THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Author: Margaret Atwood
Year: 2019 (1985)
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish (translator Maria Ekman)

 ”Gott hätte keine Welt geschaffen, wenn sie nicht unter allen möglichen die beste wäre” wrote German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his work on good and evil (”Théodicée” 1710). He argued that in every single moment, by the grace of God, we live in the best world possible at that particular moment.  This idea takes into account death, disease, natural disasters, and the fact that the universe is in constant flux and that our sun is expected to expand into a red giant in five billion years swallowing planet Earth in the process. But Leibniz also tries to fit in war, oppression, crime, and other manufactured forms of suffering caused by human malevolence and imperfection. Leibniz argues that in an interconnected reality where each phenomenon is caused by and gives cause to other phenomena, the removal of a particular torment would generate a ripple effect throughout the system provoking more severe torments elsewhere in the world. In economic terms, Leibnitz would consider the world to operate at Pareto Efficiency.

Even though Leibniz has been thoroughly taken to task by other thinkers in the centuries after the publication of his book, an ocean of dystopian literature seems to at least partially vindicate him. All things considered, despite its apparent weaknesses and horrors (historic and present), the world could be a lot worse.

The history of fiction teaches us that there are numerous ways that this world can go down the tubes: Abuse of technology, war, environmental destruction, fascism, communism, or religious fundamentalism, to mention only a few. One example of the latter, with a super-sized side order of fascism, is Margaret Atwood’s ”Tjänarinnans berättelse” (”The Handmaid’s Tale”).

Atwood’s dystopian society is named “Gilead”, a totalitarian breakaway region of the formerly powerful United States of America in a not so distant future. The community is controlled by strict adherence to a highly arbitrary reading of the Bible where bits and pieces have been selected and amplified to support the regime, whereas most of the New Testament which preaches love, forgiveness, and communion, has been dispatched into oblivion. Due to pollution, fertility is critically low and large patches of Earth are uninhabitable. The citizens of Gilead adhere to a strict hierarchy where men rule in the capacity of Commanders through a highly effective and virtually omnipresent security police called the Eyes. The highest honour bestowed upon a woman is to become a Wife of one of the high ranking officials in the regime. Econowives are the spouses of less influential male citizens. Marthas are female servants and Handmaids are fertile women who, for any more or less random reason, are considered too sinful to be suitable as wives and are therefore distributed among the childless elites as babymakers.  Escape is unthinkable, movement between the classes only possible in one direction: downward. Although Handmaids formally outrank Marthas, most Marthas frown upon the sexually exposed Handmaids and many a Handmaid would much prefer to count among the Marthas. Still, as fertility is rare, no fertile woman can be sacrificed to cook, clean, and serve tea for her own convenience.

The story is told by the handmaid Offred; a woman with modern values and ideals who, like everybody else, is forced into submission by the rulers of Gilead. Being deemed fertile, she is deposited in the household of one of the most influential Commanders. Offred manages to record her thoughts and observations in a diary which is preserved for posterity. In fact, the final chapter recounts an academic conference where the conclusions of the then newly uncovered ancient diary are presented to a community of researchers some 200 years after the events described in the book.

There are a few symbolic features well worth considering in Atwood's novel. For starters, it is no coincidence that the story is set in what is today the state of Massachusetts. This is the most liberal state in the entire Union where more than 1/3 of the voters identify as liberal and where the Democratic Party has a crushing advantage over the GOP and other totalitarian and reactionary movements. It is one of the most urbanised states with the best-educated population. I believe that Atwood wants to warn us against complacency. If it can happen in a place like Massachusetts, it can happen literally anywhere.

In many ways, “Tjänarinnans berättelse” is a feminist book. The male dominance manifests itself long before the regime rolls out the full array of oppressive restrictions. Without notice, all women’s bank accounts are closed and the balance transferred to their husbands or male relatives. They are no longer allowed to work or own property. Women are barred from reading and studying and may not enter public space without male supervision. All this is introduced long before the institutions of the old society are dissolved and replaced with the new hierarchy and chain of command. This is another reminder from Atwood that the forces that allow this kind of upheaval are at all times dormant in our society, even today. When Offred’s (before she was renamed and handed to the Commander) bank account is closed and she informs her husband Luke, he responds by saying that things will be alright and that from now on he will simply have to pay for them both. As if this was a minor inconvenience. Despite his strongly liberal and progressive views, Luke’s patriarchal essence clouds his judgment and he becomes a symbol of the latent chauvinist that dwells in all men. Had it been the other way around, and that men were suddenly dependent on their female spouses and relatives, his reaction, supposedly, would have been much different.

