CITY IN THE WORLD

Author: Per Anders Fogelström
Year: 1968
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

The story about the ultimate metamorphosis of Stockholm, from an impoverished hamlet to a prosperous, albeit small metropolis, reaches its completion in the fifth and final instalment of Per Anders Fogelström’s classic “City”-pentalogy: “Stad i världen” (“City in the World”). During the preceding books, Fogelström has chronicled how the dilapidated huts that once housed the many denizens of the Swedish capital’s working class were dismantled and triumphantly replaced by stately edifices featuring such blessings of modernity as running water, central heating, and electricity. In the final volume, the population has begun to reap the fruits of public education, job security, and democratic rights. The gulf between the grim struggles of Henning Nilsson, who first migrated into the city in the mid-19th century in “Mina drömmars stad” (see review from August 2024), and the comfortable lives of his descendants a century later could scarcely be deeper.

Fogelström does not end there, however. He is not blind to the new era and the challenges that await the generation that will populate post-war Stockholm. While their grandparents marvel at the privileges that grace their lives, the youngsters, largely oblivious of the hardships endured by their predecessors, stand impatient on their inherited pedestal, making new demands and aiming for loftier horizons, much to the amazement, and sometimes disapproval, of their elders.    

The final abandonment of the old era is symbolised by the death of Emelie Nilsson, Henning’s and Lotten’s daughter, and the backbone of the series. Emelie was a heroine of such monumental proportions that the final success of Henning’s entire lineage depended on her. Cruelly orphaned as a teenager, she was tethered to her destiny by the last words of her dying mother, Lotten: “Take care of your brother”; words that would etch themselves into the core of her heart and define her entire life. Yet Emelie’s care would extend far beyond her brother; she embraced family, neighbours, and friends with a magnanimity so profound that she became the invisible architect of their development. The progenitor of none, but a mother to all.

Among Fogelström’s characters, one that intrigues more than others in “Stad i världen” is the virtually inconsequential side character Olle Holm. Olle is the archetype of the indignant working-class conservative. He is an honest and hard-working man who is barely scraping by financially but proud to be independent and to appear strong-willed and single-minded. He has little regard for the hardships of others and regularly sets himself as a model for all humanity to emulate. To him, social security is squander, because if he can work to support himself, so can everybody else. He sees no point in aligning the traffic circulation to the right-hand-traffic of the rest of Europe, because he never has reason to drive in Denmark or Germany so why should anybody else, etc. Olle clings fiercely to the myth of his solitary success, scorning the sacrifices of generations past. To him, those who falter below him are lazy, those who ascend above him are crooked. In this character, Fogelström captures the timeless paradox of the man who turns his back on solidarity, seduced by the emotional allure of rugged individualism, even as he unwittingly basks in the warmth of collective labour and sacrifice. A figure whose bitterness and pride foreshadow the discontent that, in later decades, would make part of the working-class shift their allegiance from social democracy to the darker allure of nationalist populism.

The final judgment of Fogelström’s magnum opus can be nothing less than unqualified acclaim as it has indubitably earned its place in the Swedish canon. With the artistry of a master, Fogelström ushers the reader through the ebb and flood of history, never stooping to pedantry or encumbering his prose with technicalities and infodumps. Each historical event weaves seamlessly into the storyline interlocking with the fates of his characters, their actions, thoughts, and feelings. Though every protagonist is born from the author’s imagination, they breathe with the unmistakable vitality of flesh-and-blood Stockholmers of bygone eras. There are no villains in Fogelström’s Stockholm, merely real people who seek their own way of negotiating the vicissitudes of fate. Some prevail. Others succumb. Yet everyone feels achingly tangible, authentic, vibrant, and profoundly human. This, perhaps, is Fogelström’s greatest triumph: not merely to recount the story of a city, but to evoke its soul, embodied in the lives of its people.

 

THE KINGDOM AT THE END OF THE ROAD

Author: Jan Guillou
Year: 2000
Publisher: Piratförlaget
Language: Swedish

The crusades have reached their sad end, leaving the crusaders battered by humiliation, fatigue, and, in the luckiest cases, merely the indignity of survival, as they make their way home to their predominantly European homesteads. Among these weary souls is Arn Magnusson, or, as his fellow Templars knew him, Arn de Gothia; a knight whose life was spared and pockets lined with gold by the magnanimous Sultan Saladin, the conqueror of Jerusalem and paragon of nobility. Surrounded by an entourage of engineers, horsekeepers, physicians, blacksmiths and other denizens of the Middle East, he returns to the land of his fathers in the far north from whence he had departed to serve the Church in its holy quest over twenty years prior. When we encounter him again, it is within the pages of “Riket vid vägens slut (“The Kingdom at the End of the Road”), the third and final part of Jan Guillou's trilogy.

