KALLOCAIN

Author: Karin Boye
Year: 2018 (1940)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish 

There is something tantalising about dystopias. The same way horror novels, thrillers, and ghost stories bring out our fear of other people or the supernatural, dystopias centre on our fear of society and mankind at large. Their point of departure is almost always some sort of failed state or government overreach, some variation of fundamentalism and anti-liberalism. Quite often, the dystopian world is where the collective power oppresses the individual where the individual by his or her obedience and complacency constitutes a part of the oppressing regime.

Some of these dystopias have become part of the global literary canon. “The Time Machine”, “Nineteen Eighty Four”, “Brave New World”, and even “The Handmaid’s Tale” (see my review from November 2020) have risen to shape the general public’s idea of a repugnant social order. For Swedish readers, Karin Boye’s novel “Kallocain” can easily be added to this category.

This story is told by the chemist Leo Kall who is writing his memoirs in a penal colony where he continues to work in his profession. His testimony is of a world in which every action of every citizen has been closely monitored by the authorities for a long time. However, the rulers were not satisfied. They were adamant about trying to control people’s thoughts, too, and they made substantial efforts to reach their goal. Everybody in Kall’s world is an informer. All important citizens, including scientists such as Kall, have a mandatory housekeeper whose job it is to report any anomalies in the household to the secret service (not unlike the housekeepers in undergraduate accommodation at Cambridge). Every sign is suspicious and is supposed to be reported, be it a facial tick, a microscopic delay in response or confirmation, the slightest change of voice, returning home from work a few minutes later than usual. Yet despite this comprehensive enterprise, people’s minds and thoughts have long remained a secret to the regime.

All shifted when Leo Kall unveiled his invention Kallocain; a drug that compels whoever is injected with it to instantly reveal all their thoughts and secrets. As it turns out, it would have radical consequences.

“Kallocain” is an incredibly well-written, nay, sensational novel. The language flows swimmingly like a mountain brook and is a joy in itself to behold. The pace, the development of the characters, the dialogue and the descriptive passages are consistently powerful and engaging, the plot is intense, and the message crystal clear. Kallocain is by far the best piece of literature I have consumed so far this year.

SPOILER ALERT

I am particularly impressed by the way Boye develops the protagonist while at every stage challenging the reader to reflection and introspection. We first meet Leo Kall at the penal colony from where he is telling his story directly to us in the first person. We know that he was captured and imprisoned but we are not told about the circumstances until the very end of the novel. Instead, Kall spends some time assuring us that he is doing well and that his life in prison isn’t actually much different from his life as a free man. From the very beginning, we are faced with the prisoner/free dialectic and the dispute about whether it is at all meaningful in a totalitarian state.

For a large part of the story, Kall appears to be completely down with the dictatorship and its policies. He comes across as a deeply unpleasant and single-minded man who unabashedly promotes and defends the current state of affairs. As the events unfold we begin to understand that what he is actually doing is suppressing his own thoughts. He consistently over-compensates his insecurities, fears, and hesitations by an overly vocal commitment to the system. Lip service to the state can never get you into trouble. You do not have to make any choices. Not thinking is as simple as it is safe.

Boye juxtaposes Kall’s obstinate allegiance to official doctrine with Edo Rissen's, his supervisor’s, hesitancy. Kall deeply dislikes Rissen and talks himself into suspecting that his wife, Linda, who was previously engaged to Rissen, is still in love with him. When Kall picks up signals from Rissen which he interprets to be rebellious, he decides to report him. It eventually dawns on him that it is not the man’s political views that provoke him, but his own jealousy about Linda. He begins to realise that his political zeal is merely a manifestation of his innate insecurities.

In the meantime, Kall has begun to administer the drug, first to “volunteers” and subsequently to suspected dissidents. They all begin to speak. Thoughts that Kall has never before been exposed to now overwhelm him. Under the influence of the Kallocain, citizens open their hearts and speak freely about their most forbidden ideas. Every new encounter chips away at Kall’s facade until his manufactured indoctrination which he realises he never actually believed in or supported is ultimately razed. In the paranoid world created by the dictatorship, everything that he used to think was convictions was in effect defence mechanisms designed to give him the illusion of choice. The choice to be loyal. A shield from disappointment.

The latter was particularly pronounced in relation to Linda. In a society where everybody is an informer, you can naturally not trust anyone. On top of that, his jealousy drove him to the suspicion that Linda was still in love with her ex-fiancé and that they were conspiring behind his back. What Kall was essentially doing was to emotionally distance himself from the woman he loved before she had the chance to deceive him.

