FAIRYTALES AND STORIES

Author: Hans Christian Andersen
Year: 1902 & 1904 (19th cemtury)
Publisher: Gyldendalske Boghandel Forlag
Language: Danish

Hans Christian Andersen is arguably the greatest writer of children’s literature in history. His collected “Eventyr og historier” (“Fairytales and Stories”) can be rivalled only by the Arabian tradition of One Thousand and One Nights for global recognition, cultural impact, and durability over time. Although most of the stories were new to me, I was already familiar with a decent number of them.

Or so I thought. As I pressed on, fairytale after fairytale (80 in total), I became increasingly aware of how differently stories were told to children 150 years ago. I had not quite braced myself for the tempest of emotions that lay ahead. Yet, what captivated me most was the persistent, haunting motif of death.

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are deeply embedded in the cultural, religious, and social realities of 19th-century Denmark. In Andersen’s time, death was an everyday presence. Infant mortality was high, epidemics were common, and life expectancy was short. This familiarity with death shaped how Andersen portrayed mortality in his stories. Not as a taboo or traumatic event, but as a natural, even spiritual, transition. His tales seem often to have served as moral and emotional guides, preparing, as it were, children for the inevitability of loss while offering comfort through themes of transcendence and divine justice.

Back then, death was public and communal in a completely different way than it is in our modern society. Church records mandated the documentation of burials and causes of death, and weekly lists of the deceased were curated by the authorities and published in Copenhagen papers. Not as a tribute, but as information. The Lutheran Church played a central role in framing death as a passage to Heaven, emphasising divine justice and the afterlife as a source of solace. Andersen’s stories reflect this worldview. In The Angel, a dead child is escorted to Heaven by an angel, and in The Little Match Girl, the protagonist’s death is portrayed as a peaceful release from suffering into the arms of her grandmother. These narratives normalised death as part of life, rather than something to be feared or hidden.

Andersen’s use of death also carried social commentary. Tales like The Little Match Girl highlighted the plight of the poor, where death was a frequent and visible reality. The story’s tragic ending where the girl freezes to death, was not just a moral lesson but a critique of societal neglect. Similarly, The Little Mermaid’s transformation into sea foam symbolised the sacrifice and redemption central to Christian teachings, reinforcing the idea that death could be a path to spiritual fulfilment.

Over the past century and a half, Western Europe has undergone a profound cultural shift in its relationship with death. The medicalisation of death in the early 20th centuries marked the beginning of this transformation. Advances in medicine, sanitation, and public health drastically reduced mortality rates, particularly among children. Death moved from the home to hospitals, and the secularisation of society diminished the role of religion in explaining mortality. Freud’s and his successors’ theories on grief and the pathologisation of mourning further distanced death from everyday life, turning it into a subject often avoided in polite conversation.

The World Wars, one can imagine, accelerated this shift. Mass death on an unprecedented scale forced societies to confront mortality in new ways, but it also led to a cultural suppression of grief. In the post-war era, death became taboo, particularly in children’s literature and media. Disney’s adaptations of Andersen’s tales, for example, often softened or removed the original tragic endings. The Little Mermaid’s film version ends with a wedding, not the mermaid’s dissolution into sea foam. This sanitisation targeted all of the children’s literature from the past, e.g. the aforementioned Thousand and One Night and the tales of the Grimm Brothers, and reflected a broader trend: protecting children from the harsh realities of life, including death.

By the late 20th century, death had become invisible in many aspects of Western culture. Funerals were moved from homes to funeral parlours, and discussions about death were often deferred until adulthood. The rise of consumer culture further distanced people from mortality, as death was increasingly seen as a medical failure rather than a natural part of life. Children’s literature and media largely avoided the topic, or re-packaged it in fantastical, non-threatening ways (e.g., ghosts as friendly characters).

Today, a modern young reader approaches Andersen’s tales with a very different cultural framework. Where a 19th-century Danish child might have seen The Little Match Girl as a realistic and morally instructive story, a 21st-century child may find it shocking or incomprehensible. Some say that the fluffy fairytales of our era make our children weak and ill-prepared for the challenges they encounter when they grow up. Others argue that children need to be children and should be protected from trauma and sorrow. We will all reach a point where we will have to worry about death, anyway. What’s the hurry?  

This is not to say that children’s literature has necessarily become less educational or meaningful in our era. Instead of death, it often helps the young reader to reflect on issues such as identity, loneliness, or exclusion. Issues that are more pressing to a modern child than death, which thankfully has become a rare event in that age group. Issues change over time, but the power of literature to see us through remains a constant.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Author: Adam Smith
Year: 2000 (1776)
Publisher: The Modern Library
Language: English

    “Whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.”

    “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

    “Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little”

    “With the great part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches”

    “A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers all the goods with which these could supply them”

All of the above are quotes from the same pivotal work on economic philosophy. Who might be the author? Karl Marx? Jürgen Habermas, perhaps? Maybe John Maynard Keynes, then? It certainly couldn’t be any of the books that are frequently held up as the intellectual cornerstones of unchecked modern-day capitalism, could it?

The quotes are, in fact, collected from the most often referred to but least often read classical work on economic philosophy, “The Wealth of Nations” by Scotsman Adam Smith, which this year celebrates its 250^th birthday. It was published only a few months after the battles of Lexington and Concord (which Smith dismisses in the book as “the recent disturbances”) and a few months before Colonel John Nixon read the declaration of independence to the public in Philadelphia.

This monumental work of over 1,000 pages changed economic theory forever, but not necessarily in the way Smith intended. For the phenomenon of individuals claiming familiarity with “The Wealth of Nations” without having read it is well-documented and has historical precedence. Even in Smith’s own era, misinterpretations of his work were common, prompting Smith to address them with a mix of openness to substantive feedback when warranted and well-placed disdain when necessary. This trend persists today, with many commentators and economists invoking their imaginary ideas of Smith’s thought without engaging with the actual text.

A pervasive misconception is that Adam Smith advocated for completely unregulated markets. This error is not merely anecdotal but reflects a broader cultural tendency to oversimplify complex works, reducing them to slogans or isolated concepts. The misinterpretation is largely based on the metaphor of the “invisible hand”. The “invisible hand,” is often cherry-picked and misconstrued as a universal law of market harmony. The popular understanding is that a free market will self-regulate and always lead to the best outcome for all. It is used to support the argument that government should under no circumstances intervene in a market economy, that greed is good, and that markets somehow operate in a naturally provided steady-state acting as the blood vessels that support life in the societal organism. This misinterpretation (or deception) serves ideological agendas, particularly among hardcore capitalists who advocate for unregulated markets, despite Smith’s explicit and consistent critiques of such positions.

A closer look reveals that Smith used the term three times across all his writing, and each time to illustrate an altogether different concept. In “The Wealth of Nations” specifically, it appears in Book IV Chapter II which is titled “On Restraints upon the Importation from foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home”. Contrary to common belief, Smith here meditates on how merchants, when given the choice between investing domestically or internationally, will commonly invest in their own country which would be perceived as safer, thus contributing inadvertently to the local economy. The invisible hand is merely a visualisation of public benefit being a side effect, as opposite to the objective, of local investment by domestic merchants and industrialists.

While Smith undeniably did champion free markets where all suppliers are price takers, he was perceptive enough to realise that markets left to their own devices are bound to render themselves unfree given enough time by gradually forming price setters and in the end monopolies. He was a staunch critic of The East India Company, the dominant international corporation at the time, and argued vehemently against monopolies and oligopolies. He would with every certainty be aghast at the multinational conglomerates that control every niche and every market in the world in the 21^st century. In fact, Smith used the word “greed” only once in “The Wealth of Nations” and that was to criticise governments’ greed for power. In the same work, he accused The East India Company of largely acting like a government more than a company. From there, putting the pieces together appears to be a rather straightforward exercise. A free market, as Smith seems to have understood it, is a market that is free to leave and enter. Not a market where a few dominant companies make sure that no one else is allowed to compete for their profits. US anti-trust laws, such as the Sherman Act of 1890 or the Clayton Act of 1914, or the European Union TFEU articles 101 and 102 (and maybe even more so articles 107-109) might possibly be criticised by Smith for being crude and heavy-handed, but essentially recognised as necessary to ensure competition and functioning markets.  