Arn returns to a kingdom united under his childhood friend, King Magnus Eriksson. Yet even as the land stands nominally united, the shadow of discord looms large as a rival dynasty, bolstered by the support of Denmark's monarch, plots its dissolution. Observing the fragile balance, Arn realises that his mastery of swordplay and horsemanship are insufficient to ensure peace in the land and the unchallenged influence for his family. To the consternation of his kin, he puts in motion a peace project of unparallelled ambition based on engineering, trade, and a crushing war machine.

The Arn of the final volume is a figure reshaped and remoulded, bearing little resemblance to the devout and unassuming knight we got to know in the first two books. Gone are the piety and modesty that once defined him. In their stead, we find a man of pride and arrogance. He wears the family crest or the Templar’s cape, symbols once held sacred, alternately as required to promote his personal agenda. He insists on bearing his sword into church, disregarding the reprehension of other parishioners. He is indifferent toward his brother. He taunts his adversaries.

It is tempting to excuse such a transformation as the natural result of a life scarred by trauma and the memories of mayhem and devastation. A man who has seen the worst of humanity and the full scale of its incompetence, corruption, and folly, might well return to the simplicity of his backwater origins cynical and arrogant. Yet such character development demands exploration, an inquiry into the slow erosion of virtue and the creeping dominance of bitterness in the once innocent heart. Alas, Guillou provides none of that. The shift in Arn’s character feels less like the organic development of a man’s soul and more like the result of a writer who has grown tired of his soft-spoken and timid hero and without much ceremony rewrites him as a bad-boy. The result is a screeching dissonance: the Arn Magnusson who departs the Holy Land at the end of “Tempelriddaren” (see review from September 2024) is not the Arn Magnusson who strides into West Gothland in “Riket vid vägens slut”.

Although “Riket vid vägens slut” is less encumbered by heroism and bravado than the first and particularly the second book, there is no shortage of boyish fantasies about a superhero who in this case actually happens to wear a cape. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lengthy account of a bachelor-party, a sequence so satiated with machismo that one suspects it sprang directly from the author's own unresolved issues with adolescence.

And yet, as with most books, hidden in the clutter of verbiage, whether artfully crafted or carelessly strewn, there are some nuggets worthy of contemplation. Toward the end of the novel, Arn Magnusson reflects over his time as a knight templar and about the devastating defeat that the crusaders suffered at the hands of Sultan Saladin. He seeks some divined message in the humiliation, a lesson that God intended for him and the other survivors. And he does this with the most supremely brainwashed mind.

Here stands a warrior, a sword consecrated by holy water and pledged to the service of God by his side. A man who for twenty laborious years has risked life and limb to guard the resting place of the one he considers to be the Son of God. He has knelt in prayer, imploring God’s help in his quest to reclaim the Holy land, all the while being keenly aware how his foes, no less fervently, pray to their God for the same favour. And yet, in the face of unequivocal defeat, he ponders not whether his cause was just or his belief misguided, but instead what subtle knowledge God intends him to discern. This scene provides us with a stark meditation on the nature of fanaticism. It is a lesson, possibly inadvertently, about the maddening resilience of single-mindedness and the inherent futility of reasoning with those who cannot, or will not, entertain doubt.

Having ploughed through Jan Guillou’s entire trilogy, the lasting impression is mixed. Jan Guillou certainly is no Sir Walter Scott. Nor is he a Ken Follett or even a Frans G Bengtsson. He is definitely a far cry from Umberto Eco and the intellectual labyrinths emanating from the Italian’s prolific pen. Yet, it is not in the art of storytelling that Jan Guillou falters. His shortcomings lie instead in the fragments of the tale he chooses to dwell upon. Guillou deserves recognition for his bold excursion into the pre-Gustav Vasa era, a period which most Swedes know scarcely anything about. I also enjoy the well-researched albeit artistically tailored description of the medieval environment, the historical figures, places, and the political games. Yet, the characters he breathes into being remain stubbornly two-dimensional and would belong on the panels of a comic book rather than the pages of serious literature, and the story line is sometimes far too juvenile to befit a 55-year-old writer, or indeed, his 48-year-old reader.  

