate the magnitude of progress lost to humanity on the altar of individual ambition and trivial politics. How many geniuses have been obliterated by lesser minds due to vanity and power struggle? How many discoveries, inventions, and ideas were smothered by the petty obstruction by the inferior? In my own professional life, I have myself fallen victim to a psychopath who was so absorbed by power that she disregarded results, and whose relentless obstruction of her colleagues’ efforts, which threatened to expose her own inadequacy, ultimately contributed to the company paying a crushing regulatory fee. In the absence of the competence to construct, small people overcompensate by their ability to destroy.

I am quite sure that this observation was not the purpose of Deborah Cadbury’s book “Dinosauriejägarna” (“The Dinosaur Hunters”) but the fate of one of the greatest pioneers in geological research, Dr Gideon Mantell, at the hands of the less prolific but infinitely more conniving Sir Richard Owen is a woeful tale indeed. The greater of the two spent all his life on the brink of bankruptcy and intense family misfortune, whereas the lesser one dined with dukes and princes and was the poster boy of a scientific discipline he had made but a few meaningful contributions to.

In general, Cadbury’s work accounts for the first steps of true palaeontological research where the scientists of the time began to seriously challenge the biblical interpretation of the history of our planet and allowed themselves to follow the facts. It must have been a marvellous but scary time where everything that had for so long been accepted as a fact was suddenly overthrown in favour of a much more complex, and much less comforting, world order. Everything that used to be part of a divine plan and God’s loving provision for the species He had created in his own image, was unmasked as the result of a disinterested and purposeless natural process.

In “Dinosauriejägarna” we get acquainted with a parade of fascinating individuals. The already mentioned Gideon Mantell who proved that giant reptiles had lived on land and in the sea in the Mesozic; Sir Richard Owen who coined the term Dinosauria and spent most of his time and energy scheming against his competitors and on some occasions even stealing their work; Mary Anning who single-handedly found and extracted hundreds if not thousands of prehistoric fossils from the cliffs in Dorset; William Buckland who offered the first attempt at a complete description of a named dinosaur; Sir Charles Lyell, who could demonstrate that the forces that brought about the Earth as we know it, are still in motion and are still transforming our current world; and Georgie Cuvier who pioneered comparative anatomy and classification principles. Cadbury describes the fierce battle between the church and academia and also the valiant efforts by several notable scientists, primarily Buckland, to reconcile the two, with particular emphasis on the Deluge and Noah’s Ark.

Cadbury writes in a vivid and accessible way and reading the book was almost like following a tv-show. The new discoveries are presented one by one in an inspiring and exciting way and it is difficult to put the book away. The writer also manages to make the main characters of this 19th-century drama very human and their personalities and relationships are well accounted for.

Even still, Cadbury’s book, as interesting as it is, should have been titled “The First British Dinosaur Hunters”. Her story centres around the scientific discoveries, and much of the scientific squabble, in Britain in the first half of the 19^th century. The ground-breaking revelations of French, American, and German palaeontologists and geologists are completely omitted or mentioned only in passing. The global authority at the break of the dino-hunting era, the Frenchman George Cuviers, is introduced merely as a reference point for British research. When I first began to read the book, I thought it a matter of course that Gideon Mantell’s breakthrough would be followed-up by Hermann von Meyer’s discovery of the Archaeopteryx in Germany and the multitude of dinosaur bones dug up and classified by Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope during the so-called Bone Wars some decades later in America. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Mantell, none of the dino hunters whose stories Cadbury tells found any dinosaurs of their own. The true dinosaur hunter of the era was Mary Anning, and to some extent Gideon Mantell.

The greatest value of “Dinosauriejägarna” to a modern reader, however, is the detailed account of the resistance from the Anglican Church and the length to which serious academia went in order to preserve the belief of the biblical myth of a creation, and the resources that went into the efforts to make sense of the mounting evidence of evolution from a conservative Christian perspective. For the creationists out there, who think that they are discovering something new in Scripture and who think that it is acceptable to disregard evidence in favour of religious zeal, it might be a useful lesson in humility (something Christians supposedly should know a lot about, but sadly rarely practice) to know that infinitely more intelligent and resourceful Christians than they, with an equally acute interest in preserving the public faith in the word of the Genesis, ultimately had to capitulate in the face of scientific evidence. God didn’t create the universe for us to ignore.

 I would like to dedicate my final note to the translation. Ulf Irheden is a somewhat established translator of books on history, particularly the world wars, into Swedish. He has also written a fairly favourably received biography on Franz  Joseph, the legendary ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His Swedish take on “Dinosauriehjägarna” is airy, vivacious, and absorbing, and I appreciate that some of the terminology must have been challenging to a translator who is more used to writing about kings and battles than about bones and coprolites.  If it had not been for a number of rather basic mistakes, I would have had no hesitations to shower accolade over the Swedish issue of Cadbury’s book. Unfortunately, the mistakes are more than a few and of such obvious banality that I cannot quite shake the feeling that the book was to some degree translated in a rush or with wavering interest.

Those who know me are aware of my love for the fauna of the Mesozoic and I do not expect any of the readers of these words to share my passion for fossilised cadavers. Still, I cordially invite those of you who are curious about the scientific frontiers of geology and biology in the mid-1800s, to acquaint yourself with Deborah Cadbury’s introduction to British dino-mania and its regrettable delay caused by mediocrity’s resistance to genius. 