But “Tjänarinnans berättelse” is much more than a critique of religious fundamentalism and the fascist theocracies that commonly follow in its wake. Atwood takes the opportunity to critique all behaviours that undermine the liberal society. Offred often brings up memories of her intellectual feminist mother before the creation of Gilead. At one point she is reminded of a demonstration her mother had organised where the activists burned pornography in the name of female emancipation. Atwood wants to warn us against using fascist techniques to reach seemingly noble goals. After all, fascists, blinded by hatred and ignorance, also believe that their causes are just. The ends, Atwood seems to say, do not justify the means. On the contrary, the means tell us a lot about the ends. And about us.

There is a lot to unpack in this novel but I would like to mention only one more observation, which is to a degree valid for most dystopias in literature and popular culture. In Gilead, no one seems to be happy. Not even the Commanders who organised the system and are watching over it, enjoy it. Everyone is miserable. And that is probably the scariest thing of all. In the fascist, illiberal, intolerant, non-democratic society that more and more people seem to idealise, no one is happy.

For the last five to ten years, Margaret Atwood is routinely mentioned among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. After having read “Tjänarinnans berättelse”, which to be fair is the only title I have read by this author, I am not unreservedly supporting her candidacy. Atwood is, no doubt, a terrific writer but compared to some of the recent masters of the craft unto whom this honour has been bestowed in the last decades, and also to some unto whom it has not, I am not convinced that Atwood quite qualifies. I was expecting linguistic fireworks á la Saramago or Naipaul, startling brainteasers and unexpected insights á la Tokarczuk, or profound psychological or sociological analyses á la Lessing but found none of that. What “Tjänarinnans berättelse” is, is a well written, agreeable, and highly urgent novel which, other than an open mind, attention to detail, and average emphatic skills, requires little from the reader to drive the message home: Our world may not be the best of all possible worlds but every day, we risk treading on the road to a dramatically worse one.

 

THE DINOSAUR HUNTERS

 Author: Deborah Cadbury
Year: 2002 (2000)
Publisher: Historiska Media
Language: Swedish (translator Ulf Irheden)

From time to time, I have reason to contemplate the magnitude of progress lost to humanity on the altar of individual ambition and trivial politics. How many geniuses have been obliterated by lesser minds due to vanity and power struggle? How many discoveries, inventions, and ideas were smothered by the petty obstruction by the inferior? In my own professional life, I have myself fallen victim to a psychopath who was so absorbed by power that she disregarded results, and whose relentless obstruction of her colleagues’ efforts, which threatened to expose her own inadequacy, ultimately contributed to the company paying a crushing regulatory fee. In the absence of the competence to construct, small people overcompensate by their ability to destroy.

I am quite sure that this observation was not the purpose of Deborah Cadbury’s book “Dinosauriejägarna” (“The Dinosaur Hunters”) but the fate of one of the greatest pioneers in geological research, Dr Gideon Mantell, at the hands of the less prolific but infinitely more conniving Sir Richard Owen is a woeful tale indeed. The greater of the two spent all his life on the brink of bankruptcy and intense family misfortune, whereas the lesser one dined with dukes and princes and was the poster boy of a scientific discipline he had made but a few meaningful contributions to.

In general, Cadbury’s work accounts for the first steps of true palaeontological research where the scientists of the time began to seriously challenge the biblical interpretation of the history of our planet and allowed themselves to follow the facts. It must have been a marvellous but scary time where everything that had for so long been accepted as a fact was suddenly overthrown in favour of a much more complex, and much less comforting, world order. Everything that used to be part of a divine plan and God’s loving provision for the species He had created in his own image, was unmasked as the result of a disinterested and purposeless natural process.

In “Dinosauriejägarna” we get acquainted with a parade of fascinating individuals. The already mentioned Gideon Mantell who proved that giant reptiles had lived on land and in the sea in the Mesozic; Sir Richard Owen who coined the term Dinosauria and spent most of his time and energy scheming against his competitors and on some occasions even stealing their work; Mary Anning who single-handedly found and extracted hundreds if not thousands of prehistoric fossils from the cliffs in Dorset; William Buckland who offered the first attempt at a complete description of a named dinosaur; Sir Charles Lyell, who could demonstrate that the forces that brought about the Earth as we know it, are still in motion and are still transforming our current world; and Georgie Cuvier who pioneered comparative anatomy and classification principles. Cadbury describes the fierce battle between the church and academia and also the valiant efforts by several notable scientists, primarily Buckland, to reconcile the two, with particular emphasis on the Deluge and Noah’s Ark.