Much has been written about “The Wealth of Nations” by analysts far more capable than I, and even the thoughts of This Banker, limited as they may seem, go far beyond what can be reduced to a blog post. It would make an interesting counterfactual thought experiment to image what our world would look like if Smith’s warnings had been taken seriously.

Given how ignorance has distorted the public understanding of one of the Enlightenment’s greatest works, I can only conclude that the world would be a far more interesting place if people spoke less and read more.

A MAN AND HIS DOG

Author: Thomas Mann
Year: 1955 (1919)
Publisher: Fischer Bücherei
Language: German

It is no secret that I have a soft spot for Thomas Mann. Beyond being merely a stellar writer, I find him to be a keen observer of humankind, and his books reveal as much about the details of the age he lived in as about the people and the interactions that shaped it. While deeply rooted in the intellectual and historical currents of his time, Mann’s writing spans from the decline of the bourgeoisie to the rise and demise of fascism. But more than that, it spans from the height of realism to the birth of existentialism making him one of the foremost chroniclers of modernism.

“Herr und Hund” (“A Man and His Dog”), published in 1918, occupies a unique and often underappreciated niche in the author’s vast life work. Unlike his monumental works such as “Buddenbrooks”, “Herr und Hund” is a slender narrative that captures the relationship between a writer and his beloved dog, a mixed-breed named Bauschan. On the surface, this book does nothing else. It is a matter-of-fact account of Bauschan; his fur, his personality, his habits, his preferences, and how he ended up with the author in the first place. Yet, something must have prompted Thomas Mann, which by the time of writing this was already an established and respected writer, to write a detailed account of his canine companion.

I submit that to understand “Herr und Hund”, one must first consider the personal and historical circumstances surrounding its creation. The book was written during a tumultuous period in Mann’s life. The First World War had shattered the European order, and Mann, like many intellectuals of his time, was grappling with the implications of modernity, nationalism, and the role of the artist in a fractured world. While at first allowing himself to be swept up in the nationalist fervour that led up to the war, Mann’s enthusiasm soon faded and as the war dragged on and his worldview disintegrated, he gradually descended into a personal identity crisis; as a German and as a human being.

His refuge, it is easy to imagine, was his faithful dog Bauschan. Although Thomas Mann had already made a name for himself as a writer of great symbolic and philosophical depth (see review of “Death in Venice” from April 2019) and convoluted sense of humour at the time, “Herr und Hund” comes across as a work of radical sincerity, a moment where Mann sets aside his usual layers of scrutiny and intellectualism to focus on the immediate, tangible, and familiar: the dog, the whole dog, and nothing but the dog.

“Im Folgenden ist ausschließlich von meinem Hunde Bauschan die Rede /…/ weder werden höhere Probleme der Sittlichkeit darin aufgeworfen noch bedeutende Charaktere zergliedert, geschweige denn, daß die gesellschaftliche Frage ihrer Lösung nähergeführt würde.”

The result is a book that feels like listening to a man talking for hours at length about his dog while showing and endless stream of snapshots of it in different contexts. This is Baushan when he sleeps, this is Baushan when he eats, this is Baushan from the from the front, this is Baushan from the back. The reader is the well-meaning interlocutor, patiently listening to the man go on, because they know that the speaker needs this. Thomas Mann needed to invest his attention into something he could grasp; something he could explain. And more than one hundred years after its first publication, we can still today act as Thomas Mann’s therapists by letting him bore us with his altogether mundane and average dog. His umbilical cord to the womb of sanity.

This, at last, is what in my mind makes this book so unique. Contrary to the many other works of fiction where animals play a key role, the dog in Mann’s book is not merely the main character. The book is not about the dog’s life. It is not about any challenge or journey of the dog. It is not about the happiness or the misery of the dog. It is purely and simply about the actual dog. “Das Tier an sich”, as Immanuel Kant might have put it. And maybe, by allowing Mann to tell us every last detail about his dog, we get to know the man better than we could have via any other manifesto, autobiography, or confession.

 

 

THE COMEDIANS

Author: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
Year: 1968 (1854)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie Kraków
Language: Polish

Unknown heirs materialising at the reading of a will. Lovers discovering, at the worst possible moment, that they share a parent. Love triangles sustained by pride and silence. Scheming matriarchs. Secret debts. Broken promises delivered under chandeliers. Honour invoked hourly and violated daily. Tears, slaps, duels, declarations. Such are the dependable ingredients of the telenovela.

On the surface, “Komedianci” (not available in English but a translation might be “The Comedians”) by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski might appear to belong in that universe. There is pride. There is deceit. There are broken assurances and carefully staged appearances. A grand household presides over a web of obligations and resentments. The title itself suggests performance, artifice, theatricality.

And yet Kraszewski is not interested in melodrama for its own sake. He is interested in structure. Where the telenovela thrives on sensationalism, “Komedianci” is concerned with the slow burn of social hypocrisy. Its drama does not hinge on blood ties unexpectedly rearranged but on credit extended too far. Its climaxes are not interrupted weddings but the sudden implosions of reputation that they trigger.

Set in the 19^th century Volhynian countryside among the rural szlachta, the novel dissects a social world built on land, lineage, and mutual dependence. At its centre stands the Dendera family, aristocratic in demeanour and confident in entitlement. They perform generosity with elegance. They host, flatter, and cultivate admiration. Around them lesser landowners orbit like satellites, eager for recognition and proximity to prestige.

If this were a telenovela, Count Dendera and his family would be unambiguous villains, their downfall punctuated by confession and disgrace. Kraszewski is subtler. The aristocrats are not scheming conspirators. They are embodiments of a class that has come to confuse appearance with substance. They believe in their own performance. That is precisely their weakness.

The metaphor of the stage governs the novel. Social life is theatre, rank is costume, courtesy is choreography. But unlike melodrama where performance heightens truth, here performance obscures it. The Dendera estate becomes a set on which aristocratic virtue is acted out while, behind the scenes, economic reality deteriorates.

Kraszewski’s insight is that exploitation need not be dramatic to be devastating. The Denderas do not ruin their neighbours through a single spectacular betrayal, nor do they in essence aim to do so. Rather, they draw upon their trust incrementally by extending loans, assuming obligations, grant deference, and avoid payments. Each gesture appears small. Collectively, they amount to extraction.

The surrounding community is not innocent in the way a betrayed heroine might be. The lesser szlachta participates in the illusion. They want to believe in the Count’s grandeur because that belief reflects well on them. Association with high nobility confers symbolic capital. Reputation becomes collateral. In this sense, “Komedianci” offers a more unsettling message than any melodrama: deception persists because it is mutually convenient.

When Count Dendera’s true position finally comes to light, the revelation lacks the thunderclap theatrics of serialised television. There is no shocking revelation of secret parentage, no courtroom confession. Instead, there is gradual exposure, the quiet, devastating recognition that the performance has outstripped reality. Financial and moral insolvency converge.

For modern readers, the novel feels unexpectedly contemporary. We, too, inhabit a world rich in performance but poor in productivity. Personal branding and curated identities are valued higher than industriousness and hard work. As of early 2025, Tesla’s market cap was higher than the next 15 car producers, including Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors, Ford and Daimler Benz, combined despite producing less than 15% of the amount of vehicles that Toyota alone did that year.   reputational management. To a banker in particular, Count Dendera’s complacency and sense of entitlement will bear an eerie resemblance to the events preceding the collapse of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “Komedianci” reminds us that the temptation to substitute optics for substance seems perennial.

If I may have one remark about this book, it is that it somewhat obscures who the main characters of the novel are going to be. While the first of the novel’s four parts centres around one of the orbiting szlachta noblemen, the mellow but shrewd Cavalry Captain Kurdesz, subsequent parts see his importance fading, and the narrative arc increasingly requiring the reader’s investment to shift to other characters. Once, the recalibration has been finalised, the story continues to flow smoothly.

