THE ANTARCTIC OF LOVE

Author: Sara Stridsberg
Year: 2018
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

”Did I really think that he was going to kill me? Yes, perhaps I did, but I didn’t think it would be the end. All this time, I thought I would return as someone else, and that I’d be forgiven. Forgiven for what? I don’t know, just forgiven. For being born. For existing in this world. For being killed and for returning. Lost. Liberated. ”

The voice we hear comes from the beyond. The narrator, a prostitute and heroin addict, is dead – murdered. Her head has been sunk into a contaminated cesspit where the acids quickly consume her face as if to ultimately seal her namelessness, while her body is now dissected and disposed of in two suitcases in separate locations in Stockholm. Her body is partitioned in death as it was mutilated by hundreds or even thousands of men in life. Her face obliterated just as she was defaced in life by men who were interested only in her body, rendering her face, her thoughts, and her feelings irrelevant. A life not worth living thus ends in a death not worth dying.

In her latest novel, “Kärlekens Antarktis” (“The Antarctica of Love”), Sara Stridsberg tells a story from the perspective of the weakest and most exposed individual in her weakest and most exposed moment. The narrator knows that she is dead and she has complete memory of her moment of death. Her tale is her life passing in front of her eyes in the moment of her death. Only contrary to the common rendition of this recurring trope, it is not flashing by. Instead, it is grinding slowly and with crushing force, dwelling on every detail, every feature, and every grain and every particle. The moment of her death starts before she is born and continues in perpetuity after she is dead. Bit by bit, her life is disclosed to us: her childhood, her failed parents, her destructive relationships and marriage, the fate of the son and daughter she gave birth to, while regularly returning to the moment of her assassination. It is as if her entire life was condensed in that moment.

Verily, this is a taxing read. Stridsberg’s prose is graphic and expressive, and she does not shy away from the most grotesque details. The reader is dragged through every harrowing second of the narrator’s torturous demise. The same way the murderer did not spare her, so does she not spare us from going through the agony of her experience, if only in our imagination. The writing is powerful and direct and hits you in your gut like a donkey’s kick. True, some imperfections remain. The rhythm could be improved here and there and on a couple of occasions I was ejected from the immersion by an unexpectedly lazy choice of words. Yet, all in all, it is a well-crafted novel.

Given the plot and the characters, it is impossible not to think about a high profile murder that was perpetrated in Stockholm in 1984 where the body of a young woman, also a prostitute and a drug addict, was found cut into pieces and hidden away in different locations. Two physicians were later prosecuted and found not guilty to the murder although it could be established that they had dismembered the woman’s body after her death. I was eight years old when this story made the headlines. Stridsberg was twelve. Brutality made a debut in my life, if only from a distance. Maybe in hers, too. The reality of the violence from which this story is born had been uncloaked.   

I can only speculate about what the author aims to achieve with “Kärlekens Antarktis”, especially since this is the first book from her that I have read and therefore am unable to put it in a broader context. In the afterword, Stridsberg denies that her book is about any specific person or event. Maybe this is accurate. For in the final words of the novel, the narrator addresses her daughter.

“The tales about how the universe continues to expand, make it somewhat easier for me to let go now. The thought that we are all part of the same endless motion. I am thinking: whatever happens to us, only one second of eternity has passed.”

It seems that in Stridsberg’s mind, the line between individuals is blurred and so the divide between the writer and the fruit of her imagination can be, too. The moment Stridsberg reaches out to her they become the same. Her erudite and poetic voice becomes the voice of the simple and unschooled dead woman thus enabling her to speak despite her throat being cut and her mouth filled with dirt and acid. The literary language cannot belong to the victim but certainly to the writer who together with the victim becomes the narrator. They both speak and they are both cut into pieces and stored in suitcases.  

“The space which we, the dead, once occupied in the world is filled with the living faster than one would think.”

* All quotes are translated by me from the Swedish original and are not necessarily identical to the official English translation of this novel.

A WILD SHEEP CHASE

Author: Haruki Murakami
Year: 2003 (1982)
Publisher: Vintage Books
Language: English (translator Alfred Birnbaum)

In the spring of 2010, the Icelandic volcano at Eyjafjalljökull experienced a peculiar eruption. Seismologically, it was an insignificant event with the first phase barely reaching 1 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.  It gradually intensified and by the end of the event had spewed an, as volcanoes go, moderate amount of 0.3 km³ of tephra into the atmosphere. What made this eruption remarkable was not its force or longevity, but rather the composition of the tephra that it discharged. The matter ejected into the sky was in the form of tiny particles that formed a massive billow of ash which, propelled by the west winds, swept over Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Northern Europe. The microscopic silica-rich debris, threatening to blast aeroplane windscreens and disrupt the function of turbine engines, shut air travel down across most of Europe. The skies went silent, returned for a moment to the birds and the clouds.  

At the time of the eruption, I was on a business trip to Bulgaria. Realising that my flight home had been cancelled and that the chance of my getting airborne again in the near future was slim, I managed to book myself onto one of the northbound long-distance buses that opportunistic entrepreneurs had been quick to offer to stranded travellers. Preparing for the long ride, I purchased one small pillow and two books: Chuck Palahniuk’s “Choke”, and Haruki Murakami’s “A Wild Sheep Chase”. I read Palahniuk on the bus and finished Murakami about a week ago.

The synopsis for this novel is not terribly complicated. The protagonist is a bored Japanese man who runs a dwindling copywriting firm with his alcoholic partner. He is in the midst of a mundane divorce process because he and his wife got tired of each other. No animosity, no drama, just plain ennui. Our man is not an archetypal failure, just an average bloke in his early 30s who has reached the pinnacle of his existence and surrendered to the fact that his accomplishments are distinctly average.

One day he publishes an ad for one of his few clients using a photograph he had received a long time ago from his notoriously wayward and ultimately long-lost friend. It is a perfectly ordinary Japanese photograph showing a mob of sheep grazing on a meadow with a snow-capped mountain peak in the background. The man is understandably surprised when one day he is picked up by a black car and brought to the secluded office of a powerful politician/mafia boss who wishes to have a word about it. At closer inspection under the guidance of the boss, he notices that one of the sheep in the picture seems to have a star-shaped spot on its back. He is unceremoniously instructed to locate that particular sheep or else his company will be put out of business and he and his partner ruined. No further explanations are offered. He feels neither particularly inspired nor particularly intimidated by this, but as he has nothing better to do he sets off on what to the reader will be a highly enjoyable sheep chase.

Haruki Murakami has said that the secret to his success is that he prefers to write in English rather than in his native Japanese precisely because his command of English is limited. This forces him to write down his thoughts and images using simple words and short sentences. His greatness lies in that the resulting text is incredibly accessible without sacrificing any of its richness in colour, flavour, or scent. Murakami has an extraordinary talent for creating worlds that effortlessly envelop his reader. I have never travelled to Hokkaido but after reading “A Wild Sheep Chase” I feel like I have nevertheless been there.

There is however more to this read than masterful prose. On a deeper level, the way I read it, the novel is about detachment and loneliness. All of the characters are in one way or another lonely; aloof from the rest of the world. They function in it and affect each other but without ever really touching, similar to ships on a lake whose wakes rock nearby vessels without their ever rubbing against each other. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that none of the characters has a name. They are “the girlfriend”, “the man”, “the partner”, etc. It is as if everyone is expendable and replaceable to the point of not meriting a proper name. This way, “the cat” can be substituted for any other cat. The protagonist, his friend, his ex-wife, his new girlfriend, the boss, and the sheep with the star on its back somehow exist in the story without connecting, thrust to and forth through life like the ball in a pinball machine. They all construct different ways to deal with this reality, but none of them defeats the futility of being. In essence, “A Wild Sheep Chase” is about the vain hunt for mutuality and the utter disappointment that awaits those who believe that they have gained it. Not even those that go to extremes in order to liaise with another being are, in the end, successful.

The ending is actually the only section with which I struggled a bit. It both is and is not predictable and although the magic realism, for which Murakami is famous, is usually non-invasive and adds an interesting dimension to the universe, to me it partially clouded the final few chapters. Somewhat like the salt that, if used moderately, binds together and brings out the flavours of the other ingredients in the recipe but when over-applied ruins the meal.