My final observation relates to the nature of resistance. We typically think of an organised guerrilla, underground press, secret meetings, planned sabotage actions and so on when we think about resistance, but Karin Boye allows for none of that in her novel. In Leo Kall’s world, the resistance is inside the heads of the citizens. The more suspects he injects with his drug, the more he realises that all there is, are fragments of a collective myth. The myth of a city in the desert where the state has no reach. The myth of a leader from long ago who had liberated his people. The dream of a dream, as it were. And this is Leo Kall’s final lesson. His drug reveals that everybody is part of the resistance. Everybody criticises the system. It is an inseparable trait of humanity to disprove of an oppressive regime. The moment where the head of the police department realises this is one of the key turning points in the novel (in my own translation):
“-Anyone can be condemned with this, he snapped.
Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, seemingly overpowered by the meaning of his own words.
-Anyone can be condemned with this, he repeated but this time in an excruciatingly slow, silent, and velvety voice. Perhaps you are not wrong after all.”  

An ingenious touch by Boye is to describe how peaceful and serene the drug makes the subjects feel. I imagine the question that Boye hints at is whether it is really the drug that makes them feel relaxed or is it the very freedom of finally being able to tell the truth and speak frankly. It is subtle, elegant, and supremely potent.

“Kallocain” was published in 1940. The Second World War was raging and the horrors of both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes had become known to most readers of the press. It is easy to imagine how the events in continental Europe in the 1930s leading up to the war had inspired Boye’s imagination. Her letters from this period give evidence of the hardship she went through to pen the book. To one of her friends she wrote “Amidst sweat and internal vomit, I have just finished a rather comprehensive novel.”  To her surprise and satisfaction, “Kallocain” received a warm reception from the critics and also sold well, which Boye, who primarily considered herself a poet, was not used to.

For what it’s worth, I hereby protest that the critics of her time were right. This is in every sense a remarkable book. It has been translated to some ten languages which is far too few. Boye deserves a global audience similar to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, and even Atwood.  

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov
Year: 2002 (1967)
Publisher: Norstedts Förlag
Language: Swedish (Translator Lars Erik Blomqvist)

It is all there. Just like they said it would be. Talking cats, bulletproof creatures, severed heads, invisible men, shape-shifters, con-men, crooks, poets, opportunists, and naked women mounted on porcine hominids flying like gawky birds through the night thanks to a magical ointment. Insanity is just one thoughtless decision away (indeed, Dr Stravinsky’s mental institution fills up at an alarming pace) and a complete collapse of reality is looming while a destitute writer laments the loss of his magnum opus and the love of his life. In short; an ostensibly incongruent concoction of madness, fury, and naïveté.

And it all began when the devil stopped by to visit Moscow.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic novel “Mästaren och Margarita (“The Master and Margarita”) defies all description. Nominally, I suppose, it rests on three pillars. The first is the tumultuous clash between the devil (under the persona of professor Woland) and his henchmen with the citizens of Moscow. The second is the self-proclaimed Master’s account of the meeting between Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem some one thousand nine hundred years earlier. The third is Margarita’s pact with the devil to rescue the Master and return him to her yearning arms.

It is not entirely apparent why Woland chose to humiliate Moscow with his presence. Whatever hints there are, Bulgakov provides them toward the latter half of the novel. The devil’s first meeting with Moscow takes place by the Patriarshiye Prudy in an affluent part of the city where he intercepts the conversation between Berlioz the influential publisher and Bezdomny the poet and predicts the former's death. While Berlioz and Bezdomny vehemently maintain that neither God nor Satan exists, Woland argues the opposite and virtually ‘en passant’ mentions that he himself was there on the balcony where Pilate interrogated Jesus. Shortly thereafter, his prophecy comes true.   

Still, the devil and his cohort do not loiter for long after Berlioz’s messy death before they establish their base at the now deceased publisher’s flat in Bolshoya Sadovaya 302-bis (Berlioz’s flatmate is unceremoniously dispatched to Yalta by magical means) and begin to terrorise the local population. They show no consideration whatsoever for their hosts and moreover use their weaknesses, most frequently greed, against them to divert their sometimes importunate attention, which the gang has made no effort to avoid in the first place.   