In the end, I am a bit surprised that this novel has not found a larger audience because, much like a telenovela, this is a most supremely entertaining story. Yet while a telenovela resolves itself through catharsis, Kraszewski offers something more sober. He demonstrates that exposure does not restore innocence; it restores proportion. The social order survives, chastened. Illusion yields to reality, not with fireworks, but with consequence. Sooner or later, the stage set gives way, and the comedians find themselves without a script. In that unguarded moment, the illusion breaks, and the telenovela that has been the comedians’ life all along embarks on its final season.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Year: 1952 (1943)
Publisher: Rabén & Sjögren
Language: Swedish (translator Gunvor Bang)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Lille prinsen” (“The Little Prince”) is often, correctly or not, classified as a children’s book, a categorisation that itself reproduces one of the central faults the text quietly dismantles: the adult tendency to sort meaning into rigid taxonomies that obscure lived experience. Beneath its deceptively simple narrative lies a potent ethnography of adulthood, observed through the eyes of a child positioned as The Other within the dominant social order of grown-ups.

The main character, in social anthropological sense, functions as an etic observer. He moves between worlds, asteroids, deserts, and human institutions, and interacts with their respective societies without fully belonging to any of them. In the adult world, he is systematically misconstrued. Adults interpret through institutionalised parameters: numbers, ownership, rank, productivity. The child, by contrast, operates with relational epistemologies: care, curiosity, attachment, and presence. This mismatch renders the child an outsider, not because of juniority, but because of incompatibility.

The grown-ups Saint-Exupéry depicts are not individualised characters so much as social types. The king, the businessman, the geographer, and the lamp lighter are caricatures of actors captured in their roles. These are all people who have mistaken symbolic systems for reality itself and whose identities have consequently collapsed into their functions. Their lives are governed by what I call “self-imposed futility”: activities sustained not because they generate meaning, but because they reproduce the illusion of purpose. The businessman counts stars he can never use; the geographer records landscapes he has never seen.

Self-imposed futility resembles what Sartre called “mauvaise foi” or “bad faith”, but while self-imposed futility proposes to name a collective condition in which people inhabit empty roles sustained by social norms rather than lived meaning, mauvaise foi is the individual’s conscious self-deception that denies personal freedom by mistaking role for destiny. Both diagnose role capture, but Sartre moralises it whereas Saint-Exupéry anthropologises it, as it were.

Another concept akin to self-imposed futility is the Marxist notion of “estrangement” which describes how people can become disconnected from the fruit of their labour, and by extension from their context in society, which may lead to apathy and nihilism. However, in the most basic Marxist understanding this alienation is experienced, whereas self-imposed futility, I submit, encapsulates the continuous illusion of meaning into a state of the subconscious.  

What makes “Lille Prinsen” remarkable is that it, kills two birds with one stone, without announcing its didacticism. First, it reassures the child reader that they do not need to understand, or envy for that matter, the adult world. The book subtly delegitimises adult norms by revealing their arbitrariness. Children that are used to hearing “you will understand when you grow older” may find this refreshingly liberating as it legitimises not only their childhood, but also their worldview. Childhood here is not a preparatory stage but a fully realised cultural environment with its own logic and value system.

Second, the book offers grown-ups a mirror that is gentle but unsparing. By adopting the child’s point of view, Saint-Exupéry uncloaks adult practices, making them visible as odd, ritualised, and absurd. This is a classic ethnographic manoeuvre, externalising the familiar allowing for outside scrutiny. The result is an invitation for adults to recognise the arbitrariness of their life choices and the ways they have normalised nonsense in the name of seriousness. In Millennial vernacular: adulting.

Crucially, the text resists nostalgia. It does not argue that children are purer or morally superior. Instead, it suggests that adulthood often involves a narrowing of perception, a loss of interpretive plurality. The tragedy is not growing up per se, but forgetting that other ways of being remain possible. The little prince does not reject adulthood. He simply refuses to normalise it. Being an adult, he teaches us, does not have to follow a pattern. We could choose to break the routine, but we have grown blind to that option. And even if we saw it, having forgotten what it is like to be a child, we would no longer grasp the value of it. We are victims of self-imposed futility.

In the end, “Lille Prinsen” endures because it operates simultaneously as a fable, a philosophical critique, and a soft ethnography of modern life. It speaks to children without condescension and to adults without accusation. By positioning the child as The Other, Saint-Exupéry exposes how adulthood, far from being an inevitable norm, is itself a culturally specific, and perhaps questionable, way of organising existence.

KALEVALA

Author: Elias Lönnrot
Year: 2001 (1849)
Publisher: Atlantis bokförlag
Language: Swedish (översättare Lars Huldén and Mats Huldén)

It is easy to fall into the trap of reading “Kalevala”, compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from oral traditions throughout the Finnish heartland, as a national epic in the heroic tradition of Homer or Virgil. Yet the key to understanding this work, seems to be the realisation that its virtue lies not in grand heroics but in the realistic representation of human frailty, contumacy, and recklessness. The three central figures, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen are not heroic in any conventional, triumphant sense. Their pedestrian habits, repeated failures, and moral ambiguities form a mirror of Finnish cultural self-understanding and of a folklore tradition that values endurance, craft, and restraint over glory.

Väinämöinen, the nominally supreme hero, is defined not by martial prowess but by experience, song, and verbal skill. He is a singer and a seer, whose power is manifested in words carefully remembered, spoken, or sung. Even so, he is hardly idealised. Väinämöinen is stubborn, prideful, and often slow to adapt. His wisdom does not prevent him from making errors, nor does it grant him control over events. He loses contests, fails in courtship, and ultimately departs not in victory but in resignation. This portrayal resists the epic convention of heroic ascent; instead, it emphasises the limitations of knowledge and the inconspicuous dignity of persistence. Väinämöinen’s authority is provisional, rooted in experience rather than domination, and this modesty resonates with a cultural ethos that values patience and tacit understanding over spectacle.

The smith Ilmarinen embodies another deeply unglamorous form of excellence: labour. His defining achievement, the forging of Sampo, is not an act of conquest but of skilled craftsmanship carried out at great personal cost and against his will. Ilmarinen is diligent, reliable, and technically brilliant, yet emotionally inarticulate and unlucky in love. He forges wonders but cannot secure happiness for himself. His exploits in love end in death or bitterness, and his attempts to repair loss only underline the limits of craft as a solution to human grief. In Ilmarinen, “Kalevala” elevates work and technical competence while declining to romanticise them. Creation is necessary and valuable, but it does not legitimise existence or guarantee fulfilment. This sober view of labour aligns closely with Finnish folklore’s emphasis on work as a duty rather than a path to excellence.

Lemminkäinen, by contrast, appears at first glance to be the most conventional hero: youthful, handsome, adventurous, and impulsive. Yet his narrative arc is a sustained critique of reckless bravado. Lemminkäinen ignores warnings, provokes needless conflicts, and pursues honour without reflection. His death in Tuonela is not tragic heroism but the predictable outcome of carelessness. Even his resurrection, accomplished through his mother’s painstaking labour rather than his own merit, reinforces the poem’s scepticism toward individual glory. Lemminkäinen survives, but he does not mature. He remains a cautionary figure whose energy lacks direction. Through him, “Kalevala” suggests that courage without judgment is not admirable but dangerous, and that survival often depends on communal care rather than personal valour.

Taken together, I find that these figures articulate a vision of humanity grounded in limitations. None of the heroes achieves lasting success, moral purity, or final victory. Their world is governed by scarcity, weather, and fate, not by destiny shaped through will alone. There are no castles, only farms. There are no monsters, only forest animals and evil humans. There are deities, most prominently Ukko, the father of all gods, but they play a minor role and, much like forces of nature, show no sign of any will of their own. Conflicts in “Kalevala” are rarely resolved cleanly; instead, they fade, fracture, fluctuate, and rely largely on coincidence. This narrative texture reflects a folklore tradition shaped by harsh environments and long historical marginality, where survival depended less on conquest than on adaptability and cooperation. “Kalevala’s” heroes are thus not ideals to emulate but companions in endurance; figures whose flaws make them recognisable rather than exemplary.

