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.