Pontius Pilate's and Jesus' meeting resurfaces in the second half of the book where the Master and Margarita are properly introduced. It turns out that the Master (who remains nameless throughout the book) a long time ago wrote a novel about this very meeting. To his dismay, his work was rejected by the publishers and in a temper tantrum preceding his descent into madness, he fed the manuscript to the flames. He is now one of the patients at the asylum and seems to have surrendered to his fate.

Finally, in the last section, the attention is directed to Margarita. Although the Master has given up all hope rotting away in the asylum, Margarita is not as easily dissuaded and keeps looking for ways to reconnect with her lover. When the devil offers her his assistance in exchange for a small favour, she does not hesitate to accept, repeating over and over again how she is not afraid of Satan. The favour consists of acting as Woland’s co-host during a ball for dead sinners where Margarita is faced with lost souls of all types and from all ages. Her association with Woland develops into something that starts to resemble friendship.   

Analysing this piece is without a doubt far beyond my capacity. It is a hodgepodge of every type of madness imaginable. Like Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” but without the puns. Still, there is no doubt that the book is teeming with symbolism and covert messages. Much like Sigmund Freud argued that our dreams are twisted and turned so as to protect us from the grim reality that they are designed to help us process, so do I imagine that Bulgakov went out of his way to distort the society he wanted to criticise in order to protect himself. From the authorities for sure, but perhaps also from insanity.

There should be no doubt that The Master and Margarita is an attack on the Soviet society and system. Bulgakov was in his 20s when the Russian revolution put an end to the czar’s rule and the Bolsheviks introduced a new type of tyranny. He had chosen to side with the old regime and later suffered oppression and censorship from the authorities. The angst and resentment felt by the Master-character and later his resignation and acceptance of his fate constitute an emotional cycle that must have been profoundly familiar to Bulgakov. The nervous publishers, the housing policies, the reporting culture, and the mental asylum must all have been inspired by Bulgakov’s own observations of the new Moscow under Stalin.  

SPOILER ALERT

Still, Bulgakov doesn’t lose hope. Although the Devil brings perfect pandemonium to the narrow-minded souls in idle pursuit of the petty ambitions that preoccupy the average brains of the common man, Margarita’s pure and selfless aspirations pave the way to deliverance for both her and her lover. In one of the final chapters, Woland is looking out over Moscow from above as a pillar of smoke rises from afar and into the clouds. The analogy to Emperor Nero is obvious and underscored by his associate’s comparing Moscow to Rome (in Rome’s favour). A messenger from God suddenly appears and pleads with Woland to take the Master and Margarita with him and grant them peace. When Woland wants to know why God does not simply bring them to his dwelling if He cares about them so much, he is told that what the Master and Margarita need is not light, but peace. Woland agrees to grant God’s request. He sends his associate to summon the two lovers and they embark on their journey. On the way, they pass through the centuries and encounter Pontius Pilate who, troubled by his regret over having sent Jesus of Nazareth to the cross, is stuck in a never-ending loop of anxiety. He, too, is released by Woland upon the Master’s request. This fulfils the purpose of the Master’s unfortunate novel and stands as a symbol for the unlimited power of the written word even after it has been tossed to the flames.

“Manuscripts don’t burn.”

 

NILS DACKE - THE CATHOLIC CHIEFTAIN OF THE PEASANTS

Author: Hans Hellström
Year: 2009
Publisher: Veritas Förlag
Language: Swedish

Nils Dacke, the Smolandian yeoman who lead a peasant uprising against Swedish King Gustav Vasa in 1542, is a name known to all who graduated from primary school in Sweden. He was an ambitious upstart, murderer, thief, rapist, and blasphemer who wreaked havoc and caused misery and ordeal wherever he and his bands of seditious brutes showed their faces.

Or was he?

An old but largely verifiable truth is that history is written by the victors. Unfortunately for him, Nils Dacke was not one of them. I was therefore intrigued by historian and theologian Hans Hellström’s “Nils Dacke – Den katolske bondehövdingen (not available in English but a rough translation would be “Nils Dacke – the Catholic Chieftain of the Peasants”) found in the Catholic Bookshop in Stockholm. Perhaps reading about the man from the perspective of the losing side would broaden my horizons.