The poem’s geography further underscores this mundane perspective. While “Kalevala” is rich in spatial imagination, moving between Kaleva, Pohjola, Tuonela, and distant lands, it is notable for what it omits. As a Swede, I am made aware that despite its long political and cultural dominance over Finland, Sweden is conspicuously absent from this work. By contrast, regions to the east and south are more readily invoked, and I noted references that point toward Russia and even Germany as part of a wider mythic horizon. Russia symbolises distance. Germany luxury and flair. This asymmetry is striking. The stories were collected in a time where Finland was still recovering from its violent and sudden decoupling from the Swedish realm, which it had been a part of for 800 years, and yet, Sweden is neither idealised nor demonised. It is, much to my surprise, completely ignored.

I choose to read the silence regarding Sweden not as ignorance but as a meaningful absence: an epic drawn from vernacular tradition does not centre on imperial power but instead maps a world defined by trade, rumour, and cultural contact beyond official authority. At the time Elias Lönnrot collected his stories in the mid-19^th century, Karelia in the easternmost parts of Finland was considered the heart of Finland, and the farther west he travelled, the less genuine and more “swedenised” he may have perceived the people and the lands. In this sense, “Kalevala” reflects a folk worldview that resists dominant narratives and preserves its autonomy through curated collective memory. Russia and Germany never threatened to pollute Finnishness and so reference to these lands may have appeared safe.

On a final note, despite the ostensibly chronological storyline and recurring heroes, I propose that each of the 50 songs is best read in isolation. Each carries its own secret and its own message. The songs sometimes interact with one another, and jointly describe a chain of events, and yet there are logical gaps and plot holes everywhere. One soon learns to overlook them.

There is infinitely more to say about this curious work, and scholarly coverage continues to develop, not only in Finland but around the world. Ultimately though, “Kalevala” is an epic of restraint. Its heroes are weary, flawed, and often morally weak; its values are practical rather than transcendent. By refusing the consolations of heroic triumph, the poem offers something rarer: a meditation on how ordinary virtues such as skill, patience, care, and memory, sustain life in an indifferent world. In this way, the non-heroic qualities of Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen are not shortcomings but the very substance of the epic’s wisdom and a peephole into the Finnish soul. I can only fantasise about what the 50 songs must sound like to a Finnish ear in their original tongue.

ANIMAL FARM

Author: George Orwell
Year: 1962 (1945)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English

Let’s not complicate things: “Animal Farm” is simple. It is by all standards a straightforward and easy novel to understand, with little to no hidden meaning or subtext to explore. George Orwell, its author, does not cloak his ideas in dense symbolism or ambiguous allegory; rather, he presents a transparent political fable whose parallels to historical events and figures are direct, intentional, and unmistakable. On the nose, one might even be tempted to say. Yet this accessibility is a defining feature of the text. Orwell’s purpose is not to invite endless interpretive speculation but to instruct, warn, and criticise through clarity. As a journalist, he wants to help you understand; not challenge you to dig through layer upon layer of obscure symbolism.

The novel recounts the rebellion of farm animals against their human owner, Mr. Jones, after they are inspired by the ideals of equality and collective ownership articulated by the aging hog Old Major. Following a successful uprising, the animals establish a new society based on shared labour and common benefit. However, a group of pigs gradually assume leadership roles, consolidating power over the other animals and altering the farm’s guiding principles to serve their own interests. Over time, the revolutionary ideals erode entirely, culminating in a regime that is indistinguishable from, and arguably worse than, the human tyranny it replaced. The simplicity of this plot mirrors the simplicity of the historical trajectory Orwell critiques: the rise, corruption, and betrayal of revolutionary movements.

The characters all correspond to historical persons or events.

Old Major, who represents Karl Marx, functions primarily as an ideological catalyst rather than an active participant in events. Like Marx, Major articulates a theoretical vision of liberation rooted in equality and collective struggle, but he does not live to see how his ideas are implemented, or indeed distorted. His speech lays out the moral foundation of the rebellion, yet its vagueness leaves ample room for manipulation. Orwell suggests that abstract theory, when detached from practical safeguards, is vulnerable to appropriation by those seeking power rather than justice.

Mr. Jones embodies negligent and decaying authority and is based on Tsar Nicholas II. He is neither competent nor particularly malicious; instead, his downfall results from indifference and failure to recognise the needs of those he governs. Orwell portrays Jones not as a uniquely evil ruler but as a dysfunctional one, whose removal seems inevitable.

Napoleon’s role as Joseph Stalin is one of the novel’s most overt parallels. Napoleon is defined by his brutality, secrecy, and obsession with control. He does not persuade through reason or charisma but rules through fear, violence, and the systematic elimination of rivals. Orwell’s portrayal emphasizes the transformation of revolutionary leadership into authoritarian dictatorship, underscoring how power, once centralised, tends to perpetuate itself regardless of ideological justification.

Moses, representing the Church, occupies a marginal yet symbolically important position. His tales of Sugarcandy Mountain provide comfort and distraction, offering spiritual consolation that discourages resistance. Orwell presents religion not as an active oppressor but as a tool tolerated or suppressed depending on its usefulness to those in power. In practice it serves to pacify suffering rather than alleviating it.

Mr. Frederick of Pinchfield, symbolising Nazi Germany, is characterised by aggression, deceit, and opportunism. His eventual betrayal of Napoleon highlights the fragility of alliances formed purely on convenience. In contrast, Mr. Pilkington of Foxwood, representing the British government, is portrayed as complacent, self-interested, and ultimately accommodating. Orwell suggests that external powers are less concerned with justice than with stability and self-preservation.

Boxer, the embodiment of the uneducated and naïve working class, is the novel’s most tragic figure. His unwavering loyalty, physical strength, and simplistic maxims, render him indispensable yet disposable. Orwell’s treatment of Boxer illustrates how exploitation thrives not only through cruelty but through misplaced trust and lack of critical awareness.

Squealer, the propagandist, is perhaps Orwell’s most scathing creation. He embodies the machinery of misinformation, manipulation, and rhetorical deceit that sustains tyranny. Squealer’s power lies not in strength or intelligence but in his frantic eagerness to serve authority. He is weak, subservient, and hysterically devoted to justifying every abuse committed by his masters. Orwell’s contempt for such figures is palpable. Mouthpieces like Squealer thrive not because they believe in truth, but because they crave proximity to power. Their worthlessness is masked by their utility, and their moral emptiness by their loud orations.

Snowball’s function as a representation of Leon Trotsky is one of “Animal Farm’s” most historically interesting parallels. Like Trotsky, Snowball is an intellectual architect of the revolution, distinguished by energy, eloquence, and a genuine commitment to improving collective life. Trotsky played a central role in the Bolshevik Revolution and later organised the Red Army. Similarly, Snowball is instrumental in defending Animal Farm and shaping its early policies. His emphasis on education, committees, and long-term planning reflects Trotsky’s belief in modernisation and ideological development.

The windmill project closely mirrors Trotsky’s advocacy of rapid industrialisation and technological progress. Snowball envisions a future in which labour is reduced and productivity increased, while Napoleon dismisses such ideas in favour of consolidating personal power. This ideological divide echoes Trotsky’s conflict with Stalin, whose rise depended less on visions than on control and violence.

In sum, “Animal Farm” achieves its enduring impact precisely because of its clarity. Orwell strips political catastrophe of complexity to reveal its recurring patterns, making the novel not a cryptic allegory but an unmistakable warning which rightfully occupies its unquestionable position in any Wester school curriculum. One may only hope, that the ears of future generations do not grow deaf to its message. Authoritarianism, after all, does not thrive among the wicked as much as among the ignorant.

Special shoutout to Paul Hogarth for the evocative cover art. 

