LUCY

Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Year: 2017 (1990)
Publisher: Tranan
Language: Swedish (translator Lena Fagerström)

”The nice thing about identity is that everybody has one”, Dame Marilyn Strathern once told me during one of our few chats at Cambridge. My research at the time was in the onerous phase of deconstructing the concept of collective identity searching for the origins of its formation. I had come as far as realising that trying to establish the inception of a personal or group identity without understanding the mere concept of identity first was a bit like trying to find the source of the Nile without understanding the concept of water.

Another anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, defines identity on the most basic level as “inward sameness, outward difference”. By this he seems to subscribe to a Platonian theory of forms where an idea, an item, a person, or indeed a group of people can be defined by some characteristics that apply particularly to them. We recognise and identify a chair by our consensus on a set of properties that all chairs have and only chairs have. That which is not a chair, must by necessity be something else.

For this definition to be useful we have to allow for a space where concepts meet to constitute a border, or an interface, where the inward/outward sameness/difference dichotomy is manifested. As articulated by Stuart Hall and later elaborated on by Lawrence Grossman among others, there are essentially two models for the production of identities: one offers that there is some intrinsic and constant feature to every identity that essentially immunises it from getting mixed up with other equally perpetual identities, the other proposes that identities are never translucent, never static, and never complete but instead subject to context, time, and often arbitrary choice.

On this backdrop and as someone who did his anthropological fieldwork in Haiti in the Caribbean: the Mecca, as it were, for those who take an interest in creolisation, identity studies, and flux, I had long wanted to read Jamaica Kincaid’s most famous novel “Lucy”. In this short book (my copy is less than 160 pages), Kincaid explores ideas of hard borders between cultural domains and proposes that they may be close to impenetrable so that even communication between them is prohibited or at the very least grotesquely disfigured.

Lucy is a young girl from a Caribbean island who is sent to work as a maid in a well-to-do family in Long Island, New York. She is warmly welcomed and promptly embraced by her host family who treat her with love and respect and who, from their standpoint, try their best to invite her into their midst. Especially Mariah, the mother, makes great efforts to connect with Lucy and share her world with her. Lucy on the other hand is reserved and grumpy and soon decides that integrating with her host family, as the lady of the house so desperately desires, is not an option.

As most of Kincaid’s writing, “Lucy” is largely autobiographical. Kincaid was also an island girl from Antigua sent away to work as a black maid in a white family in the US when she was just a teenager. She was also well-received and treated as part of the family and she also used it as an opportunity to make a future for herself in the new country. In fact, she made it better than most earning a professorship at Harvard and being repeatedly mentioned among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yet “Lucy” is written from the standpoint of resentment, anger, and even hatred and revenge. It is a study of resistance. This is what finally makes this book somewhat interesting. The trigger points are in Lucy’s relationships to people around her and how they shape her identity. The divide between her and Mariah. The rift between her and her mother. The unfinished business with her father. Her friendship with Peggy. Lucy is locked in a continuous struggle for personal space and the power to define her own existence and yet it is increasingly obvious that the more bitter her tussle, the more embedded it itself becomes in her identity. She slowly turns into the sum of her tug-o-war with the world.

In the end she realises that her only escape is isolation and denial. By removing herself from the universal social horseplay and by emotionally disconnecting from her past, present, and future personal relationships, she effectively tries to withdraw from the sameness/difference grating and in so doing obtain some form of liberty. Being something else, sometimes means being nothing. “I was all alone in the world, and this is no small accomplishment.”

I will be honest to admit that I did not altogether enjoy “Lucy” as much as I had hoped. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Maybe I was in the wrong mood. Maybe Lucy’s cantankerous character put me off. Although the topic is highly interesting, I found the story bland and the storytelling unappealing, unimaginative, and slow. I readily admit that while the author makes many powerful points and the underlying analysis and the understanding of the clash between several different worlds across generations, genders, geographies, ethnicities, and historical contexts are crisp and moreover from a perspective that is impossible for a white, European man to replicate or fully grasp, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired and, in my opinion, falls short of the masterpiece that this novel is frequently declared to be.

A MAN CALLED OVE

Author: Fredrik Backman
Year: 2012
Publisher: Månpocket
Language: Swedish

In 2012, Fredrik Backman entered the Swedish literary scene with a bang. His novel “En man som heter Ove” (“A Man Called Ove”) was an instant success and he soon followed up with titles such as “Mormor hälsar och säger förlåt” (“My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry”), “Britt-Marie var här” (“Britt-Marie was here”), and “Björnstad” (“Beartown”) just to mention a few.

Fredrik Backman had dabbled in writing before. Besides his daily job as a forklift operator, he had sold some freelance journalistic work to one or two newspapers and created a moderately successful blog in cooperation with the gentlemen’s gazette Café. The blog gave him the opportunity to experiment with observations and characters, take in the reactions from the readers to expand on what seemed to hit a nerve and remodel traits and characteristics that did not work. Little by little the protagonist of his debut novel come to life.

I early on decided that I was not going to bother with his books as I am not a great fan of up-lit and I figured that there must be more rewarding literature out there than maudlin Scandinavian kitchen-sink-realism. But as time went by and I could observe Backman’s success around the world, not the least through recurring stellar reviews in English- and German-language book groups on social media, it became increasingly clear to me that as a Swede, I needed to at least have a smattering of what the rage was all about. No sooner said than done, I read “En man som heter Ove”.

I am happy to say that I have no reason to regret it. The book is a highly entertaining and engaging read which both cracked me up and squeezed an occasional tear from the corner of my eye. It is narrated in the present tense by mixing scenes from the present with flashes from the past across 39 short chapters depicting a changing Swedish society on the back of the transition from an industrial wonder to a high-tech powerhouse as well as the continuous strife between the overbearing welfare state and the individual it steamrolls.  

Ove himself is the quintessential stubborn 60-something-year-old, Swedish working-class man stuck in a mindset that has long ceased to exist. Born of a different era for a different world. He has no sympathy for people who drive a different brand of car than he does or who have names that were unknown when he was young, who cannot bleed their own radiators. And certainly none for hospital clowns who borrow a coin for a magic trick and then fail to return it.

By Ove’s never-ending clashes with the relentlessly changing Swedish society, Backman puts his finger on the rift between old and new Sweden. Immigration, feminism, technology, and globalisation have changed the face of the nation to a point where individuals who are unable to keep up, will inevitably feel left out. The boomers and the millennials seem to live in different realities. Although Backman doesn’t say anything about Ove’s political views, it seems to me that this is precisely the kind of voter who might hesitate between his loyalty to a labour party like the Swedish Social Democrats and the delusive allure of the crypto-fascistic Sweden Democrats to bring back some unspecified iteration of a mythical Sweden of the past.

This could easily have become a story where the younger generation makes fun of the older but in a warm and reconciliatory tone, Backman gently brings them together and allows them to build bridges of mutual understanding, respect, and friendship. 

Objectively, “En man som heter Ove” is not a great work of art. The storyline is simple bordering on primitive and the characters are essentially caricatures or types, rather than complex representations of human beings, engaged in dialogues that feel a bit forced here and there. I also found the theme of Ove’s suicidal attempts overly melodramatic and even though it all sort of comes together in the end, I maintain that the book would have done just as well without that subplot. This notwithstanding, it most certainly deserves its audience and its success. It is sentimental, mushy, and corny but it works very, very well.