I would be thrilled to hear what you have to say about it as I think it can be interpreted in any number of different ways. Come to think of it, while I do not know if this was Murakami’s intention, this seems like a valid statement about your and mine and everybody else’s time on Earth.

TAGE ERLANDER

Author: Tage Erlander
Year: 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1979, 1982, 
Publisher: Tidens Förlag
Language: Swedish 

Since the end of the Second World War, Sweden has had a Social Democratic prime minister for a total of 59 years. For more than 1/3 of those, the name of the Prime Minister was Tage Erlander. These are his memoirs in six tomes: ”1901-1939”, ”1940-1949”, ”1949-1954”, ”1955-1960”, ”1960-talet” (”The 1960s”), and ”Sjuttiotalet” (The Seventies”). The first four volumes are penned by Erlander himself, the fifth by Arvid Lagercrantz in the form of interviews with Erlander, and the last by what seems to be an undisclosed ghostwriter.

In Sweden, Tage Erlander is remembered as the builder of “Folkhemmet”, the People’s Home. Folkhemmet is a vision of the country as the home for its entire people based on the idea of a trilateral partnership between capital, labour, and people who all benefit from a stable co-existence and co-dependence marked by negotiation rather than confrontation. The concept was spawned by Erlander’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson, in the 1920s, but the necessary means and financial strength to put it into practice were not available until after the war.  

Although Erlander was the builder of Folkhemmet, he was not its architect. It is obvious from his memoirs, and he himself emphasises it, that he was no great ideologist. He is careful to credit several thinkers (most notably Ernst Wigforss and Gustav Möller but there were many others) for the ideas that formed the politics of his government and claims few, if any, ideas for his own. However, he was an outstanding politician who had an unusual aptitude for turning will into action. And there was no lack of will in the Social Democracy at the time!

Sweden after the world war was lifted up from the poor provincial agricultural nation that it used to be, to become the highly industrialised welfare state that we know today. Erlander supervised the overhaul of the mandatory primary school, pensions, public health insurance, non-alliance based defence, nuclear power, science and innovation, modern housing, and infrastructure. Under his stewardship, Sweden rose to become one of the most prosperous nations in the world.

Democratic Socialism, too, was tested during this time. With the end of Stalinism and the rise of various incarnations of socialism in different governments around Europe, parliamentary democracy being a young form of government still was by no means a given, and Sweden’s constitution as a hereditary monarchy was an unlikely but nonetheless lingering threat.

Tage Erlander writes in great detail about events, people, and ideas.  He has been greatly aided by his habitude of keeping a diary and retaining his letters but he has also employed the assistance of many of his friends and colleagues, as well as public files and journalistic archives. Although his tone is consistently placid throughout the series and he never veers from his respectful attitude toward the people that he mentions by name, allies and adversaries alike, it does show that the memoirs were written over a long period of time and that the Prime Minister aged significantly between each volume. While the first book that covers his youth and first steps into politics before the war is light-hearted, humorous, and witty, the middle volumes are more technical, featuring lengthy quoted passages from meeting minutes, news articles, diary entries, and speeches, whereas the last two tomes are contemplative, pensive, and sometimes philosophical.

Already in the second volume, he takes a moment to dwell on the essence of democratic socialism against the backdrop of the Second World War and the increasingly loud Communists. He writes “The supporting pillar in the ideology of social democracy is the respect for the freedom of the individual and the principles of democracy.” It is telling how the much smaller Swedish Communist Party persisted in calling the Social Democrats “traitors” on account of categorically rejecting revolution and dictatorship as permissible instruments for the liberation of the workers. Indeed, passages from his diaries show signs of concern due to his own longevity as Prime Minister and the detrimental impact that he might have on the faith in the democratic system among the Swedish electorate.

Although the political challenges for Sweden have changed since Tage Erlander’s days, it is useful to follow the ideological thread that derived out of thoughts that shaped his politics and that proceeds to the modern social democrats of today under Magdalena Andersson’s leadership. Erlander frequently returns to concepts such as democracy, rule of law, and liberty, and his actions and choices are routinely guided by these values. He explains how it is possible to be a socialist and support private investments into production and trade with ensuing profits. He defends a labour market that is based on mutual agreements between employers’ organisations and trade unions free from political interference (which is why there is no regulatory minimum wage in Sweden). In the fifth volume, Erlander talks at length about his dialogues and meetings with some of the most important industrialists in Sweden, among others Marcus Wallenberg and Axel Wenner-Gren.

It is inevitable that a person writing his autobiography will take the opportunity to shape his or her reputation. At its worst, an autobiography can become a self-aggrandising propaganda piece. At its best, it is the product of selective memory. I do not expect Tage Erlander’s memoirs to be an exception. Having said that, despite his numerous and radical accomplishments, I never get the feeling of reading about a great man. Although Erlander rarely brings up any significant mistakes or miscalculations from his past, he also resists the urge to glorify himself or his achievements.  From this perspective, the fifth entry, “1960-talet”, where he is interviewed by Arvid Lagercrantz, is perhaps the most revealing part of the series and at some point Erlander even schools his speaking partner when he disapproves of a certain question. This somehow underscores his modesty and leaves me with a feeling of having read the thoughts and memories of a person who is not altogether different from me. 

As a historical document about one of the most exciting periods in Swedish post-war politics, Tage Erlander’s memoirs are close to matchless and I am delighted to have had the opportunity to spend this time in the company of this influential person. Despite the books being written before I was born and deal with a time dating back to the first half of the 20^th century, I am often struck by how current the topics that he brings up are and how crisp (and often witty) his political commentary. “What would Erlander have done?” is not a bad thought experiment for modern-day social democrats when faced with the issues of our time. And that, perhaps, is the best testament to the greatness of this man.

HARD RETURN

Author: Julie Jézéquel
Year: 2011 (2009)
Publisher: Sekwa förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Ragna Essén)

There is often something mildly humiliating about people who have reached a moderate level of fame and try to monetise before they are duly returned to their rightful place in the mists of anonymity. Yet there is also something recognisable about it. I am quite certain that each of you who read this post would probably do the same if the opportunity presented itself. I would, too. If I were a famous musician, athlete, or artist you can be sure that before long you would find a recipe book, an eau de cologne, and a line of underwear with my name on it in a store near you. All of poor quality, of course. Especially the recipes.

Based on the above, I am usually sceptical of celebrities who have a go at writing novels. I imagine that theirs are more often than not sub-par products where the author’s name is a more important selling point than the quality of the writing.

It is a good thing then, that I am not excessively gaga over French cinema or I would have known, when I picked up her novel “Vända Blad” (“Retour á la ligne”, not available in English but the title could be translated to something like “Hard Return”), that Julie Jézéquel is a notable French actress who has appeared in numerous movies and TV-productions for more than three decades. Had I been better informed, I might have put the book down again but as it happens, in my ignorant bliss I carried the book home.

It turned out to be quite a charming read. Jézéquel is clever (and modest) enough to write about a world she knows well – television. Her protagonist Clara is an appreciated and productive writer of film scripts for TV. She does not write scripts for the big screen and she does not do series or soap operas. She keeps inside the confines of her expertise and never ventures outside. But when her producer one day insists that she rewrite an ending to one of her scripts she gets into an argument that ends up ruining her career. Overnight, she finds herself persona non grata in an entire industry.

In a desperate attempt to earn a livelihood, Clara advertises her services as a ghostwriter and meets with a somewhat peculiar client. One who asks her to re-imagine and put on paper his entire life story from scratch. He offers her no instructions, no framework, and no pointers other than a few documents to prove his identity and that of his family’s, some notes, letters and photographs, and a sizeable advance payment. Clara, not knowing what to think of it, gets to work.