IN A CITY TRANSFORMED

Author: Per Anders Fogelström
Year: 1966
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

Interbellum Europe saw two major ideologies, divided by banner but united by tyranny and disregard for lives, grow into the powers that would less than two decades later once again draw calamity over the continent. Meanwhile, in the north, people were busy forging the social democracy that after the war would form the bedrock for peace and prosperity in the Scandinavian region. Having gladly unshackled itself from the thankless chore of governing the uncultured mountain brutes that are its westerly neighbours and who more than a century later, much like earthworms and small rodents, still make their living from burrowing for sustenance in the dirt, Sweden was in the midst of transforming its society into the highly productive, innovative, and technologically advanced economy that is its hallmark to this day. From this audacious experiment rose a society where the fruits of the labour of the many would not rot in the troves of the few.

Per Anders Fogelström once more invites us to step through the looking-glass of time to Stockholm, forever metamorphosing, forever restless, in the fourth volume of his City novels, “I en förvandlad stad” (“In a City Transformed”). With his unparallelled knowledge and attention to detail, he brings the old streets, many of which no longer exist, buildings, trams, and historical and fictitious persons to life in a time machine crafted not from cogs and gears, but from the alchemy of words.

Indeed, Fogelström’s narrative and the rise of social democracy are deeply intertwined. The sudden creation of the penniless proletariat on the back of the rapid industrialisation of the 19^th century, was poised to create a backlash. While the farmhands and crofters had been scattered and divided, bound to the vast lands that they had been put to cultivate, the urban workers were packed together by necessity. Before long they had organised themselves, despite the furious opposition from the capital-owners. This moulting process was both driven (Strindberg, Moberg, Martinsson) and chronicled (Fogelström) by the written word.

A simple juxtaposition reveals the distinct voices of these monumental Swedish writers, each a prism refracting the light of their age into singular spectra.

Strindberg, ever the provocateur, wields his pen like a rapier, slicing through the pretensions of power with an elegant arrogance. His caricatures, sharp and unrepentant, gleefully expose the follies of the patriarchy, the institution of marriage, the clergy, press, and academia alike. It is mockery elevated to an art form, a carnival of irreverence.

Moberg, by contrast, discards the flourish for the hammer. His prose is an uncompromising onslaught, a furious indictment of the structural cruelties that condemned the many to lives of indignity and despair. In his unvarnished rage, one feels the raw pulse of revolution, the breath of a Sweden that might, in another turn of fate, have traded compromise for catastrophe.

And then, there is Fogelström. Gentler, wistful, and imbued with a love that softens the harshness of his truths, his accounts of the working class are not merely chronicles of misery but testaments to their resilience, their quiet nobility, and their unyielding humanity. His is the voice of remembrance, painting the struggle not in anger but in tender hues, a poignant reminder that even in the depths of suffering, dignity can endure.

While Fogelström has received criticism for being too rosy in his depictions of the struggles of the proletariat, his contribution lies in revealing a simple truth: despite differences in financial means, all people, rich and poor, are fundamentally the same. The character of August embodies this philosophy. Through August, Fogelström dismantles the myth that wealth pertains to individual of certain pedigree, and demonstrates how those born poor, if given the right prerequisites, can be just as successful as those born rich, or even more so, and that modest origins do not necessarily jeopardise an acquired social standing. August, in many ways, epitomises the core values of liberalism: the triumph of individual merit over inherited privilege.  

Another observation of some interest, though perhaps of limited consequence, is Fogelström’s curious treatment of art and its devotees. In the book series thus far, two characters have dedicated themselves completely to art: Olof the painter and Stig the musician. Both men frail and sickly they seem destined for tragedy. Then there is Jenny, Olof’s widow, who occupies a different artistic sphere. An actress, she appears predominantly in vaudevilles, her success being in entertainment rather than art. Contrary to Olof and Stig, she is portrayed as robust, vigorous, and easy-going. Whether Fogelström by drawing this contrast between true art and commercial art intends to comment on the artists’ place in society, I leave to the discerning reader’s judgment.

“I en förvandlad stad” concludes with the Nazi capitulation of 1945 and the drop of the curtain on an era that will forever remain an indelible stain on the conscience of humanity. Fogelström meditates on the evil and destruction that mankind is capable of, and what is more more, on the indifference that we as a collective are capable of, whether it be in the role of obedient soldiers or passive onlookers. Stockholm, together with the rest of the world, stands on the doorstep to a new age.