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Author: Virginia Woolf
Year: 2006 (1927)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translators IngaLisa Munck and Sonja Bergvall)

When our minds endeavour to grapple with the vastness of the universe, they often confine themselves to matter. Infinite matter. Infinite space. Infinite time, however, is assumed. Before there was something, there must have been nothing. But nothing as such, as the presocratic thinker Parmenides argued, cannot exist, since if it did, nothing would be something which is self-contradictory. Existence itself, therefore, is the essential something. There is no before and no after. There is just isness.

But if there is no before and no after, is there time at all? If there is, it must be static. It always was, and always will be. Or more accurately: it just is. Yet we still experience time. We can even measure it. We inarguably move in relation to time. It should follow then that it is matter that moves through time. Are you and I travellers through time as well as space? In a universe of expanding entropy, do we journey into increasing confusion and disorder? That is then, the fate of existence to be that something which is subject to time. Such as life.

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel “Mot fyren” (”To the Lighthouse”) seems to explore the concepts of mankind as a traveller through time by means of a narrative of an imagined journey: the short boat ride from a summer house to a nearby island lighthouse.  Little James Ramsay, the youngest of a litter of eight,  has no higher desire than to visit the lighthouse, but every day the infamous Scottish weather prevents him and his family from going. Mrs Ramsay, a caring mother and housewife always eager to safeguard the emotional harmony of those around her, consoles the boy and gives him hope. Maybe tomorrow the weather will improve. Surely tomorrow they will be able to go. James’s father, Professor Ramsay, is less sentimental. Not only is he vocal about his pessimism about their ever being able to go to the lighthouse, he moreover questions the value of going there and derides his wife and son for being so emotionally attached to the idea. He is more preoccupied with his own philosophical musings and his lack of confidence in his intellectual ability and legacy as a philosopher. In a famous passage, he compares wisdom to the alphabet and concludes that most people barely manage to cover the first few letters. In his own judgment, he has come as far as Q but he also realises that he will never master R. Others, however, will or indeed already have. In one scene, his pride and shame are captured by two letters of the alphabet.  

Apart from the Ramsays, there are a handful of other guests in the summer house, each of which plays their role. Both Mrs Ramsay and Professor Ramsay have their admirers. The young artist Lily Briscoe is Mrs Ramsay’s fan and the philosophy student Charles Tanley is Professor Ramsay’s. How Woolf portrays these persons in terms of their emotional response to their respective objects of affection and to each other is quite revealing. Together, this quartet fights a tempered and subdued war between the sexes seething with male indignation over female ambition and enterprise.

The book is divided into three sections: the Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. Woolf in her diary calls it “two blocks connected by a corridor”. The first and the last part each describe one day in the life of the Ramsays. The middle part, which is the shortest, covers ten years. Woolf seems to argue that time is an illusion and that events such as war, death, or our planet’s revolution around the sun, can easily be overshadowed by the idea of a boat ride to a lighthouse. There is no great revelation to Virginia Woolf.”Instead, there were little daily miracles. Illuminations. Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”  Or, if one will, the death of a moth trapped between two panes of window glass.

The perspective in the first and third sections is fleeting. The reader is hurled from mind to mind, sometimes mid-paragraph. The internal to external dialogue ratio is probably 10 to 1. Just like the lighthouse on the island, to which the Ramsay party never seems to arrive, which appears constantly distant and isolated, so does each individual float around the summer house like a detached particle among many, their reality affected by but independent from the other individuals around them.

In my own research many years ago, I proposed a person’s navigation through social reality to be studied on three interlocking levels:  factual reality, communicated reality, and construed reality. Based on the concepts of exchange and reciprocity most poignantly developed by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in the 1920s, I proposed that reality (not to be confused with constructions such as “fact” or “truth”) is the result of layered inter-human relationships. Woolf, I believe, is pursuing a similar line of thought allowing the reality at the summer house to be a cross-section of the collective minds present there. The childish expectation that the weather might improve thus becomes an integral part of the pessimistic scorn for such a forlorn promise. Lily Briscoe’s observations about the beauty of Mrs Ramsay contrasts Charles Tansley’s submissive idolisation of Professor Ramsay’s greatness as a thinker. A lingering uncertainty pertains, however, to the authenticity of these perspectives. How genuine or hollow are they? How aware are the characters of their own mind? How much is fact, communication, and construal respectively?    

A surprising turnaround awaits in the middle section, ”Time Passes”. The perspective no longer jumps between individuals but rather between inanimate and nameless witnesses. Woolf reinforces the non-identity of the narrator. She writes ”If someone had listened in the rooms on the upper floor of the empty house (but there was no one there that could listen) …” whereby she tosses us into the cosmos of the all-seeing, above and beyond the understanding of the individual observer from the first section of the book. ”Time Passes” is a strictly chronological account of events. Of life and death. Of turmoil, storms, war, and destruction. First world war begins and ends. A new order is established.

In the last part of the book we are back at the summer house where the Ramsays, decimated by the war, again plan a boat ride to the lighthouse on the island. They have all changed. Time has changed them as they have travelled through it. But the lighthouse remains. And so does the party’s careful eye on the weather forecasts. The changes seem superficial. At the core, reality has remained unscathed. “Mrs Ramsay saying life stand still here.” Not time. Life!

There is a lot to unpack in “Mot fyren”. It is one of those books which I would appreciate some help to understand. I am particularly interested in the Lily Briscoe-character whom I understand to be a symbol of feminism despite her timid personality. Her choice to paint a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and James instead of the stunning ocean landscape like I imagine any other artist would. I would also love to hear your interpretation of James’s and Cam’s pact against Professor Ramsay in the final part of the book.