“Vända blad” is the closest I will come to an up-lit novel and truth be told, it is far from a literary masterpiece. The language is simple and straightforward although not annoyingly so. The characters are few and stereotypical but in an endearing way. The side characters play no role whatsoever other than making Clara’s universe a little thicker but the story could just as easily have been told without their presence. The ostensible inconspicuousness of Clara’s client feels flat but marries well with Clara’s desperate attempts to try to understand this diffident person. The plot is linear with a few flashbacks but no offshoots or tangents while the ending, albeit surprising, is much too abrupt to make a lasting impression. The main indication that the book is drawing to a close is not to be found in the storyline but rather in the fact that you are running out of pages.

Despite these obvious flaws, I will admit I enjoyed the book. Without raising any critical issues it still touches on some curious topics that reveal one or two things about the working environment in French television. Another interesting connection, although superficial, is the examination of the relationship between an unwanted but real existence and a manufactured one.

To sum up, Julie Jézéquel has no apparent reason to be ashamed of her writing. She is probably not a writer I will return to seeing as there are so many other authors out there whose production I am yet to discover, but I am quite happy with having made her acquaintance and for the right reader and the right circumstance, I can actually recommend the book. As up-lit goes, it is vastly superior to the last book I read in the genre (the most detestable balderdash spawned from Jojo Moyes’s ungodly quill). This one is coherent, witty, and at the end of the day rather entertaining. It is just what you need for a tedious transatlantic flight or as a leisurely beach-read.

THREE MEN ON THE BUMMEL

Author: Jerome K Jerome
Year: 1900
Publisher: Bernhard Tauchnitz
Language: English

Sequels are a bit like the second cup of tea from the same tea bag: you recognise the flavour but miss the intensity.  

After the tremendous commercial fortunes of his “Three Men in a Boat”(see my review from October 2021), which marked the pinnacle of his fame, Jerome K Jerome’s star power faded relentlessly.  He wrote a few more books, typically based on his observations during one or another journey, but he was unable to repeat the success of his previous blockbuster. Eventually he returned to his most successful creations in the hope of being able to squeeze some more value out of them. In 1898, “Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow” was published as a sequel to his comparatively successful “Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow”, and two years later he returned to his boating heroes J, George, and Harris in “Three Men on the Bummel”.

This time around, our merry adventurers set off on a train-/bicycle ride across Germany. The tone of the novel is very similar to that of its predecessor. The travel party is just as inept and ill-prepared, the story line is frequently interrupted by more or less loosely connected anecdotes and tangents, and slapstick comedy based on awkwardness and absurdity abounds. The very decision process leading up to the trip offers the first laughs as the three gentlemen go to great lengths to ensure that their wives, who they assume will be devastated by grief and longing in their absence, will not demand to join them on their trip lest they perish from heart-ache and pining. Their disappointment upon discovering that the wives could not be happier about the chaps’ giving them some space and a bit of time to themselves, is priceless.   

Well under way, J, George, and Harris encounter a string of events and situations that allows Jerome to ponder on the cultural differences between the Brits and Germans and how their respective societies are organised. This is of particular interest as the book was written a decade and a half before the First World War and in the nearing end of the age of empires. Germany at the time was on the rise and had only recently caught up with the industrialisation level of France and Britain and seriously begun to challenge them as a colonial power. The novel was unambiguously intended for British readers and the narrator mixes humorous observations about the Germans and the British alike, but exclusively from an insular perspective. It is slightly amusing that many of the traits and characteristics that he ascribed to the Germans 120 years ago would still be recognised by a modern Briton as typical for a “Kraut” to this day.

Despite the jocularities, pranks, and antics, the British image of, or indeed prejudice to, Germany and the German people is palpable but unfailingly in a good-humoured and, as I read it, essentially respectful way. Jerome could hardly have penned a book like “Three Men on the Bummel” without having spent considerable amounts of time in Germany and gotten to at least superficially know German customs, language, architecture, cuisine, and geography. There is no doubt that Jerome during his travels around Germany took a liking to the country and its people.

A word on the history of my personal copy since it looks like it was flushed down the toilet before being retrieved from the water purification plant and subsequently dried over Mount Doom in Mordor. As a matter of fact this is the first 1900-edition which was owned by my great-grandfather, Emil, presumably through his English-born wife Magdalene who must have taken it with her to Poland and incorporated it into her husband’s library at the family estate in the early 1910s. It went on to survive two world wars and Stalinist oppression which banned Western culture and artwork, before being handed down to me by my grandfather before he passed away.   

Although this novel is less famous than “Three Men in a Boat”, as a leisurely read it is surprisingly charming for a sequel. The jokes are a little further apart and the sections of purple writing and half-baked musings a bit more tedious, but all in all, much like its predecessor, it is too a silly book.

THREE MEN IN A BOAT

Author: Jerome K Jerome
Year: 1994 (1889)
Publisher: Forum
Language: Swedish (translator Birgitta Hammar)

What a silly little book ”Tre män i en båt” (Three Men in a Boat”) by Jerome K Jerome is! It is as silly as books come. Utterly, utterly silly.

Three decadent young men – George, Harris and the narrator J – all of whose wits are vastly overshadowed by their laziness, having concluded that they suffer from exhaustion, embark on a recreational boat trip upon the River Thames from London to Oxford. They are accompanied by J’s dog Montmorency. They first consider other travel options but every time someone in the party recalls a story of a friend or family member who has already tried it with discouraging results and so the three discard the idea. In the end, a boat trip on the river remains the only feasible choice.

They rent a boat and off they go. The comical situations they encounter on the way and the more or less loosely connected anecdotes they tell each other during the journey are what the book is famous for. Jerome finds room to ruminate on such diverse issues as the fallibility of the weather report, the ease of getting lost at Victoria Station, the disadvantages of learning how to play the banjo from a manual, and the challenges of cooking and Irish stew on a river boat.

The book also has some exceptional quotes and one-liners.
“I like work, it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
“George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two.”
“He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.”

To me, the descriptions of the humorous events read a bit like a manuscript to Mr Bean episodes. Although some of the jokes are fresh and on target, the difficulties of writing as opposed to acting out slapstick frequently shine through quite strongly. More often than not, I have the feeling that I am listening to someone relating a funny incident from their lives or a scene from a movie they have seen. It must have been hilarious to have been there, but rather less captivating to have it re-told to you.

“Tre män in en båt” was originally intended to be a serious travel guide. The Thames had only recently been made available for recreational sailing after it had been cleaned up by the government only a few decades earlier. The railway revolution had moved most goods transport from the English waterways to the tracks which in a short time had afforded an abundance of room on the river. By the late 19^th century, boating up and down the river had become something of a fad among the prosperous bourgeoisie and Jerome decided to write a vade mecum for prospective boaters. It seems the skits were designed to intersperse the fact-laden portions in order to make the book more pleasurable (and perhaps to mirror the author’s jocose personality) but they soon took the upper hand and the book turned out to become a satirical commentary on the vacation habits of the privileged classes; popular with the reading masses, scoffed at by literary critics.

A fun fact is that, if applied as a travel guide, “Tre män i en båt” is still perfectly useful. All the landmarks described and all the pubs and inns recommended along the river stretch between London and Oxford are still there to this day. So if you are so inclined, hop on a boat, ropes away, and off you go.

“There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams.”     

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

Author: Arundhati Roy
Year: 2017
Publisher: Brombergs Bokförlag
Language: Swedish (translator Peter Samuelsson)

Now and again you come across a work of art that tests the limits of your cognitive abilities. Almost as if it nudged your centre of gravity or shifted your points of reference. In some cases, it is the topic that the artist examines that boggles your mind. At other times, it is a perspective offered that thus far had remained unrevealed. Yet every now and then, you encounter artwork, be it a musical piece, a poem, drama, painting, performance, or dance that by its sheer anatomy thrusts a new layer of consciousness onto your existence.    

Such provocative art will chip away with surgical precision at the joints in the fabric of your world-matrix where concepts meet; right at the edge between the familiar and the foreign, black and white, good and bad, heaven and earth. These are the points of our Weltanschauung where we as humans are already struggling and therefore easily provoked, angered, and frustrated when our conceptual compartments, chiselled with such painstaking meticulousness are challenged.