It is worth mentioning that “Nils Dacke – Den katolske bondehövdingen” is not altogether a book. In fact, it is barely an essay. With its modest dimensions of a mere 50 pages, it rather qualifies as a pamphlet. Consequently, the room for a profound analysis and detailed argumentation just is not there. The author had previously published a similar booklet, also quite short, on the same topic. I do regret that there does not seem to be enough material about Nils Dacke to fill a full-sized biography, but I understand why this is. For the same reason he has historically been portrayed as a vile and nasty character, whatever approbatory records were made of him during his lifetime they must have been destroyed by Gustav Vasa’s sheriffs once the uprising had been quashed. In compliance with His Majesty’s demands, it seems Nils Dacke was summarily referred to history as a despicable person and a traitor, and I imagine it was highly inadvisable to challenge that view for centuries to come.

 Though of minute proportions, “Nils Dacke – Den katolske bondehövdingen” does offer a partial contextualisation of Nils Dacke and the uprising he lead that serves to better understand both the man and the reasons for his actions. Hellström reminds the reader that the Swedish nation-state in the 16^th century was not nearly as well-defined as it is today and that the Smolandian farmers felt more akin to their Danish counterparts across a porous border than they did to their ruler in Stockholm. We are also reminded that King Gustav Vasa’s decision to nationalise the Swedish churches and convents and seize their assets did not go over well in many parts of Sweden. The reformation was in fact not finalised until 1600, i.e.  45 years after Nils Dacke’s resistance movement and almost 75 years after the reformation began.

According to Hellström, the trigger for the Smolandian dismay was the dual shock of a ban on trading with Denmark and the change in the liturgy. He quotes from historical letters where Gustav Vasa’s subjects implore him to allow them to remain by their traditional faith and to practice Catholicism as they were used to. There are also sources that bear witness to the outcry when the King’s sheriffs packed up the chalices, codexes, and artwork from the local churches and shipped it all off to the royal court.

Hellström’s argument is that the economical hardship imposed on the Smolandians by Gustav Vasa, which is commonly cited as the most accepted underlying reason for the unrest, was only part of the story and that Nils Dacke was in fact a devout Roman Catholic Christian whose faith and fidelity to the true church were as important as the desire for coin in his decision to lead the good men of Smolandia into battle against a ruler who from their perspective must have been perceived as a usurper.     

Sadly, the pamphlet is much too brief and, I surmise, the source material too scattered and fragmented to make a strong case in favour of Nils Dacke’s noble intents, but it is certainly sufficient to demonstrate that reality is often more complex than political propaganda may want us to appreciate.

THE FUTURE IS HISTORY

Author: Masha Gessen
Year: 2017
Publisher: Brombergs Bokförlag AB
Language: Swedish 

To the rest of us Europeans, the Russians have long been a curious lot. Many a foreign writer has ventured to verbalise the soul of the Russian people, many an army general misjudged its resolve, and many a traveller gone astray in the thicket of the idiosyncrasies of Russian rationality.

What better cicerone into this maze of cultural, psychological, and political imbroglio, than the Russian born naturalised US citizen Masha Gessen? Gessen has written extensively on Russian politics and society after the iron curtain and they* have been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian reign and his contempt for the principles of human rights. What is more interesting is their analysis of how Putin’s grip on power became possible in the first place.

”Framtiden är historia” (The Future is History”) is a chronological report of the chain of events that were triggered by the Perestroika, unfolded during the tumultuous years of the Yeltsin presidency and, after a mere 10 years of quasi-democratic reforms, collapsed into what became the still extant Putin regime. Gessen tells the story from the perspectives of seven Russian individuals whose personal negotiations with the changing reality afford a glimpse into Russian social advancement during this period.

Gessen does not settle for merely telling the story of what transpired or even how it came to be, but makes a serious attempt to explain how Putin’s rise to power was not only possible, but in the greater scheme of things virtually predetermined.

At the heart of the matter, Gessen submits, is the singular mind of the Homo sovieticus, a term introduced to the general public by Alexander Zinovyev in the early 80s. The term as such is much older but was initially instituted as a way to capture the next level of human development that mankind as envisioned by the proponents of Stalinism, but its meaning soon became derogatory and used to denote the joint characteristics of a population that allowed itself to be indoctrinated by an oppressive system.

The most salient features of Homo sovieticus are acquiescence, patience, adaptability, distrust of anything foreign or challenging, and a penchant for double-thinking. The latter is the natural way in which Homo sovieticus is able to integrate two mutually exclusive opinions or conclusions and consider them valid simultaneously. This talent is perhaps best illustrated by a survey in which two questions are asked: 1. What countries do you believe are better than Russia? 2. Which is the best country in the world? Homo sovieticus will see no contradiction in listing four or five countries in response to question 1 and still answer ”Russia” to question 2.