The novel is a challenge to read but chances are it will never leave you once you have taken the time to submerge yourself in it. Hardly a page-turner, the plot is everything but exciting. Don’t look for quick action. Don’t look for snappy dialogue. None of that will be found in ”Mot fyren”. What you will find, is an introspective microcosm of humanity, and an analysis of reality as a function of time and mankind. Looking at it this way, it is not half-bad, is it?

 

US OR THEM

Author: Christina Falck
Year: 2014
Publisher: Sahlgrens Förlag
Language: Swedish

One should think that as a Swede with an above-average interest in history, I should be able to demonstrate passable knowledge about the events which brought liberty and independence to my country’s closest neighbour and former Swedish ‘Eastern half of the realm’, but which also plunged it into a four-month-long civil war. Truth be told, I suspect that most Swedes could not even tell the difference between the Civil War (1918) and the Winter War (1939-1940).

I am therefore deeply grateful for Christina Falck’s decision to write, and now defunct Sahlgren Förlag’s decision to publish “Vi eller de” (not available in English but a simple translation would be “Us or Them”).

This is a heart-warming story about the Björks, a family of landowning farmers in southern Finland, and about how their world was hurled into chaos following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the long-anticipated Finnish independence, and the disastrous civil war between the conservatives (the Whites) and the communists (the Reds) that followed. It was to be a tumultuous time. Celebration turned into despair, loyalty to treason, hope to anguish. As death and violence slowly crept up on the Björks, they realised that their farm may not be spared and that people they thought they could trust may be the ones who would draw destruction and mayhem upon them.

But there was also a great deal of love, forgiveness, and understanding. For example, the unbridled love into which the Björk family included their two foster siblings. As I progressed through the book and saw the circumstances becoming harsher and the class struggle more and more pronounced, I was waiting for the Björks to begin to question the loyalty of their foster sister who, by birth, would be looked upon as more akin to the Reds than to the Whites. I waited in vain.

The novel is based on the preserved collection of letters that Christina Falck’s grandparents wrote each other during the conflict and which are still in the author’s possession. Some excerpts appear in the book. To me, that adds an exceptional dimension to the reading experience. This powerful connection to the past, to the real men and women of flesh and blood who helped shape the world that we are but temporary stewards of, allows me to almost smell the earth, feel the grass, and hear the voices of yore. Letters like those handed down to the author, are the closest that we will ever come to a time capsule.

By necessity, given the source material, the main protagonists will be best known to the author and therefore be most richly painted. The depictions of Astrid and Edvard are beautifully crafted. Astrid’s sister Ellinor and her brothers are also easy to establish an emotional bond with. Anneli, the foster sister, is actually the one character that I feel I would want to know more about. I found the love story between her and the farm hand, Hugo, a bit surprising and it would have helped me to grasp it if I had understood Anneli better. I could easily accept that Hugo was interested in Anneli, but I did not immediately expect his feelings to be answered.

Historically, the novel seems to check out very well. It is all there: The White Guards, the Jägar rangers, the detention camps, the sketchy news reports, the concerns of the Swedish speaking minority, the disappointment with the Swedish government’s lukewarm support.  

As landowners, the Björks sympathised with the Whites. One of the sons even went to Germany to obtain military training as a ranger to fight against the Russian oppression. Still, the author is careful to put her own family loyalty aside and paint a fair and emotional picture of the Red side as well. The misery of the poor, the lack of hope, the understandable anger and resentment, and the inner struggle between the willingness to fight for freedom and the disgust at the expectations to commit atrocities as part of that fight. It is a fair and warm portrayal of individuals, with all the weaknesses and strengths of the human heart and soul, on both sides of a conflict that ended up claiming almost 40,000 Finnish lives.  

This makes the title, “Vi eller de”, a bit provocative. Although politicians, generals, and historians do their best to solidify the boundary between the Reds and the Whites, human beings are not so easily compartmentalised. The battlefronts are, as always, blurred by memories, emotions, ideas, ambitions, and parallel conflicts. In the end, there is no us and them. There is only a web of destinies more or less closely intertwined.

 “Vi eller de” is a highly accessible read. The language is straightforward and the chronology linear. Despite the crushing topic, it is not gloomy or tormenting. On the contrary, at its core, the book is marked by light and hope. The characters are richly painted and it is easy to get to know them and to care for them. Falck lets us inside the heads of several people long gone and the perspectives are varied, credible, and stringent. It is all very well put together and makes for a delightful reading experience.

I recommend this book to anybody who likes to read about family ties, love, friendship, loyalty, and honour, but also to all Swedes out there who have realised it is about time they took an interest in the 20th-century history of our Finnish neighbours.

My copy, signed by the author.

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

 Author: Doris Lessing
Year: 2007 (1962)
Publisher: Bokförlaget Forum
Language: Swedish (translator Mårten Edlund)

 ”That epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. This is how the Swedish Academy characterised Doris Lessing’s authorship when they announced her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, it seems to provide valuable clues as to how to read Lessing, not the least her 1962 novel “Den Femte Sanningen” (“The Golden Notebook”).

For what is “the female experience”? The experience of what? And what is a “divided civilisation” contrary to the more commonly used “divided society”?

At the core of the novel is Anna, a writer who has had significant success with her first novel but has experienced writer’s block ever since, and her best friend Molly, a moderately successful actress. We follow Anna by her and Molly’s interaction with each other and people in their vicinity through sections of the book titled ”Free Women”, as well as through the notes that Anna makes in her four notebooks.

What do Anna and Molly talk about? What does Anna write about in her notebooks? Men! Ex-husbands; former, current, and future lovers; sons; film producers, directors, editors, and publishers; and Joseph Stalin. Even the introduction of Molly’s ex-husband’s new wife, Marion, turns out to be but a proxy for women’s relationship with men. When Molly and Anna speak about Marion, they really speak about Richard.

