OUTLOOKS

Author: Christian Munthe
Year: 2022
Publisher: Alhambra
Language: Swedish

The novel is like a long journey by car or a train through a foreign country. Through the window, you watch the scenery as you make your way toward the goal of your voyage. You see the landscape as it changes. Villages come and go, rolling hills become mountains and then valleys, cities and forests alternate before your eyes. You absorb the impressions and through them learn about the environment, the architecture, the nature, the history, and the life of the people who live in these lands. You allow the impressions to flood you like the waves of an ocean flushes a beach.

Suddenly, you see something that catches your eye. Maybe it is something you do not understand. Maybe something of particular beauty or value. It could be something you have seen in a picture but never visited live. You stop your car, you get out, and you spend some time focusing on this one particular thing, whether it be a landmark, a historical place, a cave, a sunset, or a herd of sheep grazing on a hillside. You take your time to savour this particular phenomenon. This brief stop, by contrast to the moving car, is a short story. An opportunity to drill into one single issue or topic, or to evoke one particular thought or emotion.

This is precisely how I read Christian Munthe’s collection of eight short stories in a volume titled “Utsikter” (not available in English but the title could be translated as “Views” or “Sights” but also “Outlooks” or “Forecasts”) which in various ways address the nature of humanity in a rapidly changing and mechanised and digitised world.

The first story, “Strandfynd” (“Flotsam”), is a tale about a small coastal community and the drastic consequences of a bubble bursting when a person who thinks he is keeping a secret about his private life is made aware that he is the only one who actually considers it a secret.

“Överlevarna” (“The Survivors”) is a study of the metamorphosis of ethnic and national identity across generations on the backdrop of a Jewish family that left Poland during the Nazi occupation, and how such an identity can come about by destiny as much as by choice.

 “Sanningens pris (“The Price of Truth”) is a futuristic account of a world order where not only science and research are subject to global market mechanisms but truth itself is determined by supply and demand.

The fourth text is “Högt över ytan” (“High Above the Surface”) which is told in the shadow of the widely overlooked shipwreck of M/S Jan Heweliusz in 1993, dwarfed by the loss of M/S Estonia a year and a half later.

In “Videomöten” (“Video conferences”), which is the shortest of the stories in this collection, Munthe investigates the nature of communication and how poor-quality online meetings using tools such as Teams or Zoom, can serve to keep a relationship alive but also how they reshape it and become an integrated part of the relationship rather than just a vehicle for it.

“Medborgare Roskow” (“Citizen Roskow”) tells the story of the totalitarian apparatus and how power can be exercised by the use of narratives rather than people, and the dangers of turning rights into privileges.

The seventh and longest text has also lent its name to the entire collection, “Utsikter”. Again, Munthe takes us into the future, this time to dwell on the concepts of time, distance, and responsibility as the main character is leading a group of scientists with the mission to find a way to travel between solar systems and establish human (or pseudo-human) colonies.

The final part of the book is “Vålnaden i Nanzen-Ji” (“The Phantom in Nanzen-Ji”) which pits a family man against the memory of his abusive father, the influence of weakness and pettiness across generations, and the undetermined relation between forgiveness and liberation.

Reading these stories, it is clear to me that they have been written by someone who is used to writing, but even more to reading. Not only because Munthe is a professor of philosophy and is more than familiar with the philosophical and sociological thinkers of past and present, but even more so because the thoughts contained in the stories, and the way they are being tested and presented show a comprehensive familiarity with world literature. The issues raised herein, seem to have been on the author’s mind for some time before he finally decided to put them in words in the form of fictional stories.

Even though, I read them all with great interest (with a slight reservation to the eponymous “Utsikter” which I found somewhat messy and disorganised), I will contain myself to commenting on only two of them here.

“Sanningens pris” is in my view a highly perceptive and intriguing story. The main character, Oskar Kamp, is the Head of Market Monitoring at the relatively recently inaugurated Knowledge Liability Office (“Kunskapsgälden” in Swedish) in charge of monitoring and reporting deviations in the trading patterns of science, research, and truth. The point of the exchange traded truth is to allow the invisible hand of the global market to determine what is true and what is false. It is a dystopian world where investor sentiment, rather than facts and public interest, dictates not only what academic endeavours to finance and what research projects to pursue, which to some extent is the case in our society already, but moreover it determines what is and is not true. It is a chilling proposition, but it does not end there.

One of the disciplines that has an index on Oskar Kamp’s monitor is economic science which is considered basic research. This means that the truth-assumption of the science that constitutes the platform for the Knowledge Liability Office is itself subject to the market forces monitored by the same. This problem resembles Russell’s paradox in set theory where the set of truths in this case include the truth that depends on and evaluates truth itself.

“Medborgare Roskow” is at its core a power analysis. There is the clearly visible power structure that divides the population up in denizens and citizens where the former have some basic rights and privileges but are excluded form higher offices, freedom of movement, and higher education whereas the latter constitute a small elite to which all doors are open. Officially, there is nothing stopping any person from becoming a citizen, if they can pass a rigorous test. But there is also an invisible power structure which is the privilege of the ruling party alone and above which no denizen or citizen stands.

Munthe’s power analysis seems to hark back to the Marxist thought on class struggle but as I read it, this is merely a mirage. The division between the citizen elites and the denizen masses is actually an artificial ruse intended to give society a veneer of class difference, but as Robert Roskow will find out, true power is vested elsewhere. Whoever controls the definitions, controls the people. Citizens and denizens, although having different roles and privileges, are equally oppressed, albeit not equally abused, by the system and its enforcers. In that sense, the story becomes a critique of the failed implementation of Marxism in the 20^th century (cf. my review of the Communist Manifesto from August 2021). In a Swedish context, it can serve as a visualisation of the right-wing parties’ adamant claim that there are true and less true Swedes, but they have a hard time defining what they mean by it. How would they propose to test the difference between a Swedish citizen and an alien denizen without being openly racist?

One of the drawbacks with the short story format is that characters are not really supposed to develop. There just isn’t room for it. Instead, their personalities and backgrounds are there to test them in a particular situation or conundrum. Munthe does a solid job sketching his characters. To me, Oskar Kamp is much akin to Leo Kall and Winston Smith as the one cog in the oppression machinery that begins to wobble. Robert Roskow is the expired part that is replaced by version 2.0. Both are rays of humanity in the darkness of a faceless machinery.

Without a doubt, “Utsikter” is a delightful read with each of the stories offering just the right amount of food for thought to keep your mind busy during the day without freaking you out. I warmly recommend it to anyone who appreciates having their circles moved a bit from time to time. Although this was the writer’s first attempt at belletristic writing, I surely hope it will not be his last; whether the next publication be a long journey, or a curious stop along the way.