Over time, Homo sovieticus and the USSR formed an interdependence where society was shaped by the Soviet rule and the Soviet rule hinged on society. The assumption in the West, but also among some notable Russian scholars at the beginning of the 1990s, was that the Soviet man would gradually die out and become replaced by a more modern generation of Russians with a taste for freedom, liberalism, democracy, and human rights. Much to their bewilderment and unmistakeable dismay, destiny would have it otherwise.   

We now know that the Yeltsin years proved to be but an imagined alembic and that Homo sovieticus, contrary to most expectations, transcended the domesticated population and traversed seamlessly into the post-USSR crop. Millennials in Russia did not revolt against their predecessors as their contemporaries did in other parts of Europe. Instead, they copied, reinforced, and amplified their mothers and fathers.

I am not a sovietologist. Nor do I specialise in Russian ethnology or Russian history. I am thus perfectly unqualified to offer even an approximation to what might have been the driver behind this unanticipated eventuation. A few thoughts do, however, spring to mind, most vividly those of Pierre Bourdieu's. Bourdieu argued that the way we perceive our world and our place in our community is history being codified into practice. He did not call this ”culture” as this word has a slightly different meaning in French than it would in English. Instead, he dusted off the old term ”habitus” which is not to be confused with ”habit”. For Bourdieu, people’s actions are direct manifestations of their perception of reality. As today’s practice is governed by yesterday’s experience, history will have a stronger impact on our actions than will current observations. Émile Durkheim was thinking along similar lines when he said that ”In each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man”.

The works of Bourdieu (which I warmly recommend) may make us aware of the importance of the past in shaping the present in terms of cultural responses to current events, but it does little to elucidate why Homo sovieticus proved as resilient to political change as it so far appears to be. Nor does it explain how the Russian people were predisposed to adopting Homo sovieticus in the first place. It does, however, suggest that democracy may not be the natural aspiration for all communities that it is often portrayed as in Western Europe.

More precisely, recent history suggests that the Russian mindset seems to have not only allowed Vladimir Putin to come to power, but indeed craved it. Niccoló Machiavelli in his 16th-century work ”The Prince” is adamant that it is a simple matter to rule a people that is not used to freedom. Étienne de la Boétie, who lived a few of decades after Machiavelli, dedicated a whole essay ”Discours de la servitude volontaire” to this phenomenon. There appears to be little room for serious disagreement that the Russian nation is inherently suitable for totalitarianism.

My own contribution to the understanding of ”Framtiden är historia”, albeit modest and probably irrelevant, stems from one further feature of the Homo sovieticus, partly uncharted: nationalism. At closer inspection, to the extent my inarguably clouded and grievously inadequate powers of observation allow, I seem to discern a connection between the passivity and defeatism on the part of Homo sovieticus with regard to his own importance on the one hand, and his vigorous nationalism on the other. I submit for the consideration of the hypothetical reader of these lines, that a people that is not used to individual accomplishments or indeed even the expectation of personal greatness, and furthermore strives to be enslaved by a singular ruler, will by design be suspicious to all individualists or minorities (sexual, ethnical and others) and by extension to the very ideas of liberalism and tolerance. They will compensate their individual insignificance by adhering to the concept of collective greatness based on nation, ethnicity, or religion. I term this trade-off ”greatness by proxy”.

I read Gessen’s book in Swedish and have a remark about the translation. If someone had read this blog, they would have noticed that I do not always offer standard translations of the texts I refer to unless they are readily available in my own home library or on the internet. Instead, I slap on my own translation into the text and keep my fingers crossed that I do not botch it completely. I am certainly aware that the material is thus left deficient and that such sloth gives the whole text an amateurish air. Imagine, if you will, a professional translator doing the same. This is exactly my beef what Jessica Hallén. In the first chapter, Masha Gessen refers to an essay by Andrej Amalrik by the title ”Просуществует ли Советский Союз до 1984 года” which Hallén translates (probably from English) to ”Kommer Sovjetunionen att överleva till 1984?” apparently oblivious to the fact that Amalrik’s essay was published by Aldus Aktuellt in Swedish in 1970 under the title ”Kommer Sovjetunionen bestå till 1984?”. The reason I know this is that I have a copy of this book standing on a bookshelf less than two meters from me. A quick search in the database of the Royal Library would have delivered Hallén from this embarrassing blunder.