“... women’s emotions are still completely adapted to a society that no longer exists. My deepest emotions, my true emotions, are governed by my relation to a man.”*

The only meaningful conversation that Molly and Anna ever have about someone who is not a man is when they speak about the therapist whom they both see and who incidentally happens to be a woman: Mother Sugar.

The widely known Bechdel test is a measure of how well-represented women are in literature. The title passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something else than a man. If it doesn’t, the proposition is that it reaffirms established patriarchal structures. “The Golden Notebook” fails the Bechdel test in a spectacular way yet still manages to be a decisively feministic literary testament. It would be easy to dismiss it as dated and irrelevant but this would be a mistake.

What Doris Lessing does in the book is to give women voice and agency in a world, which is not yet theirs. It is a newly liberated woman’s perspective on what used to be a man’s world. And truth be told, it is not particularly flattering. Every man that Anna comes across, every single one, is flimsy, insecure, pompous, conceited, and needy to a degree bordering on farcical. Anna invites them all into her life, and into her bed, for the only purpose of saving their faces. It is a world of suppressed emotions and opinions, of empty pleasantries, of failed men, and women whose mission it seems to be to clean up after them and make them feel better about themselves. Every act of love or trust is an illusion. Every moment is a tussle. Every word an accusation. Anna is always on guard, never relaxed, and she accepts this as normality.

“We hated each other but the whole atmosphere was rather cosy.”*

The four notebooks form a portal into an artificially divided mentality. Anna makes vain efforts to compartmentalise her life as if certain aspects of it had no bearing on the rest. Her successful novel was based on her experiences from Africa so her memories from Africa and everything connected with the novel and money end up in the black notebook. Even though Anna spent most of her time in Africa among fellow communists and much of her political ideology must have been formed in that setting, she detaches all things political from the rest of her persona and places them in the red notebook which she dedicates to her political activity as a communist but also to her hesitations, disillusions, and disappointments particularly with the era of Stalinism. Again poorly isolated from the others, is Anna’s thinly veiled autobiography in the yellow notebook where she more or less consciously writes a diary in the third person under the guise of a draft to her next novel. Finally, there is the blue notebook which contains Anna’s futile attempts at an objective account of herself and her life based on her therapy sessions with Mother Sugar, but which Anna concedes is the least accurate of her notebooks and which basically boils down to a revolt against psychotherapy.

The notebooks become a manifestation of Anna’s forcibly split view of herself which eventually grows into a split personality. Anna even speaks of her different Selves at one point. We are used to the question “Who am I?” but Anna begins to think in terms of “Which I am I right now?”. By dividing up her life in arbitrary categories, Anna forces herself to choose which Self to apply in any given situation in something that resembles self-induced schizophrenia. The notebooks are nothing but a mockery of how we humans see each other and how we tend to label each other as “that writer” or “that communist”. If we apply this compartmentalisation to ourselves, we become aware of how inadequate and laughable it really is. This insight marks the threshold to postmodernism. The divided civilisation that the Swedish Academy spoke of begins with the divided individual.

And that is why the fifth notebook becomes unavoidable. The golden notebook. The fifth truth.

“The Golden Notebook” is a challenging read. The layered narrative, broken chronology, and jumps between Anna’s conscious and subconscious. It requires a good understanding of politics and psychology, as well as a substantial history of self-reflection. I willingly admit that I struggled with this book. I tore my hair, I moaned in exasperation, and toiled in sweat through each of the 599 satiated pages. If this is the female experience, I bow my head in respect, regret, and deep sympathy to all my sisters out there.

*The translations into English are my own from the Swedish copy for illustration purposes only. They are not Doris Lessing’s original writing. Do not quote them in the form as presented herein!

4.50 FROM PADDINGTON

Author: Dame Agatha Christie
Year: 1991 (1957)
Publisher: Bonniers
Language: Swedish (translator Britte-Marie Bergström)

It is generally accepted that the first female detective in (English) literature was the sagacious and thrifty but nowadays largely forgotten Mrs Gladden in Andrew Forrester’s 1864 novel “The Female Detective”. Since then, several writers have introduced the world to a wealth of memorable female sleuths, agents, and heroines such as Nancy Drew, Modesty Blaise, Precious Ramotswe, and Lisbeth Salander.

One of the most notable contributions to this illustrious roster was made by the Queen of Mystery herself, Dame Agatha Christie, in the form of Miss Jane Marple across a series of short stories and twelve novels, one of which is the present “4.50 from Paddington”.

The tale opens with Mrs Elspeth McGillicuddy dozing off on a train from London to the hamlet of St Mary Mead where she is to visit her good friend, the aforementioned Miss Marple. She wakes up just in time to witness a murder take place on a passing train running in the same direction on parallel tracks. She promptly reports her observation to the authorities which launch a cursory investigation into the matter, only to conclude that Mrs McGillicuddy must have been mistaken. No dead body was found and no one had been reported missing. This might have been the end of it if it had not been for the inquisitive mind of Miss Marple’s.

I was very much surprised by the passive and subordinated role the famous detective plays in the story, however. After having concluded that Mrs McGillicuddy’s observation must have been accurate, Christie locks Miss Marple up in a rented room in a nearby village citing poor health, and dispatches the only eyewitness all the way to Sri Lanka. In their stead, the legwork is done by 32-year old math prodigy turned housekeeper; Lucy Eylesbarrow. Miss Marple returns to action toward the end of the story where she bets everything on one card when finally exposing the murderer in an all but sure-fire final confrontation.