Cadbury writes in a vivid and accessible way and reading the book was almost like following a tv-show. The new discoveries are presented one by one in an inspiring and exciting way and it is difficult to put the book away. The writer also manages to make the main characters of this 19th-century drama very human and their personalities and relationships are well accounted for.

Even still, Cadbury’s book, as interesting as it is, should have been titled “The First British Dinosaur Hunters”. Her story centres around the scientific discoveries, and much of the scientific squabble, in Britain in the first half of the 19^th century. The ground-breaking revelations of French, American, and German palaeontologists and geologists are completely omitted or mentioned only in passing. The global authority at the break of the dino-hunting era, the Frenchman George Cuviers, is introduced merely as a reference point for British research. When I first began to read the book, I thought it a matter of course that Gideon Mantell’s breakthrough would be followed-up by Hermann von Meyer’s discovery of the Archaeopteryx in Germany and the multitude of dinosaur bones dug up and classified by Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope during the so-called Bone Wars some decades later in America. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Mantell, none of the dino hunters whose stories Cadbury tells found any dinosaurs of their own. The true dinosaur hunter of the era was Mary Anning, and to some extent Gideon Mantell.

The greatest value of “Dinosauriejägarna” to a modern reader, however, is the detailed account of the resistance from the Anglican Church and the length to which serious academia went in order to preserve the belief of the biblical myth of a creation, and the resources that went into the efforts to make sense of the mounting evidence of evolution from a conservative Christian perspective. For the creationists out there, who think that they are discovering something new in Scripture and who think that it is acceptable to disregard evidence in favour of religious zeal, it might be a useful lesson in humility (something Christians supposedly should know a lot about, but sadly rarely practice) to know that infinitely more intelligent and resourceful Christians than they, with an equally acute interest in preserving the public faith in the word of the Genesis, ultimately had to capitulate in the face of scientific evidence. God didn’t create the universe for us to ignore.

 I would like to dedicate my final note to the translation. Ulf Irheden is a somewhat established translator of books on history, particularly the world wars, into Swedish. He has also written a fairly favourably received biography on Franz  Joseph, the legendary ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His Swedish take on “Dinosauriehjägarna” is airy, vivacious, and absorbing, and I appreciate that some of the terminology must have been challenging to a translator who is more used to writing about kings and battles than about bones and coprolites.  If it had not been for a number of rather basic mistakes, I would have had no hesitations to shower accolade over the Swedish issue of Cadbury’s book. Unfortunately, the mistakes are more than a few and of such obvious banality that I cannot quite shake the feeling that the book was to some degree translated in a rush or with wavering interest.

Those who know me are aware of my love for the fauna of the Mesozoic and I do not expect any of the readers of these words to share my passion for fossilised cadavers. Still, I cordially invite those of you who are curious about the scientific frontiers of geology and biology in the mid-1800s, to acquaint yourself with Deborah Cadbury’s introduction to British dino-mania and its regrettable delay caused by mediocrity’s resistance to genius. 

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Author: Virginia Woolf
Year: 2006 (1927)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translators IngaLisa Munck and Sonja Bergvall)

When our minds endeavour to grapple with the vastness of the universe, they often confine themselves to matter. Infinite matter. Infinite space. Infinite time, however, is assumed. Before there was something, there must have been nothing. But nothing as such, as the presocratic thinker Parmenides argued, cannot exist, since if it did, nothing would be something which is self-contradictory. Existence itself, therefore, is the essential something. There is no before and no after. There is just isness.

But if there is no before and no after, is there time at all? If there is, it must be static. It always was, and always will be. Or more accurately: it just is. Yet we still experience time. We can even measure it. We inarguably move in relation to time. It should follow then that it is matter that moves through time. Are you and I travellers through time as well as space? In a universe of expanding entropy, do we journey into increasing confusion and disorder? That is then, the fate of existence to be that something which is subject to time. Such as life.