This might explain why Arundhati Roy’s second and most recent novel “Den yttersta lyckans ministerium” (“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”) became so controversial. Particularly in her native India. Her book-launches have been interrupted by violent protesters and her critics have burned effigies of her in the streets and attacked her rabidly in the media. The truth of the matter is that the novel methodically homes in on some of the most widely open wounds in the Hindu society: Kashmir, the Caste system, and the culture of toxic masculinity. To people who are unable or unwilling to take a step back and observe their world at a distance for a second, this will be painful.

The novel opens with a child being born in a dark room during a blackout and being presented to her mother as the long-coveted son she was hoping for. She calls him Aftab. At a closer inspection in better lighting the next morning she realises that Aftab is actually a hermaphrodite with both male and female genitalia. Neither boy nor girl. Or both. Right on the joint in the matrix.  

“In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things- carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments- had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby. Yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him- Hijra. Two words actually, Hijra and Kinnar. But two words do not make a language.
Could you live outside of language?”  

Roy knows exactly what she is doing with her writing. By this intense prelude, she declares the purpose of her novel. Aftab goes on to grow up and decides to cast off the gender identity ascribed to him by his mother and embrace his female side. He becomes she. Aftab becomes Anjum.

In the second part, Roy breaks with the bustling capital and hurls the reader into the hotbed of political turmoil that is Kashmir. This part of the book pivots on another woman, Tilo, and the three men who all love her for different reasons and each with a love of a different kind. The three men come to represent the scattered identities of Indian citizens in the Kashmir conflict. Musa is the casteless soldier of the Muslim resistance and an active enemy to the Indian forces stationed in Kashmir. Biplab is the Indian intelligence officer and member of the highest caste. Naga is right in between, a journalist who is seemingly impartial and makes it look like he is holding the policy-makers responsible but who in reality is a useful idiot who runs the errands of the government, and knows about it.

Tilo is a mix of them all. Born of a high-caste mother and an untouchable father. A Kashmiri activist from Kerala far away from the northern provinces. She ends up marrying two of her three friends but never the one with whom she has the strongest bond.

What then unites a hermaphrodite prostitute from Shahjahanabad with a reluctant warrior from Kashmir? The former having violently broken with every premise of her middle-class existence to glissade into the bliss of resigned harmony. The latter evolving gradually through the mounting pressure of society until violence envelopes her in a climactic discharge of defiance and rebellion. One clue is in exclusion; the common experience of being a stranger in one’s own land, and the intimate acquaintance with being considered an outcast, a provocation, and a menace.

Roy brings them together at a graveyard where Anjum has created a makeshift asylum for unwanted Indian residents of all kinds. The same way the dead are being removed and deposited outside of the city walls, so are the living ejected from the community. They all gather in the same place, sharing the same site. The living, in Musa’s words, are after all “only dead people pretending to be alive.”  

In the hands of Arundhati Roy, musings such as these can only culminate in a literary masterpiece. I dare say that the main thing standing between Roy and the Nobel Prize in literature is her meagre production. Den yttersta lyckans ministerium is but her second work of fiction since her debut “The God of Small Things” almost 25 years ago. Her writing is gentle and sublime. The attention to detail is astounding. The strength is neither in the plot nor in the characters – the plot is almost non-existent and the characters, although manifold and diversified, incomplete – but rather in her unrelenting low-frequency pecking on the social fabric to which her characters are barely but inescapably connected and her ability to shine the light on the feeble threads that unite them. In this, her authorship reminds me of that of Doris Lessing (reviewed August 2020) and Virginia Woolf (reviewed September 2020). Similarly to theirs, Roy’s writing forces you to recognise that you are in fact largely ignorant of your world, as if it was poking you with a stick and pushing you against your will toward the precipice of wisdom. You do not necessarily have to love the art that does this to you. You may even hate it for tearing down a perfectly good illusion that has served you well for half a lifetime or more.

But you might have to acknowledge that the joints in your matrix are actually cracks ready to burst.

THE PIANIST

Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman
Year: 2000 (1946)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Znak
Language: Polish

The Second World War is probably the lowest point of our species so far. Mankind, undressed to all its bare-naked evil, rage, bigotry, hypocrisy, savagery, and moral bankruptcy, deliberately imprinted an indelible bloodstain on its history. It is estimated that up to 60 million people perished. They died from genocide, massacres, bombings, and disease. Some were killed in battle. Some committed suicide. Some starved to death. Many more still went through unspeakable hardship, pain, despair, horror, and trauma.

Truth be told, I try to avoid reading books about the Second World War. It marks such a revolting epoch that it makes my stomach turn at the mere thought. And yet, some books just have to be read, contemplated, and shared. Some experiences may never be forgotten and by reading them, I imagine that I add my own conscience to the collective memory of the people and events of the 1930s and 1940s. One such book is “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank (see my review from June 2020). Another is “Pianista” (“The Pianist”) by Wladyslaw Szpilman.

The book ventures to capture the haunting memories of a Varsovian Polish-Jewish pianist and employee of the National Polish Radio, from the day the Second World War broke out to the day the Nazis surrendered and Warsaw was liberated.

Szpilman recounts how despite German bombs barraging the once prosperous Polish capital, shattering windows and setting entire neighbourhoods aflame, tossing carts, vehicles, horses, and people into the air leaving only charred shadows in their stead, he made his way to the studio of the radio station to make his final broadcast. In the midst of this inferno, where the noise of the crumbling city and the blasts from the enemy’s relentless bombardment much of the time overcame the sound of his grand piano, he gave an incandescent Chopin recital to his horrified listeners as a musical valediction to the country that was to be no more. The Polish radio was soon thereafter taken off the air and replaced by Nazi-controlled transmissions.

He reminisces how one day, the dwindling population of Warsaw, already decimated by being systematically  bit by bit transported out of the city and to the extermination camps, is shocked to learn that a sizeable portion of the centre was to be designated Jewish and surrounded by walls on each side making it impossible to get either in or out without authorisation. Jews living in other quarters needed to move inside the walls, and non-Jewish Poles having thitherto resided within the designated area needed to move out. Neighbourhoods, friendships, households, businesses, schools were broken up in an instant and the ghetto came into existence.

In fact there were two ghettos, connected only by a narrow passageway across Chlodna Street which was, and I seem to recall still is, a busy thoroughfare in Warsaw with some critical tramlines running along it. It was guarded by German soldiers who had to stop the heavy traffic in order to allow the residents to cross from one of the ghettos to the other. In one memorable sequence, Szpilman relates how the soldiers, having grown bored with their monotonous jobs of keeping the Jews at bay during rush hours, came up with a game where they commanded a group of street musicians to play some merry tunes and then forced some unfortunate individuals from the anticipating masses on the pavement on each side of Chlodna Street to dance for their amusement. They found particular pleasure in matching up conspicuously silly pairs such as the shortest man they could find with the tallest woman or elderly and crippled couples which they spurred to dance faster and faster under the threat of being shot on the spot, until their frail bodies succumbed to the fatigue and tumbled to the ground.

The book is packed with stories like these. Every single page saturated with disbelief, fear, humiliation, despair, sacrifice, and senseless killing and death. Wladyslaw Szpilman would lose everything and everyone to the war; except his life. As if by a miracle, almost six years after he had given the last live recital on the wireless in 1939, he gave the first to a once again free Poland in 1945, playing the same piece by Frédéric Chopin as if to declare the indomitability of the Polish resolve through the music of one of the nation’s most illustrious patriots.     

Szpilman was to recover quickly after the war and his loyalty to Polish music and the Polish National Radio would become his path back to some sort of normality. Rebuilding the fine arts would prove to be a slow process facing many obstacles. While the Germans had prohibited much Polish music during the occupation years, Chopin among them, after the war the Russian overlords continued to restrict the freedom of Warsaw’s musicians, artists, writers, poets, and film-makers. Not until after Joseph Stalin’s death, did the Communist grip loosen enough to permit western influence and a more liberal production of art and entertainment.

In 1962, Szpilman, who was already an established and respected pianist, composer and songwriter at the time, became one of the founding members of what was to be the global phenomenon “The Warsaw Quintet” and from that moment his fame was secured.*

All this without anybody even having heard about “Pianista”.