In many ways, “4.50 from Paddington” constitutes a classical whodunit similar to so many others from the golden age of British detective fiction but there is no denying that the genre was already considered out of fashion by the time Christie wrote it. I seem to pick up on one or two indications that the writer might have been aware of this and was perhaps preparing for Miss Marple’s retirement. I get a feeling that she was experimenting with the Lucy-character and gauging the waters for a young and spirited new heroine. It would certainly explain Miss Marple’s modest participation in solving the crime. Still, as far as I have been able to discern, this novel was to be Lucy’s only appearance, whereas Miss Marple would thrive for another 19 years (the last Miss Marple mystery, “Sleeping Murders” was published in 1976, the same year Agatha Christie passed away).

Seeing as this is merely the second novel by Agatha Christie that I have ever read (the first being “Death on the Nile”, featuring Hercule Poirot, when I was seventeen) am not qualified to pass judgment on how this novel measures up to the rest of Christie’s output, or to comment on the evolution of the Miss Marple character, but I was struck by the focus and taciturnity with which Christie tells her story. My Swedish copy is a mere 209 pages. A modern crime story would be twice that long. Not because the mystery would be more complex but because of the characters. In modern writing, it seems to me, that the writer is obsessed with the private lives of the characters. Every dirty, embarrassing, troubling, and disgusting detail about the hero and the villain needs to be relished in. If Christie had followed the modern guidelines, while solving the murder mystery Miss Marple would spend half of the book trying to reconnect with her long-lost illegitimate daughter, detective-inspector Craddock would be battling his alcohol addiction and try to patch things up with his wife, and Lucy Eylesbarrow would try to seek revenge on the stern director who routinely abused her as a child at the orphanage where she grew up.

Much to my delight, none of this encumbers “4.50 from Paddington”. This is quite simply a classical, albeit slightly outdated, murder mystery.

 

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

Author: Anne Frank
Year: 1988 (1953, 1947)
Publisher: Hökerbergs
Language: Swedish (Translator Ella Wilcke)

”The Diary of a Young Girl” (”Het Achterhuis”) by Anne Frank is the authentic diary of an adolescent Jewish girl in the Netherlands from the time her family goes into hiding from the Nazis in 1942 until three days before the Gestapo raided their hiding place in 1944. And it is an overwhelming read.

Two weeks after I finished the book, I have still not managed to regain my composure. It rattled me to the core. It is a challenge not to think about what I have read and still, I am barely able to collect my thoughts and make sense of the experience.

Rendered unqualified to process Anne Frank’s diary intellectually, my emotional response is all the clearer. I feel horror, grief, and disbelief. I feel love, fear, and confusion. I feel anger. So much anger. But in this dense brew, one feeling towers head and shoulders above all others.

Shame.

Through every word and every page, shame followed me like a heavy load on my chest which sometimes made it hard to breathe and which still forces me to gasp for air when the memories force themselves to the front of my mind.

Shame came in several shapes and for different reasons.

At the beginning, the mere act of reading a young girl’s diary made me uncomfortable. This is, after all, a diary of a regular teenage girl living under highly irregular conditions. Anne Frank wrote about everyday things such as her favourite books and music, her friends and love interests, about which subjects in school she liked and disliked. I was reading the thoughts of a girl who made every effort to keep her diary secret to people around her (in the entry of the 21 September 1942 Anne writes expressively about how she had to physically protect her diary from the prying eyes of one of the other fugitives cooped up in the hiding place).

As she got older, her choice of topics developed. Being stuck in a confined space without access to classmates, friends, cousins, games, movies, sporting events, and concerts, Anne became introspective and resorted to writing about her crowded miniature world. She entrusted every secret, sensitive, and sometimes embarrassing detail to her beloved diary (or “Kitty” as she called it) and as a reader I was constantly reminded that I was an intruder in a supremely intelligent and impressionable young woman’s most private sphere.

I also felt shame about not having read this monumental document much earlier. In secondary school at the latest. For a person who prides himself on being reasonably informed on the Second World War, not having read Anne Frank’s diary is an unforgivable educational lacuna. History may have been made by Hitler, Churchill, and Truman, but history was suffered by Anne Frank and her family and millions of others like her. Their experiences constitute the basis of our knowledge about the era. They are the ones who lived and died in the midst of the world created for them. If one does not know their story, one knows nothing.  

Still, most of all I felt shame for mankind. For the scum who orchestrated the Holocaust, for the many who remained silent and allowed it to happen, and for the measly waste of a person who betrayed Anne Frank along with all the others in the yard house. How brutal, barbarous, simpleminded, and savage does a species have to be to make up an imaginary divide between people and use it as an excuse to unleash mayhem, torment, and misery on them for no other reason than that they can? What a bankrupt people we are, if our own satisfaction and self-worth require the oppression and agony of another? How lowly does one have to be, if one cannot stand on one’s own two legs but has to support oneself on the mutilated bodies of others?

None of Anne Frank’s despair, hope, fears, or confusion was her own choice. She was forced into hiding, forced to flee like a hunted animal from men who did not know her but judged her for her background. How can I not feel ashamed on behalf of humanity for this?

Having said that, dignity can still be restored.

On the 29^th of March 1944, Anne wrote in her diary that Mr Bolkestein of the Dutch exiled government had encouraged the citizens of occupied Netherlands to preserve all written material from the war and announced that an archive of testimonies was to be created once peace was restored. Anne Frank immediately began to plan for the publication of her diary and even gave it the title “Het Achterhuise” under which it was later published in its original Dutch. Suddenly, the shame of reading her words was remedied. I realised that by reading her book, I was granting her wish. She wanted me to do it. What joy! What relief!