Speaking of translations.  ”Framtiden är historia” does not appear to be available in Russian. I wonder why…

All things considered, Gessen’s book is an extraordinary testimony to Russian governance after the disintegration of the USSR. Their ambition is unambiguous and their research meticulous, heedful, and, from what I can see, entirely adequate. I have no hesitation to endorse it to anybody who is interested in the rise of totalitarianism in general, and Putin and Russia in particular.

 

*I respect Masha Gessen’s, who identifies as non-binary, request to use the pronouns they/them.

THE GREAT EXHIBITION

Author: Marie Hermanson
Year: 2018
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish 

By 1923, Gothenburg on the Swedish west coast had established itself as the second city of the realm and following the success of the Stockholm Expo of 1897 and the Baltic Expo in Malmö 1914, the political leadership in this port city was eager to show that their city was ready to play in the big league.  The 300 year anniversary of Gothenburg two years earlier coincided with the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded to Albert Einstein and it was decided that Einstein, who had been prevented from collecting his prize money until then, would give his Nobel lecture in Gothenburg during the exhibition. He arrived in the spring of 1923 amid political unrest, economic distress, and a sharp rise of anti-semitic sentiments raging in his native Germany.

This sets the stage for Marie Hermanson’s latest suspense novel “Den stora utställningen” (not available in English but a verbatim translation would be “The Great Exhibition”). It is a composite story of historical facts mixed with the spawn of the author’s imagination seamlessly sewn together to what ends up being a rather satisfying tale. From the angles of four different observers who are all in one way or another involved with the exhibition, the fabric is woven in an accessible, entertaining, and interesting way. Otto, who is the only person who tells his story from the first perspective, reminisces about his childhood in the 1920s. Einstein himself is another voice, engulfed in what turns out to be a fight for survival. The last two, Ellen the journalist and Nils the police constable, are fictitious characters.  

Similar to how it is sometimes liberating to squeeze in an odd pizza or chocolate bar between elaborate culinary masterpieces it is sometimes liberating to squeeze in an odd pizza or chocolate bar or how the emotional depths probed by Mahler’s symphonies or Mozart’s Requiem occasionally benefit from being interrupted by the less demanding tunes of Ariana Grande or Robbie Williams, the world of literature, too, has plenty of room for folksy entertainment. Shelves at bookstores around the world buckle under the weight of crime fiction, fantasy, up lit, and romance. As in all other genres, the quality is highly uneven and chances are that more often than not the book you pick at random will turn out to be a dud.

Last time I read a book written for entertainment purposes only was in October 2018 where I allowed myself to suffer through the agony of making acquaintance with one of Britain’s most celebrated scribbler, whose name I will graciously omit. This time around, I had been more scrupulous in my selection when I cuddled up on the sofa in my snuggery to read Hermanson.

It paid off. Even though “Den stora utställningen” is probably best characterised as suspense fiction, the plot is neither novel nor unpredictable and as suspense goes, it was far from spine-chilling. Still, this is exactly part of the charm of this book. It chugs along at a moderate pace which allows the reader to enjoy the scenery comfortably seated as if in a railway car during a soothing ride through the comely vastness of a countryside landscape. There are no sudden stops or sharp turns, and although a modest degree of acceleration can be felt toward the climax of the book the experience is still closer to a Ferris wheel than a rollercoaster.

Particular accolade is due for Hermanson’s research in preparation of this book. Geographical accuracy and historical events are smartly anchored in the story. Gorgeous little details such as the latest music hits playing in the background contribute to my trust in the author and I have no hesitation to splash into the polished and temperate authenticity of the novel’s universe.  

As much as I regretted my choice in 2018, I am equally satisfied with having read Hermanson in 2020. Hers is not a production that will be remembered by posterity, but in the moment it is deliciously gratifying.  Her place in the history of literature is that of a chocolate bar’s at a World Exhibition.

 

A TICKING BOMB

Author: Linnéa Lindquist
Year: 2020
Publisher: Books on Demand
Language: Swedish 

Public education is arguably the most crucial issue for Western society right now; not least for Sweden. How is it possible that a 15-year-old can graduate primary school without knowing the difference between the government and the parliament? Why do we teach our children to question but not to analyse? How come the terms fact and opinion have been conflated? Who benefits from education being biased toward the mediocre rich at the expense of the brilliant poor?