HERTHA

Author: Fredrika Bremer
Year: 2020 (1856)
Publisher: Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet
Language: Swedish 

Anybody who has cared to ask, should know that I am not an undivided supporter of literary canon. No matter how you slice it, it will be exclusive and narrow, or if you make it more comprehensive, it is soon rendered meaningless. And yet, I hereby submit, contradictory as it may be, that every resident of Haninge municipality where Fredrika Bremer’s residence Årsta Castle is located, ought to read at least one of her works; and in particular her most famous one “Hertha” from 1856.

“Hertha” is often celebrated as a foundational text in the Swedish women’s rights movement. The story follows Hertha, a young woman trapped by her father’s authority and by laws that deny her legal independence, education, and meaningful work. Under the 1734 Civil Code, unmarried women in Sweden were treated as perpetual minors under the guardianship of male relatives, limiting their legal capacity to work, own property, or make decisions about their own lives. Unlike her peers, who are more concerned about getting married and avoiding scandals, Hertha finds it impossible to accept her fate. She demands change; not only for herself, but for all women in King Oskar I’s dual monarchy.

Beneath the most obvious romantic and dramatic narrative, “Hertha” is, however, a sophisticated political treatise*, only thinly disguised as fiction. Through her protagonist and key supporting characters such as Yngve and Rudolph, Bremer crafts a forceful critique of the social and legal structures that limited women’s autonomy in mid-19th century Sweden, while simultaneously offering a vision for reform that is both rational and morally sound.

A critical figure in amplifying this argument is Yngve whose role is central in demonstrating Bremer’s vision of a society in which men support women’s rights. Yngve is not portrayed as a revolutionary, nor as a mere romantic interest. He is a morally and intellectually engaged participant in the broader social debate. His respect for Hertha’s autonomy illustrates an essential point: men’s support of women’s rights is not a threat to their masculinity, authority, or social power. On the contrary, Yngve embodies the idea that enlightened men have a vested interest in promoting justice and equity. By affirming Hertha’s agency and moral insight, he models how a man can act as an ally without diminishing his own stature or influence.

What makes Hertha particularly convincing is her insistence on constructive change rather than simple rebellion. The way the societies in Sweden and other Nordic countries were transformed in the 20^th century by social reforms, contrasted many other at the time by their emphasis on peaceful and gradual transformation, rather than radical and violent revolutions (see review of “What is Social Democracy” from November 2025). Fredrika Bremer foreshadows that ambition in her writing and holds it up as a preferred vehicle for lasting change. Hertha’s struggle is framed not in terms of personal vengeance or overturning social order, but as a reasoned plea for structural reform. She challenges the legal guardianship system and the social expectation that women must remain dependent, but she does so through reflection, argumentation, and moral appeal rather than impulsive action. Explicitly so, as when presented with an offer to bring her father in front of a judge to force him to grant her autonomy, she refuses.

Bremer drives her point home early in the novel by introducing the character of Rudolph, Hertha’s distant relative. Contrary to Hertha’s, Rudolph’s actions are designed to liberate them from the oppressive father by force. Not only does the path of violence that Rudolph chooses fail to solve the problem, it moreover creates unimaginable destruction and, ultimately, his own defeat. Bremer’s message could not have been clearer.

Bremer’s use of surnames in the novel carries another powerful symbolic weight, particularly through bird imagery. Hertha’s surname, Falk (Falcon) evokes strength, freedom, and agency, emphasizing her aspiration for autonomy and moral elevation. This symbolism recurs with other characters: minor female characters often bear names suggestive of small birds, representing potential, delicacy, or the societal constraints placed upon them. Owls, cocks and other feathered animals are similarly utilised for different effects. By weaving bird imagery into the naming structure, Bremer creates a thematic network in which characters’ identities reflect their moral or social roles. Flight and freedom are not merely personal desires but symbolic markers of agency of all womankind, linking Hertha’s personal quest to broader social reconfiguration. Even birds unaware of their ability to fly, ought to have the liberty to do so.

The novel’s political strategy is further enhanced by Bremer’s literary techniques. The narrative alternates between Hertha’s personal experience and broader social observation, allowing readers to engage emotionally while also absorbing analytical critique. Bremer’s attention to Hertha’s internal life, her reflections on morality, education, and the limitations imposed upon her, transforms the novel into a vehicle for social argument. Every moment of personal frustration is carefully linked to systemic issues, from legal guardianship to marriage customs, illustrating the interplay between individual suffering and societal structures. Some sections, although framed as dialogue, read like lectures or info-dumps.

In the end, when all facts and declarations have been identified, established, and elaborated on, more than anything else it is Hertha’s very self: intelligent, morally unbreakable, steadfast, and rational; that embodies the main argument why women can be nothing but equal to men.

 

 

*This is amplified by the appendix that followed the book, containing a factual breakdown of the legal situation in Sweden at the time, complete with recent court decisions on the matter of women’s rights and the written arguments issued by the judges in support of their verdicts.

 

THERE THERE

Author: Tommy Orange
Year: 2018
Publisher: Bokförlaget Polaris
Language: Swedish (translator Eva Åsefeldt)

Present day America. The date for the annual pow wow in Oakland is approaching. Native Americans, predominantly from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, prepare for the great event, each for their own personal reasons. A middle-aged woman is going to re-unite with her children, a young man to collect stories for posterity, still another to dance for the first time in the ritual dances, and some are up to no good and plan to steal the safe containing rewards for the winners in various competitions.

Tommy Orange’s “Pow wow” (“There, There”) follows a dozen individuals in their preparations for the big day. It is a groundbreaking novel that reexamines the narrative of contemporary Native American life. Some critics have already hailed it as the beginning of a new era in Native American writing in the United States.

By means of a diverse gallery of characters and interwoven storylines, the book offers an intimate depiction of the challenges faced by Native peoples navigating urban environments, grappling with history, and negotiating identity in the 21^st century. Among the characters, to me Edwin Black in particular stands out as a compelling figure whose struggles illustrate the complexities of later-generation First Nations identity.

Edwin Black, a middle-aged man living in Oakland, embodies the tension of inherited trauma without the means to process it. The son of a white mother and a Cheyenne father, he is raised with little exposure to his Native roots. He struggles with alcoholism, obesity, sporadic employment, and his addiction to online gaming. Yet beneath this dysfunction lies a yearning for cultural grounding. His identity is less about participation in traditional rituals, which he remains largely oblivious of, and more about negotiating absence: absence of homeland, of community, and of coherent selfhood. Edwin’s narrative exemplifies the identity struggles likely faced by many later-generation First Nations individuals, whose connection to their heritage is fragmented due to historical displacement, systemic erasure, and colonial assimilation policies.

In this respect, Edwin’s experience shares similarities with second-generation immigrants in countries such as Sweden, who juggle multiple cultural belongings. Both groups negotiate between inherited cultural identity and dominant societal norms. However, the key difference lies in the historical context: second-generation immigrants often engage with living, accessible cultures from their parents’ homelands. Their identity is tied to a physical place where their heritage is prevalent as an idea. Edwin, on the other hand, must reconstruct identity from fragmented histories, oral narratives, and intermittent exposure to tribal knowledge, often from a distant, perhaps mythical, past. The urban Native experience, as dramatised by Edwin, is thus uniquely burdened by historical erasure and dispossession, making identity reclamation both a personal and generational endeavour, based on myth rather than roots.

Comparatively, later-generation First Nations identity shares features with other stateless or marginalised peoples, such as Kurds, Roma, and Sami. All face pressures of marginalisation, displacement, or cultural suppression. Kurds navigate multiple nation-states that deny sovereignty; Roma contend with centuries of persecution and societal marginalisation; the Sami face assimilationist pressures in Arctic regions. In this sense Native Americans’ experience is similar in its intimate connection to settler colonialism and land dispossession. Unlike diasporic peoples whose cultures may persist across borders, later-generation Native Americans must contend with erasure within a single nation-state. Edwin’s identity crisis is therefore intertwined with the absence of homeland and the historical trauma, adding layers of complexity absent from many other marginalised identities.