The second source of shame has also been addressed. Admittedly far too late, but I did end up reading the book in the end. Maybe I needed to grow into it longer than most. Maybe you would gain from reading it at a mature age, too. Be as it may, I did end up reading “The Diary of a Young Girl”, an omission had been corrected and my life became all the richer for it.

It remains to address the third source of shame for it, too, can be redeemed. The forces that time and again fling the world into chaos are rarely unopposed. But they are still frequently victorious. Their success depends less on their own strength or the weakness of the opposition and more on the silence of the masses. By remaining silent, we side with the oppressors. It is imperative that people of good will unite and take action whenever the stench of pettiness, inferiority complex, narrow-mindedness, and hatred poisons the air.

But it is not enough to detect it in others. We must all be aware that we are human, too. We are, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, specimens of the same base species that for generations has slandered, slated, and slain each other for the silliest reasons. We need to recognise and reconcile with the fact that we are different from the butchers of Amsterdam not in nature, but in our ability to allow reason to trump our instincts.

Anne Frank’s death was pointless, but I for one will do what I can to make sure that her short life was meaningful. I will not live in shame.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Author: Harper Lee
Year: 2010 (1960)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (Translator Jadwiga P. Westrup)

99 years ago, 19-year-old Dick Rowland was shining shoes in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. As an African-American, the only lavatory available to him, according to the law of the land in 1921, was at the top of the nearby Drexel building. The lift was operated by 17-year-old Sarah Page; a white girl. Upon entering the lift, Dick tripped. To break his fall, he instinctively grabbed on to Sarah’s arm accidentally tearing part of her sleeve. He was promptly arrested for attempted rape. The headline in The Tulsa Tribune on the next day read ”Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator”.

This triggered the most violent assault on the black community ever perpetrated on US soil. For 16 hours during the night between the 31^st of May and 1^st of June, white mobs, supported by the local government, including U.S. aircraft, wreaked havoc on the black district of Tulsa. Houses were razed, fires started, bombs dropped from the air, people maimed in the street. The Tulsa Tribune reported 176 dead. Today it is known as “The Tulsa Massacre”.

I have no idea if Harper Lee knew about the Tulsa Massacre when she wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Dödssynden” (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) but growing up in the 30s and 40s in Alabama, she certainly must have had ample opportunity to study racial divide and the oppression of black people.  In many ways, the events in 1921 bear a lot of resemblance to Lee’s story. There is the segregated community, the black man wrongly accused of rape, the assumption of guilt based on skin colour, the dreadful consequences, and the ensuing feeling of shame.

    

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is a highly recommendable read. For starters, it is brimming with attractive characters, scenery, intriguing plots and subplots, and it is well written with a stable pace and solid dialogue. But that is all merely fine craftsmanship. The genius of this novel lies on a different level.

The true power of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is derived from how immersive it is. Lee is in no hurry to skip past seemingly irrelevant scenes which serve the purpose of subtly setting the scene. The reader is invited into the idyllic and carefree world of 9-year-old Scout Finch and her elder brother Jem. We learn about their hometown, Maycomb, Alabama, and about its citizens who are just as diverse and complex as people are in general. Scout and Jem like some of them more than others, as is natural, but they are all, in their own way, decent folks.

One of them is Scout’s and Jem’s father Atticus Finch; a local barrister who will soon be appointed as the accused Tom Robinson’s public defender. He is a balanced, principled, and fair man who works too much and who sometimes allows Scout and Jem more freedom than they would like.

What I find so ingenious about this angle is that in the first half of the book, with all their weaknesses and faults, most citizens of Maycomb seem likeable and, for lack of a better word; good.

Yet when the crisis hits and their characters are tested, they change. Some of those who used to smile and joke, now show up on the doorstep carrying torches and pitchforks. Others, who used to curse and cause trouble, stand up to the trouble-makers. The majority, hunker down and try to come up with excuses why not to take a stand. Those who fret about how the German Nazis treat the Jews and applaud the missionary work to help the Mruna people in Africa are unable to translate their indignation to the reality of their own neighbourhood. Scout and Jem change, too. Jem becomes angry and relentless in his judgment of his fellow Maycombians. Scout’s mind changes from that of a happy-go-lucky little girl to that of an initially confused but increasingly determined young woman.

The only person who remains unfazed by the commotion is Atticus Finch. One of the Finch-family’s neighbours, Maudie, at one point in the book says that Atticus is unique by being the same person in the courthouse as he is in the street. True to that, while fighting vehemently for the rights of his wrongly accused client, he is able to predict his defeat despite overwhelming evidence in his favour. He knows the hearts and souls of the Alabamians all too well to hope that they will put their racism aside to provide justice to an innocent black man against the word of a lying white woman. He knows, but he takes up the fight anyway. In him, Harper Lee gives us a role model. She shows us that no matter how good we think we are, we need to stay true to ourselves when the world around us crumbles and everybody else turns. Atticus Finch is the epitome of the saying “not all heroes wear a cape.” By this, Lee compels us to speak up and not remain silent, even when we are in the minority. Even if we are sure to lose the battle. It is a powerful message of moral courage.

It is imperative that we recognise, that this book is not a history lesson. Racism and bigotry are not things of the past. In the last few days, we have seen the public outcry around the western world about yet another atrocity committed against a black person in the US. Protests and violence follow. “To Kill a Mockingbird” is not about the 1930s. It is not about an era at all. It is about a mindset that transcends generations and which is still very much present in this day and age.