Anybody who has spent ten minutes discussing political issues on social media will have suffered the bastard monstrosity that is generated from the fusion between ignorance and misguided fortitude. The right to question without a corresponding obligation to understand, interbred with obtuseness and misbegotten loquacity is cute in a five-year-old, embarrassing in a 25-year-old, and calamitous in thousands and thousands of grown-ups in all spheres of our community. If you wish to see the failure of the educational system for yourself, log in to Twitter and in seconds you will be engulfed by it.  

In my personal analysis, which I have mentioned on earlier occasions but do not have enough data to firmly support, society’s ongoing alienation from knowledge is at the core of the matter. The gap between the accumulated knowledge as produced by our science and research institutions on the one hand and the average Joe on the other has expanded to unbridgeable proportions. In simple terms, people no longer know how little they know. We are all capable to comprehend the complexity of a car engine and we have a reasonable understanding of the ratio of our knowledge to that of a trained mechanic. When it comes to social science, pharmacology, evo-devo, geology, and many other scholarly disciplines, however, the rift between what we know, what we think there is to know, and what humanity actually knows, has widened to a virtual canyon. The segregation between those who know and those who do not know is widening daily at the same pace as science makes progress. And, not surprisingly, the asymmetric distribution of knowledge seems to follow the ancient and essentially indelible boundaries of the distribution of wealth, i.e. social class.

An increasing number of observers in the Kingdom of Sweden argue that this problem is exacerbated by the rapidly growing presence of publicly funded private schools. One of the most vocal of these observers and one who has received a considerable amount of attention in the last months is Linnéa Lindquist who, besides being a close personal friend of mine, is a Swedish primary school principal, recognised pundit, and tireless activist. In her recently published book, she calls the ballooning educational segregation “a ticking bomb”, which is also the title.

From the vantage point in her vast experience as a teacher and principal in socially disadvantaged areas around Stockholm and Gothenburg, she has written a devastating testimony about the Swedish school system. This short read of a mere 102 pages takes a few hours to read but is rife with insights and observations from half a lifetime in the service to education. The book covers all aspects of the reality of the modern school such as financing, recruitments, language didactics, and free school meals. Lindquist connects the dots which all lead to the centre-right government’s 1992 decision to open the publicly funded school system up for private entrepreneurs. A decision whose effects were exacerbated by the centre-left government’s decision two years later to even out the funding per student for all types of schools.

Much of the debate from the left so far has been focused on the ethics of allowing private investors to profit from a publicly funded welfare institution that furthermore is mandatory for all residents until the age of 15. Lindquist, however, puts the purpose of the school in the centre of her argument and pokes her finger in all the wounds the current school system has inflicted on education: how instead of students choosing their schools, the schools choose their students; how the high turnover of students at municipal schools depresses the school’s funding and increases its costs. There are many other examples.  

One of the most touching episodes is where Lindquist writes how provoking it is to her each time a sports club or cultural association approaches her with proposals of coming to her school in the suburbs to offer the students pro bono workshops in dance or graffiti painting as if that is what youngsters in “da hood” (my term, not the author’s) really crave, rather than proper Swedish language skills. “I wonder if headmasters in Östermalm [a well-to-do borough of Stockholm, my remark] receive as many propositions about graffiti and dancing for their pupils”, Lindquist quips. My thoughts go to the community or writers and novelists. How often do they avail themselves to schools to help nudge the youth in the general direction of the written and spoken word.

I agree with what I understand to be Lindquist’s argument that it is irrelevant who runs the schools: be it the state, the municipalities, associations, congregations, or private investors as long as the outcome of the schooling system as a nationwide whole is not compromised. Hers is a holistic view and, despite frequently citing examples from her own schools and students, is little concerned with anecdotal evidence or local issues. “En tickande bomb” is not a critique of individual schools, but of the system that allows or forces schools to act in one way or another.

At present, the reaction to the current market-driven school system in Sweden is snowballing and even some of its architects are beginning to doubt the efficacy of putting money ahead of children. “En tickande bomb” is one of those books that are born from a movement but it is also powerful enough to help steer the direction of the debate. No matter where you are on the political left-right spectrum, this book will give you access to the wisdom of an education professional. What you do with it and what your priorities are may depend on your political persuasions, but I strongly suggest that we leave disregarding reality to the incorrigibly asinine clodpates on Twitter

 

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.