Juxtaposed with second-generation immigrant identity, Edwin’s experience is uniquely shaped by politics of recognition and erasure. Immigrant communities often negotiate belonging within pluralistic frameworks, while urban Native Americans must assert cultural presence against a backdrop of historical invisibility. It is telling that while a mere 0.3% of the population in the United States identified as First Nation in 1960, nearly 3% did so in 2020. Similarly, compared with Kurds, Roma, or Sami, the struggle of Native Americans intertwines personal, cultural, and legal dimensions: treaties, reservations, and federal recognition create a complex framework where identity is simultaneously lived and legislated. Edwin’s search for selfhood is therefore not only personal but also political, bridging historical trauma with contemporary urban realities.

Orange’s structural choice to follow multiple characters amplifies these explorations. For Edwin, the Oakland Coliseum pow wow symbolises both a literal and metaphorical “there”: a site of reconnection, performance, and confrontation with the past. Like other characters, such as Orvil Red Feather who learns traditional dance through Youtube, Opal Bear Shield who tries to hold her family together in a hostile social environment, and Dene Oxendene who documents Native stories as a filmmaker, Edwin’s journey emphasises the active labour required to reconstruct identity in contemporary urban contexts. The novel shows that Native identity in cities is neither static nor monolithic; it is a dynamic interplay of memory, cultural performance (or re-enactment even), and resilience. One could argue that the colonial and later US authorities over the centuries successfully shattered it, but failed to erase it.

In conclusion, “Pow wow” is a profound exploration of identity, trauma, and resilience. The individual journeys of each of the characters illustrate the particular struggles of later-generation Native Americans negotiating urban life and ancestral heritage. Tommy Orange’s novel challenges readers to confront the legacies of colonisation, the nuances of urban Native identity, and the interplay between past and present. This is knowledge that has been available to sociologists and anthropologists for decades. Would that this literary effort bring it to the attention of a broader public.

FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Year: 2007 (2004)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English

I am not a particularly intelligent man. I know what I need to know and I understand what others have told me I need to understand. I totter around the world like most other people oblivious of the size of the universe, relying to a large degree on knowledge generated by others and wisdom accumulated by generations before me. I am, by all accounts, a banker belonging to the most commonplace persuasion.

And yet, the mediocre mind that I possess, I still cannot find a single original thought in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”, hailed by Fortune Magazine as ‘one of the smartest books of all time’.  

“Fooled by Randomness” has achieved near-canonical status in the literature of risk, uncertainty, and human irrationality. Its reputation rests on its supposedly radical thesis: that we routinely mistake luck for skill, underestimate randomness, and build narratives to explain what is often just noise. Yet reading the book critically, one is struck less by its originality and more by Taleb’s flair for repackaging ideas that, while vital, are hardly new.

At its core, “Fooled by Randomness” argues that human beings are cognitively ill-equipped to understand probabilistic reality. Taleb illustrates how traders, investors, CEOs, and even scientists often credit themselves for success that is better attributed to statistical variance. This insight, though forcefully delivered, echoes long-established ideas from behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy from Hume’s scepticism about causation to Popper’s critique of historical determinism. Taleb’s contribution thus remains shrouded in mystery.

Ironically, what he presents as revelatory is something many thoughtful readers might consider common sense: unpredictable events happen (or “shit happens” might better capture it), luck plays a large role in outcomes, and our confidence in our own stories far exceeds the evidence of their actuality. His central admonition, “expect the unexpected”, is ancient in spirit. So is “alea iacta est”. Or “pride goeth before destruction”. The list goes on and on.  

One is reminded of Stoic counsel, medieval warnings against hubris, and the probabilistic humility embedded in scientific method or the biblical call to modesty, piety and reflection. Taleb’s philosophical posture is a modern reframing of old wisdom, delivered with charismatic frustration at humanity’s refusal to internalise it.

But this lack of originality does not render the book irrelevant. If anything, it underscores Taleb’s larger, and surprisingly damning, point: even the simplest probabilistic truths must be endlessly restated because we as humans persistently fail to live by them. We prefer neat explanations over messy randomness, confident predictions over uncertainty, and flattering narratives over the humbling truth of chance.

A particularly sharp example is his takedown of the caste of Risk Managers in financial institutions. Taleb argues that Risk Managers act primarily to protect themselves rather than their firms. From my own professional experience, this rings painfully true: risk frameworks often become bureaucratic armour rather than genuine safeguards, designed more to deflect blame than to confront uncertainty.

The very fact that “Fooled by Randomness” feels obvious is part of its evidence: our institutions and personal decisions alike routinely disregard what should be common sense.

This is where the book earns its value. Taleb’s observations, though not groundbreaking, are delivered with a piercing clarity that exposes the gap between what we should know and how we actually behave. He forces the reader to confront not merely intellectual errors but the emotional and cultural forces that encourage them. If we continuously act as though the world is more predictable than it is, then perhaps even cliché warnings about uncertainty need to be articulated, loudly and repeatedly.

In the end, “Fooled by Randomness” is less an original treatise than a necessary one. Its power lies not in novelty but in its unrelenting insistence that our blindness to randomness is self-inflicted and catastrophically persistent. Taleb may not tell us anything fundamentally new, but he tells us what we perpetually fail to remember. Rather like a demented patient is repeatedly fascinated by the same discovery, to our oblivious selves, this book endures as a periodical reminder of something our primitive minds simply cannot contain for any meaningful period of time.

WHAT IS SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?

Author: Ingvar Carlsson & Anne-Marie Lindgren
Year: 2019
Publisher: Tankesmedjan Tiden
Language: Swedish 

Social Democracy is by far the most successful political project in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia in the 20^th century, and it is at the core of what made this region the envy of the world*. But few people, even those who vote for the Social Democratic party or identify as social democrats, truly know what it is.

As debates over the meaning of social democracy grew increasingly muddled, Ingvar Carlsson, who would later become leader of the Social Democratic Party and Sweden’s prime minister, teamed up with Anne-Marie Lindgren, a respected publisher and political analyst, to bring clarity. In 1974 they co-authored “Vad är socialdemokrati” (“What is Social Democracy”); a concise attempt to define the party’s principles and purpose. The book has since been translated to a number of languages, and revised and updated four times. The latest edition, published in 2019, reflects both the endurance of the project and the evolution of its ideas.

The book is divided into six sections: 1. History of Social Democracy, 2. Ideological legacy of Social Democracy 3. Social Democratic ideological development: The world of production, 4. Social Democratic ideological development: Distribution of the results of production 5. Social Democracy – am outdated ideology? 6. The future?

If there is a single lesson to be drawn from this book, it is that it should not be mistaken for either a bible or a manifesto. Social democracy, by its very nature, resists dogma. It rejects any fundamentalist interpretation of its founders or ideological forerunners. As Carlsson and Lindgren themselves put it:

“Within some left-wing parties, Marx and ‘Marxism’ (or notions of ’Marxism) have at periods of time been seen almost as a religious document, in which some of the more obscure words provide a guideline that is not to be questioned. Such trends, albeit not as evident as in the past, can also be found in modern-day debate. This type of single-minded literal approach is extremely dangerous – and this applies to all theories – political or religious – seen as representing the Truth with a capital T. The history of Communism shows us how dangerous such single-mindedness can be, and how it directly opposes the ideal of freedom and equality.”**

It is thus neither a roadmap nor a yardstick, nor does it claim to be a philosophical treatise on the nature of happiness or a blueprint for utopia. Instead, it offers a framework for understanding society, an intellectual toolkit that enables readers to identify the structures and processes that produce social injustice, and to devise practical, contextually relevant solutions suited to their own time and circumstances.

Although its intellectual roots lie in the writings of Karl Marx, the social-democratic movement began reinventing itself almost from the outset. A decisive break with classical Marxism, as articulated in the “Communist Manifesto” (see review from August 2021), came when social democrats abandoned the goal of redistributing ownership of the means of production and instead sought to democratise control over them. This shift owed much to the trade unions, which formed the backbone of Sweden’s labour movement. Traditionally, economists distinguish between two main factors of production: capital and labour. The unions’ initial priority was to gain greater control over the latter; the time, energy and skills of their members. But their thinking soon influenced the political wing of the movement. The call to transfer ownership of capital gave way to a more pragmatic demand: to share control over capital and the rewards of production more equitably.