The fact is that as early as 1946, the first edition of this book was released under the name “Smierc miasta” (“Death of a City”). The actual author was the Polish nobleman, socialite, intellectual, and cultural celebrity Jerzy Waldorff, to whom Szpilman had entrusted the literary composition of his memoir. The book was quickly censored by the totalitarian pro-Stalinist regime and soon put out of print. Not until 1998, when Szpilman was 87 years old, would it see the day of light in an uncensored German translation. It instantly became a global success and within two years had been issued in several languages, including the original Polish now under the title “Pianista”. Roman Polanski’s film adaptation another two years later went on to win three Academy Awards.

During the course of this revival, Jerzy Waldorff’s name was somehow lost. Still, the language of the Polish original could only have been produced by a lettered and sophisticated writer, far from Szpilman’s direct and sometimes crude way of communicating. The contrast between the literary and high flying language on the one hand and the horrendous events that it describes on the other, time and time again punched me right in the gut and I found that I could only read one chapter at the time on account of my heart-rate and blood pressure. Graphic descriptions of one unthinkable atrocity after the other are, after all, emotionally rather taxing.

What then can be said about actually living through this experience?   

 

*A comprehensive detail on the exploits of the Warsaw Quintet based on interviews with surviving members as well as historical records and documents is brilliantly provided in the Master thesis “Kwintet Warszawski – historia i opis dzialalnosci” by Karolina Orzelska from 2010.

  

THE QUEEN OF SPADES AND OTHER SHORT-STORIES

Author: Alexander Pushkin
Year: 1954 (1831, 1834)
Publisher: Tidens Förlag
Language: Swedish (translators Manja Benkow, E von Sabsay, C Sterzel)

Many nations have their own literary deity; a towering figure who stands as a standard-bearer for the collected belle-lettre, poetry, and drama of a group of people which communally subscribe to the national identity with which the apotheosised wordsmith is associated. I imagine such personas to be Homer for Greece, William Shakespeare for England, Adam Mickiewicz for Poland, Johann Wolfgang Goethe for Germany, and perhaps Molière for France.

Yet none of these giants, revered as they are both nationally and internationally, enjoy a stature in their respective country similar to Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin’s in Russia. Every generation of Russians in the last 150 years have learned, and continue to learn, his poems by heart; all his dramas and novels are analysed in primary school; quotes from his works have entered daily Russian language; one would be hard-pressed to find a city, town, or hamlet in Russia without a Pushkin Street; and “Пушкин: наше всё” (“Pushkin: our everything”) is a slogan known to every Russian.

Having read some of his short stories, more specifically “Spader Dam” (“The Queen of Spades”) and “Bjelkins berättelser” (“The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin”) it is easy to understand why Pushkin was and still is an appreciated writer, but it is not immediately obvious why he has become such a monumental entity.

“Spader Dam” is a gothic tale of a young officer who hears a story about an old countess who is said to know the secret of how to always win at cards. In order to get to the old lady with the aim to obtain the auspicious formula, he decides to court her young but lethargic ward. Things do not exactly go according to plan.

“Bjelkins berättelser” is a collection of short stories which Pushkin pretends to have heard from a fictional acquaintance of his, Ivan Belkin. In the Russian original, there are five stories but for some reason, the editor of my Swedish translation, the legendary Nils-Åke Nilsson (see my post on Nicolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” from March 2019) chose to omit one of them.

The first Belkin, “The Shot”, is the story about Silvio who is a civilian but hangs out with a group of young officers drinking, playing cards, and telling stories. He is widely considered to be the best marksman in the region. One day he shocks and confuses his friends when a newly arrived officer at the regiment insults him in his own house and yet Silvio refuses to challenge him to a duel, which would be the honourable thing to do. But as it will turn out; there is a reason.

The second Belkin, “The Snowstorm”, tells the tale of two lovers who decide to elope and get married against the will of the young woman’s parents. They decide to meet in the middle of the night in a small nearby village and perform the wedding ceremony in the local church. When the night arrives, a terrible blizzard hits the area and the groom-to-be loses his directions as he tries to sled to the meeting point and gets hopelessly lost. The hapless lovers never see each other again. Some years later, a young hussar wins the heart of the forsaken bride, but the snowstorm has one more surprise up its sleeve.

The third Belkin, “The Undertaker” is the one that Nilsson excluded from my copy. Hence, no comment.

The fourth then is “The Postmaster” wherein a traveller recounts his meeting with the fair Dunya, the daughter of a keeper of a rural post station. The postmaster is very proud of his daughter who is the epitome of beauty, wit, and charm. Three years after their first meeting, the traveller returns to the station on official business and encounters the postmaster in a state of deep depression. It appears that a wealthy nobleman has seduced Dunya and swept her away to St Petersburg without her father’s approval. The traveller agrees to seek her out and bring her back to her father’s home.

The fifth and final Belkin, “The Mistress as Farm Girl”, is yet another love story where two feuding landowners are unable to reconcile with the different lifestyle of the other. Incidentally, one of them has a son and the other a daughter of roughly the same age. The young woman grows curious about the allegedly handsome son of her father’s foe and disguises as a farm girl to have an excuse to ostensibly accidentally run into him without revealing her true identity. Sure enough, they fall in love. Things get complicated when their respective parents mend fences and decide to introduce their children to one another.

All of these short stories are an absolute delight to read. There is not a boring moment, not a cumbersome passage or redundant word in the whole book. Pushkin was quite simply a superb writer. Still, the leap from superb to divine is not immediately clear. In fact, internationally Pushkin is not even the best-known Russian writer, overshadowed outside of Russia by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and probably even Bulgakov given the global cult status of “The Master and Margarita” (see my review from May 2021). And yet to Russians, he remains without equal.

I can identify two possible explanations for this. The first is that Alexander Pushkin was first and foremost a poet. His preeminent works “Ruslan and Ludmila” and “Eugene Onegin” are written in poetic form and he is the author of several large and small format poems. Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, linguistically as well as culturally, which may have impeded the penetration power of his works in other languages. The second is that in Russia, Pushkin’s importance is measured against the backdrop of the evolution of Russian literature and his role in modernising the art of poetry and fiction in Russia. All great Russian writers who came after him are in a way his artistic heirs. On a global scale, however, his impact has been much less crucial which is likely to have prompted rather less admiration for his art in the rest of the world.

Reading “Spader dam” and “Belkins berättlser” hardly qualifies me to pass judgment on the totality of Pushkin’s legacy. All I can say is that I had a jolly good time reading them and I have no hesitations to recommend them to anyone who is looking for easily digestible stories with a twist conceived and penned by a true master.   

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Author: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
Year: 2018 (1848)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator unknown)

In November 1842, 22-year-old Friedrich Engels was on his way to Manchester, where his father ran a successful cotton mill, to finish his internship which would introduce him to the family business and prepare him for a professional life in the cotton industry. As a young idealist, he had already read some of the modest and little known publications of Karl Marx and as his journey to England happened to go via Cologne, where at the time Marx was the editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, he decided to pop in. This would be the first time he and Karl Marx met in person and the beginning of a life-long friendship, and philosophical and political cooperation.

Six years later, the London-based Communist League commissioned the two, who were members and co-founders of the League, to write a “declaration of faith” for the communist party. As an atheist ideology, the term “faith” was subsequently abandoned and in 1848, shortly before the attempted revolutions in France and Germany, the pair published “Kommunistiska manifested” (“The Communist Manifesto”), or as it is more accurately named: “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei” (“Manifesto of the Communist Party”).

To be honest, I hesitated a while to write about this work. Few pieces of political literature are as divisive as the Communist Manifesto. It is a short book more akin to a pamphlet.  I read most of it during a lunch break. Its brevity, however, was fully intended. It must be understood when reading the Manifesto that it is not a philosophical essay; it is a call to arms. It is agitation, not philosophy. It is designed not to appeal to the intellect, but to the emotions.