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel “Mot fyren” (”To the Lighthouse”) seems to explore the concepts of mankind as a traveller through time by means of a narrative of an imagined journey: the short boat ride from a summer house to a nearby island lighthouse.  Little James Ramsay, the youngest of a litter of eight,  has no higher desire than to visit the lighthouse, but every day the infamous Scottish weather prevents him and his family from going. Mrs Ramsay, a caring mother and housewife always eager to safeguard the emotional harmony of those around her, consoles the boy and gives him hope. Maybe tomorrow the weather will improve. Surely tomorrow they will be able to go. James’s father, Professor Ramsay, is less sentimental. Not only is he vocal about his pessimism about their ever being able to go to the lighthouse, he moreover questions the value of going there and derides his wife and son for being so emotionally attached to the idea. He is more preoccupied with his own philosophical musings and his lack of confidence in his intellectual ability and legacy as a philosopher. In a famous passage, he compares wisdom to the alphabet and concludes that most people barely manage to cover the first few letters. In his own judgment, he has come as far as Q but he also realises that he will never master R. Others, however, will or indeed already have. In one scene, his pride and shame are captured by two letters of the alphabet.  

Apart from the Ramsays, there are a handful of other guests in the summer house, each of which plays their role. Both Mrs Ramsay and Professor Ramsay have their admirers. The young artist Lily Briscoe is Mrs Ramsay’s fan and the philosophy student Charles Tanley is Professor Ramsay’s. How Woolf portrays these persons in terms of their emotional response to their respective objects of affection and to each other is quite revealing. Together, this quartet fights a tempered and subdued war between the sexes seething with male indignation over female ambition and enterprise.

The book is divided into three sections: the Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. Woolf in her diary calls it “two blocks connected by a corridor”. The first and the last part each describe one day in the life of the Ramsays. The middle part, which is the shortest, covers ten years. Woolf seems to argue that time is an illusion and that events such as war, death, or our planet’s revolution around the sun, can easily be overshadowed by the idea of a boat ride to a lighthouse. There is no great revelation to Virginia Woolf.”Instead, there were little daily miracles. Illuminations. Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”  Or, if one will, the death of a moth trapped between two panes of window glass.

The perspective in the first and third sections is fleeting. The reader is hurled from mind to mind, sometimes mid-paragraph. The internal to external dialogue ratio is probably 10 to 1. Just like the lighthouse on the island, to which the Ramsay party never seems to arrive, which appears constantly distant and isolated, so does each individual float around the summer house like a detached particle among many, their reality affected by but independent from the other individuals around them.

In my own research many years ago, I proposed a person’s navigation through social reality to be studied on three interlocking levels:  factual reality, communicated reality, and construed reality. Based on the concepts of exchange and reciprocity most poignantly developed by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in the 1920s, I proposed that reality (not to be confused with constructions such as “fact” or “truth”) is the result of layered inter-human relationships. Woolf, I believe, is pursuing a similar line of thought allowing the reality at the summer house to be a cross-section of the collective minds present there. The childish expectation that the weather might improve thus becomes an integral part of the pessimistic scorn for such a forlorn promise. Lily Briscoe’s observations about the beauty of Mrs Ramsay contrasts Charles Tansley’s submissive idolisation of Professor Ramsay’s greatness as a thinker. A lingering uncertainty pertains, however, to the authenticity of these perspectives. How genuine or hollow are they? How aware are the characters of their own mind? How much is fact, communication, and construal respectively?    

A surprising turnaround awaits in the middle section, ”Time Passes”. The perspective no longer jumps between individuals but rather between inanimate and nameless witnesses. Woolf reinforces the non-identity of the narrator. She writes ”If someone had listened in the rooms on the upper floor of the empty house (but there was no one there that could listen) …” whereby she tosses us into the cosmos of the all-seeing, above and beyond the understanding of the individual observer from the first section of the book. ”Time Passes” is a strictly chronological account of events. Of life and death. Of turmoil, storms, war, and destruction. First world war begins and ends. A new order is established.

In the last part of the book we are back at the summer house where the Ramsays, decimated by the war, again plan a boat ride to the lighthouse on the island. They have all changed. Time has changed them as they have travelled through it. But the lighthouse remains. And so does the party’s careful eye on the weather forecasts. The changes seem superficial. At the core, reality has remained unscathed. “Mrs Ramsay saying life stand still here.” Not time. Life!

There is a lot to unpack in “Mot fyren”. It is one of those books which I would appreciate some help to understand. I am particularly interested in the Lily Briscoe-character whom I understand to be a symbol of feminism despite her timid personality. Her choice to paint a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and James instead of the stunning ocean landscape like I imagine any other artist would. I would also love to hear your interpretation of James’s and Cam’s pact against Professor Ramsay in the final part of the book.

