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!