So... what of Dick Rowland? Since Sarah refused to press charges, he was eventually exonerated and immediately left Tulsa to settle in Kansas City. No crime had apparently been perpetrated. Still, the Tulsa Massacre happened.

On the 99^th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. commanded the police to clear the Black Lives Matter demonstration outside his window so that he could cross the street to a nearby church to have propaganda photos taken wielding a Bible in his hand.

I pray that the 100^th anniversary will be presided over by a more worthy American. Atticus Finch's work is not nearly done.

NAZISM IN SWEDEN

Author: Heléne Lööw
Year: 2016 (1998, 2004, 2015)
Publisher: Ordfront förlag
Language: Swedish

I have always found it mildly amusing that the word “Nazi” and “Neanderthal” stand right next to each other in the Swedish Academy’s dictionary of the Swedish language (Svenska Akademiens Ordbok). In my opinion, few if any ideologies in the history of mankind, have been as catastrophic as Nazism. While many ideologies, religions, philosophies, cosmologies, and political and economic systems and beliefs have repeatedly been abused to do evil they were typically not fundamentally intended for, Nazism stands out as being inherently wicked. Being the naïve and philanthropic person that I am, I have long chosen to view the rank and file Nazi sympathisers as intellectually challenged individuals who have been duped by a small group of vile haters, rather than believing that our species could broadly harbour such heinousness and depravation that the core ideology of Nazism would require. They were to me, in the colloquial use of the word, Neanderthals.

Little did I know, that I had but a vague idea of the taxonomy of racism, anti-Semitism, Fascism, Nazism, and other related movements and confusions. This is where Heléne Lööw’s exposé “Nazism in Sweden” across three tomes (“Nazismen i Sverige 1924-1979”, “Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999”, and “Nazismen i Sverige 2000-2014”) turned out to prove invaluable.

Heléne Lööw is an Associate Professor / Reader of History at Uppsala University in Sweden and has dedicated her academic life to the study of extreme right-wing organisations. Her contributions to the field span over more than three decades and she has published extensively on the issue. The present trilogy was never supposed to be one. Lööw writes in the preface that she intended “Nazism in Sweden” to be a conclusion or a summary. Only later did she realise that what she had been studying was not the decline of a movement. It was the beginning of one.

The first volume introduces the history of Nazism in Sweden dating back to the Interwar period where the ideas of National Socialism were first introduced in Sweden. Nationalism, Socialism, anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-democratism were already ubiquitous in Swedish society making the building blocks readily available. Even so, Lööw paints a picture of a highly fragmented Nazi movement with disparaging strategies and problematic relationships with other Nazi organisations in Sweden and Europe, particularly the NSDAP after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway.

The second volume is based on Lööw’s extensive research and personal network in the Swedish extreme right community. Lööw guides us through the gradual transformation from nationalism to white supremacy. Whereas Nazism is naturally isolationistic in its focus on the nation-state, white supremacy is by definition international. The period 1980 – 1999 was also the age in which the old-school Nazis from the 30s and 40s handed the reins over to the next generation. The arrival of the music genre White Noise receives particular attention from Lööw as it became a powerful tool for nationalists to recruit young and influential minds.

The third (and final?) volume accounts for the most recent radicalisation. While racist, anti-semitic and anti-democratic opinions were shameful and covert in the past, the 2000s have seen a broad and public radicalisation of opinions across all of Europe, including Sweden. Far-right political parties entered parliaments left, right, and centre. In Sweden, they call themselves Sweden Democrats and make no secret of their racist agenda. Fascism and racism have gained social acceptance. The arrival of social media gave conspiracy theorists and tinfoil hats a completely new platform to proliferate the myth that there are forbidden truths “they don’t want us to speak about”. This idea entered mainstream politics and triggered a widespread rejection of science, facts, and confidence of authority.

Lööw’s work is interesting in many ways. It helped me open my eyes and understand parts of this world that I hitherto had not considered. Or looked away from. Here are some, but far from all, take-aways.

• Not all racists are Nazis. National Socialism is a well-defined and strictly observed socialist ideology. Nazis have tried to organise labour unions and guilds, they have proposed enhanced public safety nets and social security, advocated the abolition of private ownership, and in many other ways acted like other socialists with one key difference: nationalism. Whereas classical socialism takes aim at social class and the means of production, Nazism focuses on nationality and ethnicity. By its very nature, it is against globalisation, it equals race with privilege, and is collectivistic as opposite to individualistic. In a Swedish Nazi utopia, Swedes (by any given definition) are collectively the lords within the territory of Sweden. It is a socialist society where no Swede stands above any other and all Swedes stand above all others. The Nazi political struggle is not between class and class, but between nationality and nationality. 
• The Nazi movement has many similarities with religion. They have rites and revival meetings, they observe special holidays and traditions, they adore deities and saints. Heléne Lööw affords considerable space, particularly in the second and third volumes, to the quasi-religious martyrs, myths, rites, art, and symbols that are part of the Nazi movement in Sweden. I was surprised by the sheer volume and complexity of the Nazi pantheon and the detailed knowledge and education in the field that the dedicated Nazi sympathisers acquire. “Nazism in Sweden” offers a detailed report of the different martyrs and demigods that Swedish Nazis worship, as well as the fervour with which they do it. 
• A third observation, which is of particular interest to me, is the history of other political movements which share the white supremacist ideology with the Nazis but are different in other ways. There are the globalists who want to unite all white supremacy movements, regardless of nationality. There are the Christian white nationalists, mostly in the USA. There are the anti-Semites who root for the Muslims. There are the Islamophobes who root for the Jews. It seems to me that with so many minorities to hate, it is difficult to fit all of that hatred into one organisation or political movement. Consequently, many Nazis frequently jump between parties and action groups so that they can always savour the hatred flavour of the day. 
• Throughout history, there have only been two political forces in Sweden which have consistently and methodically opposed Nazism under any guise. These are the Liberals and the Social Democrats. No matter what modern racists would like to have us believe, Hjalmar Branting, Per Albin Hansson, and Tage Erlander were all staunchly anti-Nazi and pro-democracy. Communists may rightfully claim to have consistently opposed Nazism, too, but they did not defend democracy, which is why I disqualify them on this point.