The novel is a challenge to read but chances are it will never leave you once you have taken the time to submerge yourself in it. Hardly a page-turner, the plot is everything but exciting. Don’t look for quick action. Don’t look for snappy dialogue. None of that will be found in ”Mot fyren”. What you will find, is an introspective microcosm of humanity, and an analysis of reality as a function of time and mankind. Looking at it this way, it is not half-bad, is it?

 

US OR THEM

Author: Christina Falck
Year: 2014
Publisher: Sahlgrens Förlag
Language: Swedish

One should think that as a Swede with an above-average interest in history, I should be able to demonstrate passable knowledge about the events which brought liberty and independence to my country’s closest neighbour and former Swedish ‘Eastern half of the realm’, but which also plunged it into a four-month-long civil war. Truth be told, I suspect that most Swedes could not even tell the difference between the Civil War (1918) and the Winter War (1939-1940).

I am therefore deeply grateful for Christina Falck’s decision to write, and now defunct Sahlgren Förlag’s decision to publish “Vi eller de” (not available in English but a simple translation would be “Us or Them”).

This is a heart-warming story about the Björks, a family of landowning farmers in southern Finland, and about how their world was hurled into chaos following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the long-anticipated Finnish independence, and the disastrous civil war between the conservatives (the Whites) and the communists (the Reds) that followed. It was to be a tumultuous time. Celebration turned into despair, loyalty to treason, hope to anguish. As death and violence slowly crept up on the Björks, they realised that their farm may not be spared and that people they thought they could trust may be the ones who would draw destruction and mayhem upon them.

But there was also a great deal of love, forgiveness, and understanding. For example, the unbridled love into which the Björk family included their two foster siblings. As I progressed through the book and saw the circumstances becoming harsher and the class struggle more and more pronounced, I was waiting for the Björks to begin to question the loyalty of their foster sister who, by birth, would be looked upon as more akin to the Reds than to the Whites. I waited in vain.

The novel is based on the preserved collection of letters that Christina Falck’s grandparents wrote each other during the conflict and which are still in the author’s possession. Some excerpts appear in the book. To me, that adds an exceptional dimension to the reading experience. This powerful connection to the past, to the real men and women of flesh and blood who helped shape the world that we are but temporary stewards of, allows me to almost smell the earth, feel the grass, and hear the voices of yore. Letters like those handed down to the author, are the closest that we will ever come to a time capsule.

By necessity, given the source material, the main protagonists will be best known to the author and therefore be most richly painted. The depictions of Astrid and Edvard are beautifully crafted. Astrid’s sister Ellinor and her brothers are also easy to establish an emotional bond with. Anneli, the foster sister, is actually the one character that I feel I would want to know more about. I found the love story between her and the farm hand, Hugo, a bit surprising and it would have helped me to grasp it if I had understood Anneli better. I could easily accept that Hugo was interested in Anneli, but I did not immediately expect his feelings to be answered.

Historically, the novel seems to check out very well. It is all there: The White Guards, the Jägar rangers, the detention camps, the sketchy news reports, the concerns of the Swedish speaking minority, the disappointment with the Swedish government’s lukewarm support.  

As landowners, the Björks sympathised with the Whites. One of the sons even went to Germany to obtain military training as a ranger to fight against the Russian oppression. Still, the author is careful to put her own family loyalty aside and paint a fair and emotional picture of the Red side as well. The misery of the poor, the lack of hope, the understandable anger and resentment, and the inner struggle between the willingness to fight for freedom and the disgust at the expectations to commit atrocities as part of that fight. It is a fair and warm portrayal of individuals, with all the weaknesses and strengths of the human heart and soul, on both sides of a conflict that ended up claiming almost 40,000 Finnish lives.  

This makes the title, “Vi eller de”, a bit provocative. Although politicians, generals, and historians do their best to solidify the boundary between the Reds and the Whites, human beings are not so easily compartmentalised. The battlefronts are, as always, blurred by memories, emotions, ideas, ambitions, and parallel conflicts. In the end, there is no us and them. There is only a web of destinies more or less closely intertwined.

 “Vi eller de” is a highly accessible read. The language is straightforward and the chronology linear. Despite the crushing topic, it is not gloomy or tormenting. On the contrary, at its core, the book is marked by light and hope. The characters are richly painted and it is easy to get to know them and to care for them. Falck lets us inside the heads of several people long gone and the perspectives are varied, credible, and stringent. It is all very well put together and makes for a delightful reading experience.

I recommend this book to anybody who likes to read about family ties, love, friendship, loyalty, and honour, but also to all Swedes out there who have realised it is about time they took an interest in the 20th-century history of our Finnish neighbours.

My copy, signed by the author.