This insight proved decisive in sparing Scandinavia the violent upheavals that shook parts of Europe under Communist and Fascist movements. Instead, it laid the foundation for a path of gradual, democratic reform. Once owners of capital recognised that their property rights were not under direct threat, they became more inclined to negotiate and compromise. The result was the emergence of the so-called Swedish model, i.e. an enduring framework that balances the interests of capital, labour and the broader public. It fostered a society in which innovation and cooperation could flourish, not through conflict, but through consensus, ensuring that no group’s prosperity came at the systematic expense of another.

The at the time of writing this ongoing dispute between Tesla and the Swedish trade union IF Metall must be seen in this historical context. Tesla’s management appears to operate as though it is free from norms and responsibilities, yet their actions risk undermining the very foundation of Sweden’s prosperous welfare model. Elon Musk’s apparent inability to recognise or respect this legacy is regrettable. Equally, if not more concerning, however, is the fact that many Swedish workers, by opting not to join the union, seem unaware of the broader consequences of their choices for both themselves and the collective framework that has long safeguarded their rights.

It is a pity that works such as this by Carlsson and Lindgren are unlikely to alter this dynamic. The reason is simple: their arguments demand a degree of analytical sophistication that, in 2025, remains beyond the grasp of much of the population leaving it up to others to fight their fights for them.

* Yes haters, it is hardly a secret that the acrid venom you spew upon Sweden on social media springs from none other but your own envy and crushing sense of inadequacy. You are not fooling anybody.

** The whole book is available in English at the Palme Center webpage, wherefrom this quote was sourced.

A DOUBLE PORTRAIT

Author: Agneta Pleijel
Year: 2020
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish 

My first brush with Agneta Pleijel’s writing occurred in the early noughties through her work “Lord Nevermore”. This is a tale spun around two Polish souls of vastly different temperaments yet bound by the exquisite absurdity of friendship, and parted, as fate would have it, by the ruthless savagery of inane politics, in this case the first world war. What struck me the most was the ease and elegance with which she recreates the private chambers of her characters’ minds, not so much depicting the young men but rather listening in to a conversation between them. To read her was like attending a séance where the dead remained unaware of the living and conversed uninhibitedly with one another in our presence. In later years, she turned her art inward and produced that singular re-invention of the autobiography that I was moved to christen synaisthimatography; the cartography of the emotional landscape itself. By this work alone, she surely established herself as a towering giant of modern belletristic writing.

In “Dubbelporträtt” (not available in English but a rough translation could be “A Double Portrait”), Pleijel returns to the semi-biographical but deeply personal storytelling. The tale is based on the true story of Agatha Christie, the undisputed queen of mystery, sitting for Oskar Kokoschka, the world-renowned Viennese painter from whom Christie’s grandson Matthew commissioned a portrait of his grandmother for her 80^th birthday. Both Christie and Kokoschka reluctantly accept the initiative.

In her subtle orchestration of this encounter, Pleijel permits Kokoschka to try to engage in meaningful and intimate conversation with his highly reserved subject, in an attempt to capture her personality for the portrait. The elderly lady, ever on guard and unwilling to let anybody in, especially not a foreign painter, no matter how prominent her grandson assures her that he may be, proves delightfully impervious to analysis. While the painter imagines himself dissecting her soul, it is she who conducts the true inquisition, listening serenely as he reveals far more of himself than she ever intended to yield.

And so the drama unfolds across six sittings, each one a duel disguised as civility, while the portrait slowly but surely takes form. Not until the very end, Christie finally opens up and grants Kokoschka the keys to her inner self allowing for the portrait to become the masterpiece that is still in Matthew’s possession to this day. A memento of an English heart momentarily unveiled.  

“Dubbelpoträtt” may lack the sweeping grandeur of “Lord Nevermore” but the inimitable Pleijelan blend of whit, warmth, and curiosity all abound. Beneath its modest frame, dwells an investigation of more profound dimensions than first meets the eye. For what, in truth, is a portrait? Is it the likeness of the subject, or the confession of the artist? Is the final painting really a portrait of Agatha Christie? Or is it a portrait of Oskar Kokoschka painting Agatha Christie?

And here Pleijel strikes her most modern note. In an age intoxicated with machines that imitate human thought and creativity, she reminds us that art has never been about replication, but revelation. A machine may produce an image; only a human can err beautifully enough to make it art.

Art in all forms can be said to be a reflection of the artist. This includes the art of writing. In an interview from 2020, Pleijel confessed that her choice of exploring this legendary encounter was born from love for their arts. No one was present in the room when Christie sat for Kokoschka. No one knows what words were uttered. So Agneta Pleijel does what historians cannot. She invents. The novel is a re-imagination of the event. The conversation is what Pleijel imagines could have taken place. Or maybe even what she hopes actually transpired.

Thus, as the portrait was more about its creator than its subject, “Dubbelporträtt” becomes a story less about Agatha Christie or Oskar Kokoschka and more about Agneta Pleijel. Perhaps, she does not step into the minds of her characters. Rather, she invites them to dwell within hers. As did Kokoschka. The outcome is that most exquisite of human inventions; the fusion of creator and creation, where truth and illusion clasp hands and become what we call art.

 

BLINDNESS

Author: José Saramago
Year: 1998 (1995)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

In Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “Seams” (in the short story collection “Tales of the Bizarre” reviewed in January 2020) a man wakes to discover subtle but uncanny alterations in his world. Socks that suddenly have seams, stamps that are now round instead of square, the familiar blue ink in his pen inexplicably replaced by brown. Socks aren’t supposed to have seams, are they? These small deviations from the expected unravel his sense of stability. He is bewildered, but those around him find nothing unusual. For them, round stamps and brown ink are the natural order of things. Through these quiet distortions, Tokarczuk exposes how fragile the category of “normality” really is, how dependent our sanity and social coherence are on countless unnoticed details that we assume to be permanent. If such trivial shifts can destabilise us, how deep are our roots in what we call reality? How thin is the membrane separating order from chaos?

José Saramago’s “Blindheten” (“Blindness”) poses this question on a catastrophic scale. Whereas Tokarczuk’s protagonist falters before the dissonance of socks and stamps, Saramago strips his characters of sight altogether, and with it, the entire apparatus of modern life. The sudden epidemic of blindness tears through an unnamed city, dissolving the seams that hold civilisation together. Law, government, decency, even the simplest routines of cleanliness or trust collapse within days. If Tokarczuk reveals the precariousness of order in miniature, Saramago demonstrates its total implosion. Civilisation, it seems, is not an edifice of stone but a scaffolding of habits, agreements, and illusions that threatens to collapse at the slightest tremor.

Among the many who stumble through the blindness, two figures form the novel’s most striking contrast. As all other characters they remain nameless: the doctor’s wife and the girl with the sunglasses. They appear at first as opposites. The doctor’s wife embodies middle-class respectability, a figure of family stability and conventional decency. The girl with the sunglasses, a part-time sex worker (not by financial necessity but by sexual promiscuity) belongs to the margins, shielding herself from social stigma behind her tinted lenses. Yet in the moment of disaster, their paths converge, and in their juxtaposition Saramago reveals two poles of human response to catastrophe: one grounded in responsibility and altruism, the other in intimacy and rediscovered dignity.

SPOILER ALERT

The doctor’s wife, uniquely spared from blindness, steps out of her prominent husband’s shadow and becomes the group’s reluctant leader. Her immunity to blindness is never explained. It is allegorical, a reminder that to see is not only to perceive but to bear responsibility. She becomes a kind of inverted panopticon. In Foucault’s famous image, the one who sees from the central tower exerts power over the many who are seen. Yet here, the doctor’s wife does not discipline but suffers. Her vision is a burden. She alone must clean the excrement-covered ward, lead the group through chaos, bury the dead, and carry the memory of all she witnesses. Seeing, for her, is not empowerment but an ethical wound, an obligation to act when others cannot. For this reason, she keeps her ability a secret from the others.