“Nazism in Sweden” is written in a remarkably dispassionate tone, to the point of almost sounding bland. In the preface, the author discloses some hints to her antipathy to all things associated with the Nazi movement in Sweden and elsewhere, but the tone in the book is balanced, objective, and unbiased. At times, I even had to remind myself that the people quoted as expressing one or another opinion were in fact Nazis who actively sought to bring about the demise of this country and the freedom of its people. Lööw grants them the right to sound human, far removed from the demonic depictions of Nazi leaders that we are used to.

This brings me to a point where I realise, after having read all three books and a total of more than 1,300 pages, that there are similarities between Nazis and Neanderthals after all: both are routinely underestimated by the general public.

THE COLOR PURPLE

Author: Alice Walker

Year: 1987 (1982)

Publisher: Bokförlaget Trevi

Language: Swedish (Translator Kerstin Hallén)

It has been a while since I last read an epistolary novel. In fact, I had almost elevated to a truism the idea that the genre itself belonged in the beginning of the 20th century or, if still exercised, was chiefly intended to provide an archaic or comic effect best suited for children's books such as "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4" or the Swedish smash hit "In Ned's Head". But to every rule, if indeed this is a rule, there are exceptions. "The Martian", by Andy Weir, "We Need to Talk about Kevin" by Lionel Shriver, and "An Eye Red", by Jonas Hassen Khemiri are some notable 21st-century examples. 

One of the most well-known epistolary novels, “Purpurfärgen” ("The Colour Purple") by Alice Walker, however, is not a fin-de-siécle creation but was published in 1982. The novel constitutes a fictional diary or series of letters that the young African-American girl, Celie, in the American South begins to write to God in an attempt to make sense of a profoundly miserable and hopeless universe. Her mother dies, leaving her with her abusive father who frequently rapes her and twice impregnates her. Before long, he gives her away in marriage to another wife-beating man who is more interested in her younger sister, Nettie, but has to settle for her. She is again beaten and abused, not only by her several times older husband but also by his adolescent children from an earlier marriage. After Nettie runs away from their father and is not heard from again, Celie has absolutely nothing left. 

This is when the turnaround germinates. With the help of newly forged and unexpected friendships, Celie slowly begins to create room for herself in this world. A wonderful journey, which will take decades, commences.  

"The Color Purple" could almost be considered a Bildungsroman, but it is nothing of the sort. It is quite clear that this is more than a story about one girl. This is a story about an entire revolution. Black women's uprising against male and white oppression. The events, characters, and environments were never intended to be realistic. They are all there to tell the story about a widespread awakening that Walker was trying to not only describe but rather to instigate. 

A quick analysis of the characters provides a lot of information. Each of them serves a singular purpose in the story. Broadly speaking, it can be summarised as "black woman = good, man or white = bad." Celie is the embodiment of the oppressed black woman. She is uneducated, abused, unattractive, and bereft of all self-esteem. Her transformation is the transformation of black women as a collective.  

Each of the key female characters around Celie symbolises some desirable quality in a black woman. Nettie is education. Shug Avery is wealth and beauty. Sofia is independence and courage. Mary Agnes is talent. In combination, they paint the picture of the competent, strong, and free African-American woman. And symbolically, they all need to come together to set the oppressed woman free. 

The diary format works reasonably well although Celie’s idiosyncratic use of the English language sometimes makes the text difficult to follow.  As I consumed this title in its Swedish translation, I had reason to consider the challenges that the translator must have faced. The black voice of southern US has no immediate counterpart in the Swedish language and so Kerstin Hallén had to create a unique voice for Celie in the Swedish version. The English syntax and grammar are designed to reflect the way a person like Celie would talk, not necessarily how she would write, which would make it unusually suitable for an audiobook. In the Swedish version, Hallén has opted for an imagined rural dialect, possibly from her own native Jämtland. Contrary to the English original, Celie’s lack of education is mirrored in spelling errors in the Swedish version. However, the spelling, including the errors, remains consistent throughout the book, and despite Celie’s struggle to spell basic words, she still manages to spell the notoriously difficult state name of Tennessee accurately in her diary. This technique, as with everything else in the book, is clearly designed to convey a message and build dramaturgy rather than to be credible or authentic. 

Humble to the fact that my knowledge of American literature, and especially Black literature, is best described as rudimentary, I will not try to put "The Color Purple" in a broader context. In my own reading, Alice Walker takes the place as a worthy heir to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even though "The Color Purple" is set in a historical context at the beginning of the 20th century, I imagine that Walker wants us to recognise the modern-day struggles of Black women in the United States. The emancipation journey once embarked on by the African-American community in the 19th century is far from complete. Novels, essays, academic papers, news reports, and everyday conversation and actions are necessary to maintain direction and momentum. As long as racism, bigotry, men’s violence against women exist, Alice Walker’s classic novel will sadly remain relevant.