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

 Author: Doris Lessing
Year: 2007 (1962)
Publisher: Bokförlaget Forum
Language: Swedish (translator Mårten Edlund)

 ”That epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. This is how the Swedish Academy characterised Doris Lessing’s authorship when they announced her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, it seems to provide valuable clues as to how to read Lessing, not the least her 1962 novel “Den Femte Sanningen” (“The Golden Notebook”).

For what is “the female experience”? The experience of what? And what is a “divided civilisation” contrary to the more commonly used “divided society”?

At the core of the novel is Anna, a writer who has had significant success with her first novel but has experienced writer’s block ever since, and her best friend Molly, a moderately successful actress. We follow Anna by her and Molly’s interaction with each other and people in their vicinity through sections of the book titled ”Free Women”, as well as through the notes that Anna makes in her four notebooks.

What do Anna and Molly talk about? What does Anna write about in her notebooks? Men! Ex-husbands; former, current, and future lovers; sons; film producers, directors, editors, and publishers; and Joseph Stalin. Even the introduction of Molly’s ex-husband’s new wife, Marion, turns out to be but a proxy for women’s relationship with men. When Molly and Anna speak about Marion, they really speak about Richard.

“... women’s emotions are still completely adapted to a society that no longer exists. My deepest emotions, my true emotions, are governed by my relation to a man.”*

The only meaningful conversation that Molly and Anna ever have about someone who is not a man is when they speak about the therapist whom they both see and who incidentally happens to be a woman: Mother Sugar.

The widely known Bechdel test is a measure of how well-represented women are in literature. The title passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something else than a man. If it doesn’t, the proposition is that it reaffirms established patriarchal structures. “The Golden Notebook” fails the Bechdel test in a spectacular way yet still manages to be a decisively feministic literary testament. It would be easy to dismiss it as dated and irrelevant but this would be a mistake.

What Doris Lessing does in the book is to give women voice and agency in a world, which is not yet theirs. It is a newly liberated woman’s perspective on what used to be a man’s world. And truth be told, it is not particularly flattering. Every man that Anna comes across, every single one, is flimsy, insecure, pompous, conceited, and needy to a degree bordering on farcical. Anna invites them all into her life, and into her bed, for the only purpose of saving their faces. It is a world of suppressed emotions and opinions, of empty pleasantries, of failed men, and women whose mission it seems to be to clean up after them and make them feel better about themselves. Every act of love or trust is an illusion. Every moment is a tussle. Every word an accusation. Anna is always on guard, never relaxed, and she accepts this as normality.

“We hated each other but the whole atmosphere was rather cosy.”*

The four notebooks form a portal into an artificially divided mentality. Anna makes vain efforts to compartmentalise her life as if certain aspects of it had no bearing on the rest. Her successful novel was based on her experiences from Africa so her memories from Africa and everything connected with the novel and money end up in the black notebook. Even though Anna spent most of her time in Africa among fellow communists and much of her political ideology must have been formed in that setting, she detaches all things political from the rest of her persona and places them in the red notebook which she dedicates to her political activity as a communist but also to her hesitations, disillusions, and disappointments particularly with the era of Stalinism. Again poorly isolated from the others, is Anna’s thinly veiled autobiography in the yellow notebook where she more or less consciously writes a diary in the third person under the guise of a draft to her next novel. Finally, there is the blue notebook which contains Anna’s futile attempts at an objective account of herself and her life based on her therapy sessions with Mother Sugar, but which Anna concedes is the least accurate of her notebooks and which basically boils down to a revolt against psychotherapy.

The notebooks become a manifestation of Anna’s forcibly split view of herself which eventually grows into a split personality. Anna even speaks of her different Selves at one point. We are used to the question “Who am I?” but Anna begins to think in terms of “Which I am I right now?”. By dividing up her life in arbitrary categories, Anna forces herself to choose which Self to apply in any given situation in something that resembles self-induced schizophrenia. The notebooks are nothing but a mockery of how we humans see each other and how we tend to label each other as “that writer” or “that communist”. If we apply this compartmentalisation to ourselves, we become aware of how inadequate and laughable it really is. This insight marks the threshold to postmodernism. The divided civilisation that the Swedish Academy spoke of begins with the divided individual.

And that is why the fifth notebook becomes unavoidable. The golden notebook. The fifth truth.