The girl with the sunglasses undergoes a transformation of another sort. Stripped of the markers of her profession, she is no longer defined by society’s hypocrisy. Her beauty, once a commodity, becomes irrelevant; her sunglasses, formerly a mask against judgment, lose their function in a world where no one sees. In their place emerges a person of compassion and tenderness. She nurses the old man with the black eyepatch with a love that is untainted by transaction, discovering an intimacy that had eluded her in her previous life. If the doctor’s wife embodies the pain of clarity, the girl with the sunglasses embodies the possibility of moral vision even within blindness.

Together, they lay bare the thinness of the veneer that Thomas Hobbes diagnosed centuries earlier. In “Leviathan” (reviewed in April 2022) Hobbes warned that without strong institutions, life reverts to a brutish war of all against all. Saramago stages this collapse with merciless precision. Within days, the quarantine asylum devolves into violence, hoarding, and sexual exploitation. Food becomes currency, women are traded like rations, cruelty and cowardice reign. Western civilisation, so confident in its legal codes and humanitarian principles, is revealed as the emperor’s new clothes. It rests not on unshakable foundations but on such invisible seams as agreements, routines, shared perceptions, and as Hobbes would argue, the fear of repercussions. Once sight is lost, the seams disintegrate.

And yet, the novel resists cynicism. For even within this Hobbesian nightmare, solidarity flickers. The doctor’s wife shoulders responsibility without succumbing to domination. The girl with the sunglasses discovers dignity in love rather than passion. Together, they sketch the possibility of a different humanity: one not guaranteed, but latent beneath the collapse. Saramago suggests that civilisation’s scaffolding may be fragile, but within the rubble there are still gestures of recognition and care that refuse to be vanquished.

The ending offers no easy redemption. Sight returns arbitrarily, just as it was lost. We may assume that civilisation will be rebuilt. The city remains there. But whether it will be less blind than before remains doubtful. The doctor’s wife, still sighted, has seen too much to trust in renewal. The girl with the sunglasses, by contrast, carries the fragile hope that love discovered in blindness might persist into sight. Between them, they frame the paradox of the human condition: responsibility and compassion, burden and intimacy, clarity and fragility.

Saramago’s novel may be a provocative accusation against the weakness and baseness of man, but it is without a doubt a triumph for literature. His prose flows like an unbroken current, lyrical, ironic, and humane, where his long sentences carry profound truths, while his short ones either prick or punch in just the right spot as is necessary. And it seems that when one looks at the world of today, one may feel a little like Tokarczuk’s protagonist wondering about abnormal seams. We used to berate liars, didn’t we? Fascism used to be a bad thing, didn’t it? One would be forgiven for entertaining the idea that in order to open certain minds to the truth, they first need to be gently pricked… or in some cases, forcefully punched.

THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

Author: Salman Rushdie
Year: 1999
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

Not long ago I found myself in a conversation with a friend on the subject of Salman Rushdie. She confessed with the charming candour which is the privilege of the truly well-read, that although she had cultivated a respectable level of acquaintance with post-colonial literature, she had not as much as brushed against a single page of Rushdie’s writing. My own first encounter with the author’s name was in 1989 when ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, a bitter old fart with a singularly unamused temperament, issued a fatwa, a vengeful prize on Rushdie’s head, thinly veiled as a religious obligation.

I was then thirteen years old and recall* that Sweden’s indignation, apart from condemning the cleric’s barbarous decree, was triggered by the meek response by the Swedish Academy, which is the college of intellectuals who, among other duties, elect the yearly Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Some years later, at the questionable intellectual maturity expected from an Upper Secondary School student, I finally came across the book that had vexed the ayatollah to the point where he reduced himself to a petulant child: The Satanic Verses. I bought it, read it, and I loved it.

Those acquainted with my reading habits, will be aware that I am a most unfaithful reader. Even with the authors I profess to adore, I rarely commit to more than one or two titles before curiosity of new ideas and new minds fling me onto the hunting path for the next name. Rushdie, however, is one of the rare exceptions of writers that I gladly read again and again. After conversing with my friend on the subject, I was overcome by a craving for Rushdie’s writing. I reached for “Marken under hennes fötter” (“The Ground Beneath her Feet”) which had been collecting dust in by bookcase long enough and merely a few pages in concluded, that it was bound to meet with all of my expectations.

Rushdie is one of the most erudite writers in the post-war era who comfortably commands the particulars of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, music, literature, and art among many other fields. To imbibe his prose is to experience that rare sensation of learning while one admires, and admiring while one rejoices. Not merely a man of infinite knowledge, but equally importantly of a magical ability to craft his characters and tell his story.

“Marken under hennes fötter” dramatises the instability of identity in a postcolonial world where the ground beneath the self is perpetually shifting. Through the intertwined lives of the introvert artist Ormus Cama, the extrovert diva Vina Apsara, and the melancholic observer Rai, the novel stages how colonial histories and global cultural flows fracture, hybridise, and creolise personal identities.

Ormus Cama embodies the diasporic artist who cannot be contained by national or cultural boundaries. Born in Bombay yet perpetually oriented toward elsewhere, he channels songs from a parallel world, suggesting that his creativity itself is transnational and borderless. His identity is never rooted in one cultural context but always fluid and in motion, making him emblematic of the postcolonial subject who finds both possibility and alienation in cosmopolitanism.

Vina Apsara is constructed as both a person and a mythic icon. Her fame and sexual charisma transform her into a commodity of global culture, consumed through images and stories. For her, identity is a performance staged across multiple audiences, from India across Europe to the Americas, each demanding a different version of her. She epitomises the postcolonial predicament of being seen not as a coherent self but as a projection of the desires of others, whether they stem from colonial fantasies, mythic archetypes, or pedestrian clickbait journalism.

Rai, the narrator-photographer, wrestles with identity through mediation. As a Parsi in India and later as an exile in the West, he experiences marginality and unbelonging, which he manages by constructing narratives and images. His photographs reveal that identity in the postcolonial context is always framed, never raw, captured through lenses shaped by history, politics, and personal longing, personalised, although not necessarily internalised.

Together, these three figures show that in Rushdie’s postcolonial universe, identity is not essence but fabrication: a shifting collage of myths, histories, and performances, precariously balanced on unstable ground. Rushdie’s depiction of fluid, fabricated identities resonates with Anthony Giddens’ account of identity in late modernity. For Giddens, the self is no longer grounded in tradition but must be “reflexively” constructed through ongoing choices, narratives, and relationships. Similarly, Rushdie’s characters live without essentialist anchors, improvising selves from fractured cultural inheritances and unstable geographies. Where Giddens emphasizes the individual’s responsibility to “keep a coherent story going,” Rushdie complicates this with myth and tragedy, suggesting that personal identity, though fabricated, is also subject to forces—earthquakes, media spectacles, colonial legacies—that resist individual control.

By bowing to Rushdie’s compelling argument and acknowledging the malleability of the terrain wherein we so desperately try to set our roots and feign stability, we must realise that the ground is moving not only under her feet, but also under our own.

It is my humble proposition, that the sole reason that the Nobel Prize in Literature has not yet found its way into Salman Rushdie’s prize cabinet, which already contains the Booker Prize, The PEN Golden Award, The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, several honorary doctorates, and a knighthood, is the Swedish Academy’s embarrassing history with the author. It is not unreasonable to suspect, that bestowing this honour on him now would bring back to the limelight the obeisance to the Iranian ayatollah as unbecoming to men of taste as their silence was to men of wit. The Academy’s recent scandals surely reinforce their hesitation. How much more splendid then, to seize the occasion to right an unfortunate wrong and to save itself from the eternal disgrace of having ignored one of the finest writers of our age.

 

* I furthermore recall Margaret Thatcher saying in an interview that she did not even find the book particularly well-written.