Having said that, its ideological roots are certainly implanted in rich philosophical soil which would later produce more elaborate and valuable pieces of academic literature, climaxing with the legendary “Das Kapital”. It is therefore of immense importance, that this text be read carefully and with a critical mind. I do not in any way claim to have the intellectual capacity to do that adequately but I still allow myself to jot down the following notes. Please do not base your school essay on them. 

Here it goes! Marx and Engels open with a bold statement. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. They then go forth on a historical exposition where they claim that the class struggle between patricians and plebeians in ancient times, and lords and serfs in the medieval era, is continued in our day and age by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively. The argument goes that one group oppresses the other by accumulating capital. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Both groups participate in the production of goods and wealth, the difference being that the former brings capital and the latter labour to the table. The continued argument is that the capitalist process will make the capital-owning elite more and more exclusive and the wage-earning proletariat more and more numerous as time passes. 

However, in order to usurp the workers, the capitalists need to make a minimum investment into them. Most essentially, they need to keep enough of them alive to populate their factories and plants. Then they need to train them and they need to provide them with tools and equipment. In so doing, the bourgeoisie will by necessity put the weapons in the hands of the proletariat and the revolution will be inevitable.

In the second chapter, Marx and Engels claim that the Communist Party differs from the other workers’ movements of the time (NB workers’ movement is not synonymous with Socialism as is specified in chapter three) only in the respect that Communism does not allow itself to be constrained by national borders. Workers, as Marx and Engels say, need to deal with their own domestic bourgeoisie first and foremost, but as an ideology and as a community, the proletariat is cosmopolitan. In fact, the authors go so far as to claim that there is no philosophical or ideological basis for Communism at all as it is simply a general expression of reality and a natural response to the world system as it is. The response is not to abolish ownership of property, but to abolish bourgeois ownership of property specifically. By this, Marx and Engels specify that ownership of goods and valuables as a result of work is perfectly acceptable. It is wealth generated by capital that they oppose since it is in their definition the fruit of other people’s work and therefore the instrument for oppression. My understanding is that all accumulation of the means of production, such as land, machines, buildings, infrastructure, etc need to be owned jointly by the people, whereas personal belongings such as clothes, jewellery, toys, pets etc may have individual owners. To a certain extent.   

The Manifesto contains a list of “generally applicable measures” by which such abolition private property can come about.

“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.”*

The third chapter is dedicated to the literary heritage of the various coeval socialist movements that Marx and Engels identify and which they forthwith reject. They group the different kinds of socialist thinking into three main categories: Reactionary socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois socialism, and Critical-Utopian socialism. This is generally the least well-known part of the Manifesto, probably because much of the literature and many of the ideologies that produced it have since then disappeared into oblivion. 

In a day and age, such as ours, where an increasingly vocal minority of cognitively impaired Swedish voters seek what can only be described as a form of masochistic gratification through rendering themselves fools in the eyes of the educated masses, it may be useful to dwell for a moment on the third chapter of the Manifesto. Marx and Engels here make a commendable effort to differentiate Communism from other forms of Socialist movements. The feeling is mutual, as Socialists in general and Social Democrats in particular, have for well over a century considered Communism one of their main adversaries. It is therefore useful to hear Marx and Engels elaborate on this contrariety from their perspective.

The fourth and final chapter is just a couple of pages long. It drives home the point that wherever there are workers ready to revolt against the oppression of the capital-owners, there will be communists. Although Germany is stated as the main battleground for the Proletariat in Marx’ and Engels’ days, the final chord is a call for action to all workers around the world: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”   

Any critical reader will soon react to the fact that this short work is rife with blanket statements and unfounded claims. From the outset, the two authors venture into murky waters and suggest that class struggle is a universal phenomenon. They do nothing to substantiate their claim and it is fair to argue that this is a problematic statement. As different societies organise themselves and their production in different ways, and the ownership of the production functions varies, so will the set-up of the hierarchy. As one obvious example, the fundamental thesis of the Communist Manifesto affords no space for spiritual/religious oppression unless it is connected to the distribution of capital.  Nor do they actually care to define the terms “Bourgeoisie” and “Proletariat”, and instead leave it to the reader to deduce the meaning from the rest of the text. Perhaps the terms were so well established in the 1840s that such a definition seemed superfluous.  Friedrich Engels had previously written “The Principles of Communism” in which the Proletariat was defined as “... that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital” or what in modern days would be called ”wage earners” which would hence include the large majority of what we today consider a rather well-to-do middle class in most advanced economies. This is helpful to us, but wouldn’t have been to the readers in 1848 as Engels’ work remained unpublished until 1914.

Another problematic term is ”ownership” or ”propriety” which are also decidedly European-American concepts and which have no or vastly different meanings in other social or cultural constructs (see e.g. Keen, Ian (2013). The language of possession: Three case studies. Language in Society, 42(2), 187-214.) I also recommend a thorough reading of Bronislaw Malinowski’s research on the Kula-trade in the Trobriand archipelago. For a phenomenon to be so fundamental to a theory and, perhaps more decisive still, to a revolution, it is lamentably inadequate not to define it more precisely than Marx and Engels do.

Extrapolating on that, in an effort to connect me to my final note, Marx and Engels say nothing about what sort of political system they want to institute after the Communists have toppled the current state of things? What governmental institutions do they propose to uphold the new rule? The well-known term “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is never used in the Manifesto and was coined later by one of Marx’ disciples. Although the text is both poignant and verbose on the point of what the Communist revolution is against, it has precious little to say about what it wants instead. A possible explanation to why the authors find no reason to elaborate on this point may perhaps be found in their argument that the developments they advocate are inevitable. “Its [the bourgeoisie] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” One may surmise that the results are expected to be organic, too.

Marx and Engels go on to write that “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” If the proletariat is aiming at the conquest rather than abolition of political power, then anarchy is off the table. We saw in chapter 2 what measures a Proletarian government may apply. High taxes, expropriation of capital, free education, etc . All of this requires some sort of administration.  

The age-old defence against the argument that whenever it has been tried, Communism has irrefragably failed is “Has it ever really been tried, though?” This response from left-wing sympathisers is routinely shrugged off as an attempt to move the goalposts, but as I read the Manifesto, the question does have some merit. One would no doubt be right to argue that the ten bullet-points in Chapter 2 were actually implemented to greater or lesser degree in the USSR and that therefore passing a verdict is fair. Yet, the very next sentence that follows the list in the Manifesto complicates this argument:

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the entire nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

No community or nation where Communism has been tried, ever reached this point. The state has in no instance been dissolved, the class struggle never ended. Small elites of power-hungry men and women have continued to exploit the populations, and capitalst elites have been replaced with proletarian elites, the same way the bourgeois elite once ousted the aristocracy. Historical conclusions, in fact, seem to land closer to the thinking of Marx’ and Engels’ contemporary socialist activist and antagonist Louis Auguste Blanqui who rejected the idea of a public uprising and instead favoured the concept that a dedicated and highly qualified task force topple the government and establish a rule on behalf of the proletariat. Marxism could thus be said to have indeed failed, not so much because it was implemented and found unfruitful, but rather because it has proven impossible to implement in the first place.

*Quotes are from Samuel Moore’s translation to English from 1888.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Author: George Orwell
Year: 1984 (1949)
Publisher: Bra Böcker
Language: Swedish (translator Thomas Warburton)

“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt”, Ludwig Wittgenstein submits in his most famous work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (see my review January 2019). This is usually understood to mean that a person’s perception of the world is constrained by what he or she is able to express (or comprehend) through language. Language on aggregate is ultimately a totality of thoughts. From this follows that by controlling the language one should be able to control thoughts. And by controlling the thoughts of a population one controls its actions.

This premise is at the core of George Orwell’s iconic novel “1984” (“Nineteen Eighty-Four”). The Big Brother-government of the united transcontinental state of Oceania, presumably similar to the other two superpowers in the world, Eastasia and Eurasia, with which Oceania is alternately at war or in an alliance, has gone at great length to monitor and control the actions of the denizens but they have not yet gained complete domination of their thoughts. Granted, the Thought Police have certain tools to pick up on criminal thinking by means of reading body language, facial expressions, perspiration levels, heartbeat, etc but that only offers a reactive response to individual thoughts which, from the government’s perspective, remain annoyingly free, comprehensive, and impenetrable.