“The Golden Notebook” is a challenging read. The layered narrative, broken chronology, and jumps between Anna’s conscious and subconscious. It requires a good understanding of politics and psychology, as well as a substantial history of self-reflection. I willingly admit that I struggled with this book. I tore my hair, I moaned in exasperation, and toiled in sweat through each of the 599 satiated pages. If this is the female experience, I bow my head in respect, regret, and deep sympathy to all my sisters out there.

*The translations into English are my own from the Swedish copy for illustration purposes only. They are not Doris Lessing’s original writing. Do not quote them in the form as presented herein!

4.50 FROM PADDINGTON

Author: Dame Agatha Christie
Year: 1991 (1957)
Publisher: Bonniers
Language: Swedish (translator Britte-Marie Bergström)

It is generally accepted that the first female detective in (English) literature was the sagacious and thrifty but nowadays largely forgotten Mrs Gladden in Andrew Forrester’s 1864 novel “The Female Detective”. Since then, several writers have introduced the world to a wealth of memorable female sleuths, agents, and heroines such as Nancy Drew, Modesty Blaise, Precious Ramotswe, and Lisbeth Salander.

One of the most notable contributions to this illustrious roster was made by the Queen of Mystery herself, Dame Agatha Christie, in the form of Miss Jane Marple across a series of short stories and twelve novels, one of which is the present “4.50 from Paddington”.

The tale opens with Mrs Elspeth McGillicuddy dozing off on a train from London to the hamlet of St Mary Mead where she is to visit her good friend, the aforementioned Miss Marple. She wakes up just in time to witness a murder take place on a passing train running in the same direction on parallel tracks. She promptly reports her observation to the authorities which launch a cursory investigation into the matter, only to conclude that Mrs McGillicuddy must have been mistaken. No dead body was found and no one had been reported missing. This might have been the end of it if it had not been for the inquisitive mind of Miss Marple’s.

I was very much surprised by the passive and subordinated role the famous detective plays in the story, however. After having concluded that Mrs McGillicuddy’s observation must have been accurate, Christie locks Miss Marple up in a rented room in a nearby village citing poor health, and dispatches the only eyewitness all the way to Sri Lanka. In their stead, the legwork is done by 32-year old math prodigy turned housekeeper; Lucy Eylesbarrow. Miss Marple returns to action toward the end of the story where she bets everything on one card when finally exposing the murderer in an all but sure-fire final confrontation.

In many ways, “4.50 from Paddington” constitutes a classical whodunit similar to so many others from the golden age of British detective fiction but there is no denying that the genre was already considered out of fashion by the time Christie wrote it. I seem to pick up on one or two indications that the writer might have been aware of this and was perhaps preparing for Miss Marple’s retirement. I get a feeling that she was experimenting with the Lucy-character and gauging the waters for a young and spirited new heroine. It would certainly explain Miss Marple’s modest participation in solving the crime. Still, as far as I have been able to discern, this novel was to be Lucy’s only appearance, whereas Miss Marple would thrive for another 19 years (the last Miss Marple mystery, “Sleeping Murders” was published in 1976, the same year Agatha Christie passed away).

Seeing as this is merely the second novel by Agatha Christie that I have ever read (the first being “Death on the Nile”, featuring Hercule Poirot, when I was seventeen) am not qualified to pass judgment on how this novel measures up to the rest of Christie’s output, or to comment on the evolution of the Miss Marple character, but I was struck by the focus and taciturnity with which Christie tells her story. My Swedish copy is a mere 209 pages. A modern crime story would be twice that long. Not because the mystery would be more complex but because of the characters. In modern writing, it seems to me, that the writer is obsessed with the private lives of the characters. Every dirty, embarrassing, troubling, and disgusting detail about the hero and the villain needs to be relished in. If Christie had followed the modern guidelines, while solving the murder mystery Miss Marple would spend half of the book trying to reconnect with her long-lost illegitimate daughter, detective-inspector Craddock would be battling his alcohol addiction and try to patch things up with his wife, and Lucy Eylesbarrow would try to seek revenge on the stern director who routinely abused her as a child at the orphanage where she grew up.

Much to my delight, none of this encumbers “4.50 from Paddington”. This is quite simply a classical, albeit slightly outdated, murder mystery.

 

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

Author: Anne Frank
Year: 1988 (1953, 1947)
Publisher: Hökerbergs
Language: Swedish (Translator Ella Wilcke)

”The Diary of a Young Girl” (”Het Achterhuis”) by Anne Frank is the authentic diary of an adolescent Jewish girl in the Netherlands from the time her family goes into hiding from the Nazis in 1942 until three days before the Gestapo raided their hiding place in 1944. And it is an overwhelming read.