By the time we are thrown into the action in the year 1984, the project of replacing the old language with the new, so-called Newspeak, is underway but still has a long way to go. New articles and official correspondence are already written in Newspeak but conversations and thoughts are usually still conducted in Standard English. Also, the efforts to fine-tune and tweak Newspeak has not yet been finalised and is a work in progress. The idea is to drastically simplify the language to ensure that grammar and vocabulary are useful for the most essential communication only.

But contorting a society’s ability to engage in logical thinking requires more layers. It is not enough to merely do away with opposites of what the regime deems “goodthink” in order to incapacitate “crimethink”. People can be further pacified by conflating opposites into ideas that are contradictory to a healthy mind and make them palatable to the mind of an enslaved nation. One of the most prophetic of Orwell’s constructions, and one which is still today available for real-time field study, is this very concept of “doublethink”. Doublethink is basically the ability to accept and find unproblematic two inconsistent and mutually exclusive thoughts at one time. Doublethink is typically an ability acquired by (or imposed on) a population ruled by an autocratic regime which has had the time and resources to systematically break down its subjects’ ability to think rationally and clutter their sense of reason. A typical example of doublethink is the famous Big Brother motto: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

A systematic implementation of doublethink, albeit not as absolute as Orwell envisaged, was enacted in the USSR by the Communist dictatorship where the Soviet public was taught to accept contradictory claims as truth. To the Russian citizen, the USSR was both the most powerful country on earth and a victim at the same time. It was the perfect society that other countries could only aspire to but no one was allowed to leave the country without intense screening and special permission. Two concepts that ought to give rise to reasonable questions were widely accepted as truths. After the fall of the USSR, it was widely expected that doublethink would die out with the old generations but several observers, such as Masha Gessen (see my review February 2021), have shown compelling evidence that doublethink is part of Russian world-view to this day.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there is a less systematic but equally efficient roll-out of doublethink. In a growing community of the confused far-right, it is perfectly logical to demand that Donald Trump is given credit for delivering the life-saving Covid-vaccine in record time and refusing to take the same vaccine claiming that it is a liberal/Colombian/BillGates/enter-your-personal-favourite-flavour-of-the-day conspiracy. Doublethink in all its depressing splendour.

It is well-known that George Orwell was a staunch socialist but more than that, he was a defender of liberal democracy. In today’s era of a polarised public discourse where the intellectually challenged general population seems to get some sort of perverse gratification from bundling Western Democratic Socialism with Stalinism (and effectively Sweden with North Korea), as well as Conservatism with Nazism (no, Boris Johnson is not a Nazi), it is a useful reminder that democracy is a fundamental value independent of property tax, class analysis, and capitalism. Democracy must be the non-negotiable foundation of any functioning political system. Orwell understood this and demonstrated with his life how one can support the ends while condemning the means.   

Alas, as a work of literary art, “1984” is not brilliant. Compared to other dystopias (e.g. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, reviewed in November 2020, and “Kallocain” by Karin Boye, reviewed in June 2021) I find the language of “1984” barren and the dramaturgy sketchy and incoherent. Indeed, the very Big Brother-motto “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” appears to be erroneously constructed as it breaks with the pattern “Undesirable is desirable” and therefore becomes rumpled, non-intuitive, and nebulous.

The sloth and inconsistency with which Orwell’s characters make their choices, too, on numerous occasions effectively ejected me from Oceania and interrupted the flow of my reading experience. It is baffling to me how a person who has lived all his adult life in a world where anybody could be a government agent, the telly spies on you, children turn in their parents, and people are removed from all written records when they are liquidated can unreservedly trust a person after receiving a simple love note or a barely noticeable look. I can see how that would be enough to convict a person, seeing as the Thought Police will have very little to lose from making an occasional mistake, but an individual taking such risks is just not plausible.

If “1984” had been written by a Swedish writer and “Kallocain” published in Britain or the US, I am quite sure that “Kallocain” would have been the benchmark dystopian novel of the global literary canon. In fact, sacrilegious as it may sound, I honestly do not think that today “1984” would have been published at all without comprehensive editing and significant improvements.

This is not to say that Orwell’s is not an important book. On the contrary, Orwell would have been astonished at how current his novel still is more than 70 years after it first appeared and he would, most likely, be appalled by the complacency of today’s general public in the face of the rising authoritarianism in the Western hemisphere. His warning is as topical to European politics in 2021 as it was in 1949.

If not more.

 

DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

Author: Étienne de la Boétie
Year: 2017 (1577)
Publisher: Ersatz
Language: Swedish (translator Ervin Rosenberg)

We have all heard of Niccolo Machiavelli and “The Prince”. We know it as the monolith in philosophical literature in which the Florentine diplomat delves into the murky depths of power; how to obtain it and how to maintain it. Less famous, and as history has shown, infinitely less influential, is the French lawyer and poet Étienne de la Boétie. De la Boétie was also interested in power but approached the topic from the opposite direction. In his essay “Avhandling om frivillig underkastelse” (”Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”) he attempts to bring clarity to why a community, a city, or indeed an entire nation not only allows a single person to dominate and even enslave them, but moreover, encourage him or her to do so.

“For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him”*

For it is most certainly true, that human history is but a series of temporally interconnected states of affairs where the few subjugate the many. Historical events taught in schools are nothing but episodes where a small élite either seize or abuse the power over one or another population. Monuments are raised, poems are written, and myths are retold by the oppressed in celebration of their oppressors. How is this possible?

Unquestionably, there seem to be certain processes within a community that shrewd pretenders to power can exploit in order to propel themselves to the top of the hierarchy or, indeed, thrust a new order onto said community. Machiavelli’s book deals with these processes and the manipulative techniques a ruler might want to employ to manage them to his or her advantage. De la Boétie in no way questions the existence of such processes or denies the efficiency of various power techniques, but moreover challenges the mere necessity of these processes. His remedy is as simple as it is provocative.

“Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself.”*

Perhaps this is a mirror of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s famous statement “Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.” To a free man, threats are impotent.

De la Boétie argues that humans are naturally predisposed to obeying their parents as children but equally prone to rebelling against them in adolescence. In the same way, a refusal to submit to all other authorities is just as natural to him, and yet all of us who rebelled against our guardians as teenagers remain servile to the government throughout our adult lives. We are so preoccupied with the illusion of owning whatever measly earthly possessions we convince ourselves that we have amassed, that we fail to see that we do not even own ourselves in the first place.

Étienne de la Boétie is one of a great many philosophers, some of whom have achieved far greater fame than he, who have wrestled with the concept of freedom and slavery. Thomas Hobbes polemised that autocracy was inevitable, as the only alternative would be chaos. One can either be free in a chaotic and hostile world, or subjugated in an organised and safe one. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was decidedly more optimistic. Although he recognised that humans are systemically enslaved (“L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers”) he made great intellectual efforts to unify order and liberty by means of a so called “social contract” through which society as a whole would guarantee the citizen collective safety and individual freedom at the same time. John Stuart Mill, in his “On Liberty” (reviewed on this blog in December 2019) argues that the role of the government can only be legitimate in so far as it protects the liberties of society. Additionally, he argued, that the greatest threat to individual freedom was not the government or state, but the self-controlling structures of society itself.

Still, I would venture to argue that Jean-Paul Sartre came the closest to answering de la Boétie’s principle question. While de la Boétie argues that all you have to do to stop being oppressed is to stop obeying, Sartre claims that all you need to do is to stop thinking that you are not free. The illusion of slavery, “mauvais fois” in Sartre’s terminology, is a self-fulfilling prophecy which serves only to shackle us with invisible chains. He even argues that humans are “condemned to freedom” and that this is something we generally detest. By being completely free, we are also made directly responsible for our actions. No one to blame. No fingers to point. It is thus easy to imagine mankind, horrified by the crushing responsibility of freedom, rush into the shade of a tyrant who mercifully lifts freedom, and consequently responsibility, from its grateful shoulders.

400 years before Sartre, de la Boétie already promoted a form of anarchy. Essentially, “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” is a call to civil disobedience. He is adamant about revolutions being unnecessary where simple passivity suffices. At the core of the argument is anarchism.

De la Boétie lists three types of ruler.
1. The ruler by election
2. The ruler by force
3. The ruler by inheritance
Of these three, he suggests that the former is the most tolerable, but at the same time he postulates that even that type of ruler will do whatever they need to make themselves absolute and that will in the end make them even more ruthless than any of the other two.

Put in a modern perspective, this leads us to a couple of interesting observations. There is certainly no shortage of anarchists in modern day Europe. They often argue that all governments of all kinds need to be abolished. We can find them to the far left where the state is perceived as nothing but a watchdog for the capital and elite, and to the right where the war-cry “Taxation is theft” is nothing but a catchphrase for anarchy.

This is where I propose that a modern reader needs to tread carefully. De la Boétie lived in an era where the government looked upon the people as their subjects. In a modern democracy, the government’s mandate is from the electorate. This is a fundamental difference which people have fought and died for ever since the rise of liberalism and it must not be neglected or diminished. An orphan growing up in a working-class foster family in a small village far away from the capital becoming the prime minister and leader of the country would be a fairy-tale in de la Boétie’s times but is democracy in ours. It is thus folly to advocate nihilism and anarchy based on writings from the 16^th century.

I do not know if Sartre read “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”. Nor do I know if de la Boétie read “The Prince”. Yet these behemoths in the history of thought are closely interlinked through the study of domination and submission, and they all help us understand ourselves and the choices available to us.

*The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (Indianapolis: 1942).

KALLOCAIN

Author: Karin Boye
Year: 2018 (1940)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish 

There is something tantalising about dystopias. The same way horror novels, thrillers, and ghost stories bring out our fear of other people or the supernatural, dystopias centre on our fear of society and mankind at large. Their point of departure is almost always some sort of failed state or government overreach, some variation of fundamentalism and anti-liberalism. Quite often, the dystopian world is where the collective power oppresses the individual where the individual by his or her obedience and complacency constitutes a part of the oppressing regime.

Some of these dystopias have become part of the global literary canon. “The Time Machine”, “Nineteen Eighty Four”, “Brave New World”, and even “The Handmaid’s Tale” (see my review from November 2020) have risen to shape the general public’s idea of a repugnant social order. For Swedish readers, Karin Boye’s novel “Kallocain” can easily be added to this category.

This story is told by the chemist Leo Kall who is writing his memoirs in a penal colony where he continues to work in his profession. His testimony is of a world in which every action of every citizen has been closely monitored by the authorities for a long time. However, the rulers were not satisfied. They were adamant about trying to control people’s thoughts, too, and they made substantial efforts to reach their goal. Everybody in Kall’s world is an informer. All important citizens, including scientists such as Kall, have a mandatory housekeeper whose job it is to report any anomalies in the household to the secret service (not unlike the housekeepers in undergraduate accommodation at Cambridge). Every sign is suspicious and is supposed to be reported, be it a facial tick, a microscopic delay in response or confirmation, the slightest change of voice, returning home from work a few minutes later than usual. Yet despite this comprehensive enterprise, people’s minds and thoughts have long remained a secret to the regime.

All shifted when Leo Kall unveiled his invention Kallocain; a drug that compels whoever is injected with it to instantly reveal all their thoughts and secrets. As it turns out, it would have radical consequences.

“Kallocain” is an incredibly well-written, nay, sensational novel. The language flows swimmingly like a mountain brook and is a joy in itself to behold. The pace, the development of the characters, the dialogue and the descriptive passages are consistently powerful and engaging, the plot is intense, and the message crystal clear. Kallocain is by far the best piece of literature I have consumed so far this year.

SPOILER ALERT

I am particularly impressed by the way Boye develops the protagonist while at every stage challenging the reader to reflection and introspection. We first meet Leo Kall at the penal colony from where he is telling his story directly to us in the first person. We know that he was captured and imprisoned but we are not told about the circumstances until the very end of the novel. Instead, Kall spends some time assuring us that he is doing well and that his life in prison isn’t actually much different from his life as a free man. From the very beginning, we are faced with the prisoner/free dialectic and the dispute about whether it is at all meaningful in a totalitarian state.

For a large part of the story, Kall appears to be completely down with the dictatorship and its policies. He comes across as a deeply unpleasant and single-minded man who unabashedly promotes and defends the current state of affairs. As the events unfold we begin to understand that what he is actually doing is suppressing his own thoughts. He consistently over-compensates his insecurities, fears, and hesitations by an overly vocal commitment to the system. Lip service to the state can never get you into trouble. You do not have to make any choices. Not thinking is as simple as it is safe.

Boye juxtaposes Kall’s obstinate allegiance to official doctrine with Edo Rissen's, his supervisor’s, hesitancy. Kall deeply dislikes Rissen and talks himself into suspecting that his wife, Linda, who was previously engaged to Rissen, is still in love with him. When Kall picks up signals from Rissen which he interprets to be rebellious, he decides to report him. It eventually dawns on him that it is not the man’s political views that provoke him, but his own jealousy about Linda. He begins to realise that his political zeal is merely a manifestation of his innate insecurities.

In the meantime, Kall has begun to administer the drug, first to “volunteers” and subsequently to suspected dissidents. They all begin to speak. Thoughts that Kall has never before been exposed to now overwhelm him. Under the influence of the Kallocain, citizens open their hearts and speak freely about their most forbidden ideas. Every new encounter chips away at Kall’s facade until his manufactured indoctrination which he realises he never actually believed in or supported is ultimately razed. In the paranoid world created by the dictatorship, everything that he used to think was convictions was in effect defence mechanisms designed to give him the illusion of choice. The choice to be loyal. A shield from disappointment.

The latter was particularly pronounced in relation to Linda. In a society where everybody is an informer, you can naturally not trust anyone. On top of that, his jealousy drove him to the suspicion that Linda was still in love with her ex-fiancé and that they were conspiring behind his back. What Kall was essentially doing was to emotionally distance himself from the woman he loved before she had the chance to deceive him.

My final observation relates to the nature of resistance. We typically think of an organised guerrilla, underground press, secret meetings, planned sabotage actions and so on when we think about resistance, but Karin Boye allows for none of that in her novel. In Leo Kall’s world, the resistance is inside the heads of the citizens. The more suspects he injects with his drug, the more he realises that all there is, are fragments of a collective myth. The myth of a city in the desert where the state has no reach. The myth of a leader from long ago who had liberated his people. The dream of a dream, as it were. And this is Leo Kall’s final lesson. His drug reveals that everybody is part of the resistance. Everybody criticises the system. It is an inseparable trait of humanity to disprove of an oppressive regime. The moment where the head of the police department realises this is one of the key turning points in the novel (in my own translation):
“-Anyone can be condemned with this, he snapped.
Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, seemingly overpowered by the meaning of his own words.
-Anyone can be condemned with this, he repeated but this time in an excruciatingly slow, silent, and velvety voice. Perhaps you are not wrong after all.”  

An ingenious touch by Boye is to describe how peaceful and serene the drug makes the subjects feel. I imagine the question that Boye hints at is whether it is really the drug that makes them feel relaxed or is it the very freedom of finally being able to tell the truth and speak frankly. It is subtle, elegant, and supremely potent.

“Kallocain” was published in 1940. The Second World War was raging and the horrors of both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes had become known to most readers of the press. It is easy to imagine how the events in continental Europe in the 1930s leading up to the war had inspired Boye’s imagination. Her letters from this period give evidence of the hardship she went through to pen the book. To one of her friends she wrote “Amidst sweat and internal vomit, I have just finished a rather comprehensive novel.”  To her surprise and satisfaction, “Kallocain” received a warm reception from the critics and also sold well, which Boye, who primarily considered herself a poet, was not used to.

For what it’s worth, I hereby protest that the critics of her time were right. This is in every sense a remarkable book. It has been translated to some ten languages which is far too few. Boye deserves a global audience similar to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, and even Atwood.