Two weeks after I finished the book, I have still not managed to regain my composure. It rattled me to the core. It is a challenge not to think about what I have read and still, I am barely able to collect my thoughts and make sense of the experience.

Rendered unqualified to process Anne Frank’s diary intellectually, my emotional response is all the clearer. I feel horror, grief, and disbelief. I feel love, fear, and confusion. I feel anger. So much anger. But in this dense brew, one feeling towers head and shoulders above all others.

Shame.

Through every word and every page, shame followed me like a heavy load on my chest which sometimes made it hard to breathe and which still forces me to gasp for air when the memories force themselves to the front of my mind.

Shame came in several shapes and for different reasons.

At the beginning, the mere act of reading a young girl’s diary made me uncomfortable. This is, after all, a diary of a regular teenage girl living under highly irregular conditions. Anne Frank wrote about everyday things such as her favourite books and music, her friends and love interests, about which subjects in school she liked and disliked. I was reading the thoughts of a girl who made every effort to keep her diary secret to people around her (in the entry of the 21 September 1942 Anne writes expressively about how she had to physically protect her diary from the prying eyes of one of the other fugitives cooped up in the hiding place).

As she got older, her choice of topics developed. Being stuck in a confined space without access to classmates, friends, cousins, games, movies, sporting events, and concerts, Anne became introspective and resorted to writing about her crowded miniature world. She entrusted every secret, sensitive, and sometimes embarrassing detail to her beloved diary (or “Kitty” as she called it) and as a reader I was constantly reminded that I was an intruder in a supremely intelligent and impressionable young woman’s most private sphere.

I also felt shame about not having read this monumental document much earlier. In secondary school at the latest. For a person who prides himself on being reasonably informed on the Second World War, not having read Anne Frank’s diary is an unforgivable educational lacuna. History may have been made by Hitler, Churchill, and Truman, but history was suffered by Anne Frank and her family and millions of others like her. Their experiences constitute the basis of our knowledge about the era. They are the ones who lived and died in the midst of the world created for them. If one does not know their story, one knows nothing.  

Still, most of all I felt shame for mankind. For the scum who orchestrated the Holocaust, for the many who remained silent and allowed it to happen, and for the measly waste of a person who betrayed Anne Frank along with all the others in the yard house. How brutal, barbarous, simpleminded, and savage does a species have to be to make up an imaginary divide between people and use it as an excuse to unleash mayhem, torment, and misery on them for no other reason than that they can? What a bankrupt people we are, if our own satisfaction and self-worth require the oppression and agony of another? How lowly does one have to be, if one cannot stand on one’s own two legs but has to support oneself on the mutilated bodies of others?

None of Anne Frank’s despair, hope, fears, or confusion was her own choice. She was forced into hiding, forced to flee like a hunted animal from men who did not know her but judged her for her background. How can I not feel ashamed on behalf of humanity for this?

Having said that, dignity can still be restored.

On the 29^th of March 1944, Anne wrote in her diary that Mr Bolkestein of the Dutch exiled government had encouraged the citizens of occupied Netherlands to preserve all written material from the war and announced that an archive of testimonies was to be created once peace was restored. Anne Frank immediately began to plan for the publication of her diary and even gave it the title “Het Achterhuise” under which it was later published in its original Dutch. Suddenly, the shame of reading her words was remedied. I realised that by reading her book, I was granting her wish. She wanted me to do it. What joy! What relief!

The second source of shame has also been addressed. Admittedly far too late, but I did end up reading the book in the end. Maybe I needed to grow into it longer than most. Maybe you would gain from reading it at a mature age, too. Be as it may, I did end up reading “The Diary of a Young Girl”, an omission had been corrected and my life became all the richer for it.

It remains to address the third source of shame for it, too, can be redeemed. The forces that time and again fling the world into chaos are rarely unopposed. But they are still frequently victorious. Their success depends less on their own strength or the weakness of the opposition and more on the silence of the masses. By remaining silent, we side with the oppressors. It is imperative that people of good will unite and take action whenever the stench of pettiness, inferiority complex, narrow-mindedness, and hatred poisons the air.

But it is not enough to detect it in others. We must all be aware that we are human, too. We are, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, specimens of the same base species that for generations has slandered, slated, and slain each other for the silliest reasons. We need to recognise and reconcile with the fact that we are different from the butchers of Amsterdam not in nature, but in our ability to allow reason to trump our instincts.

Anne Frank’s death was pointless, but I for one will do what I can to make sure that her short life was meaningful. I will not live in shame.