LUCY

Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Year: 2017 (1990)
Publisher: Tranan
Language: Swedish (translator Lena Fagerström)

”The nice thing about identity is that everybody has one”, Dame Marilyn Strathern once told me during one of our few chats at Cambridge. My research at the time was in the onerous phase of deconstructing the concept of collective identity searching for the origins of its formation. I had come as far as realising that trying to establish the inception of a personal or group identity without understanding the mere concept of identity first was a bit like trying to find the source of the Nile without understanding the concept of water.

Another anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, defines identity on the most basic level as “inward sameness, outward difference”. By this he seems to subscribe to a Platonian theory of forms where an idea, an item, a person, or indeed a group of people can be defined by some characteristics that apply particularly to them. We recognise and identify a chair by our consensus on a set of properties that all chairs have and only chairs have. That which is not a chair, must by necessity be something else.

For this definition to be useful we have to allow for a space where concepts meet to constitute a border, or an interface, where the inward/outward sameness/difference dichotomy is manifested. As articulated by Stuart Hall and later elaborated on by Lawrence Grossman among others, there are essentially two models for the production of identities: one offers that there is some intrinsic and constant feature to every identity that essentially immunises it from getting mixed up with other equally perpetual identities, the other proposes that identities are never translucent, never static, and never complete but instead subject to context, time, and often arbitrary choice.

On this backdrop and as someone who did his anthropological fieldwork in Haiti in the Caribbean: the Mecca, as it were, for those who take an interest in creolisation, identity studies, and flux, I had long wanted to read Jamaica Kincaid’s most famous novel “Lucy”. In this short book (my copy is less than 160 pages), Kincaid explores ideas of hard borders between cultural domains and proposes that they may be close to impenetrable so that even communication between them is prohibited or at the very least grotesquely disfigured.

Lucy is a young girl from a Caribbean island who is sent to work as a maid in a well-to-do family in Long Island, New York. She is warmly welcomed and promptly embraced by her host family who treat her with love and respect and who, from their standpoint, try their best to invite her into their midst. Especially Mariah, the mother, makes great efforts to connect with Lucy and share her world with her. Lucy on the other hand is reserved and grumpy and soon decides that integrating with her host family, as the lady of the house so desperately desires, is not an option.

As most of Kincaid’s writing, “Lucy” is largely autobiographical. Kincaid was also an island girl from Antigua sent away to work as a black maid in a white family in the US when she was just a teenager. She was also well-received and treated as part of the family and she also used it as an opportunity to make a future for herself in the new country. In fact, she made it better than most earning a professorship at Harvard and being repeatedly mentioned among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yet “Lucy” is written from the standpoint of resentment, anger, and even hatred and revenge. It is a study of resistance. This is what finally makes this book somewhat interesting. The trigger points are in Lucy’s relationships to people around her and how they shape her identity. The divide between her and Mariah. The rift between her and her mother. The unfinished business with her father. Her friendship with Peggy. Lucy is locked in a continuous struggle for personal space and the power to define her own existence and yet it is increasingly obvious that the more bitter her tussle, the more embedded it itself becomes in her identity. She slowly turns into the sum of her tug-o-war with the world.

In the end she realises that her only escape is isolation and denial. By removing herself from the universal social horseplay and by emotionally disconnecting from her past, present, and future personal relationships, she effectively tries to withdraw from the sameness/difference grating and in so doing obtain some form of liberty. Being something else, sometimes means being nothing. “I was all alone in the world, and this is no small accomplishment.”

I will be honest to admit that I did not altogether enjoy “Lucy” as much as I had hoped. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Maybe I was in the wrong mood. Maybe Lucy’s cantankerous character put me off. Although the topic is highly interesting, I found the story bland and the storytelling unappealing, unimaginative, and slow. I readily admit that while the author makes many powerful points and the underlying analysis and the understanding of the clash between several different worlds across generations, genders, geographies, ethnicities, and historical contexts are crisp and moreover from a perspective that is impossible for a white, European man to replicate or fully grasp, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired and, in my opinion, falls short of the masterpiece that this novel is frequently declared to be.

A MAN CALLED OVE

Author: Fredrik Backman
Year: 2012
Publisher: Månpocket
Language: Swedish

In 2012, Fredrik Backman entered the Swedish literary scene with a bang. His novel “En man som heter Ove” (“A Man Called Ove”) was an instant success and he soon followed up with titles such as “Mormor hälsar och säger förlåt” (“My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry”), “Britt-Marie var här” (“Britt-Marie was here”), and “Björnstad” (“Beartown”) just to mention a few.

Fredrik Backman had dabbled in writing before. Besides his daily job as a forklift operator, he had sold some freelance journalistic work to one or two newspapers and created a moderately successful blog in cooperation with the gentlemen’s gazette Café. The blog gave him the opportunity to experiment with observations and characters, take in the reactions from the readers to expand on what seemed to hit a nerve and remodel traits and characteristics that did not work. Little by little the protagonist of his debut novel come to life.

I early on decided that I was not going to bother with his books as I am not a great fan of up-lit and I figured that there must be more rewarding literature out there than maudlin Scandinavian kitchen-sink-realism. But as time went by and I could observe Backman’s success around the world, not the least through recurring stellar reviews in English- and German-language book groups on social media, it became increasingly clear to me that as a Swede, I needed to at least have a smattering of what the rage was all about. No sooner said than done, I read “En man som heter Ove”.

I am happy to say that I have no reason to regret it. The book is a highly entertaining and engaging read which both cracked me up and squeezed an occasional tear from the corner of my eye. It is narrated in the present tense by mixing scenes from the present with flashes from the past across 39 short chapters depicting a changing Swedish society on the back of the transition from an industrial wonder to a high-tech powerhouse as well as the continuous strife between the overbearing welfare state and the individual it steamrolls.  

Ove himself is the quintessential stubborn 60-something-year-old, Swedish working-class man stuck in a mindset that has long ceased to exist. Born of a different era for a different world. He has no sympathy for people who drive a different brand of car than he does or who have names that were unknown when he was young, who cannot bleed their own radiators. And certainly none for hospital clowns who borrow a coin for a magic trick and then fail to return it.

By Ove’s never-ending clashes with the relentlessly changing Swedish society, Backman puts his finger on the rift between old and new Sweden. Immigration, feminism, technology, and globalisation have changed the face of the nation to a point where individuals who are unable to keep up, will inevitably feel left out. The boomers and the millennials seem to live in different realities. Although Backman doesn’t say anything about Ove’s political views, it seems to me that this is precisely the kind of voter who might hesitate between his loyalty to a labour party like the Swedish Social Democrats and the delusive allure of the crypto-fascistic Sweden Democrats to bring back some unspecified iteration of a mythical Sweden of the past.

This could easily have become a story where the younger generation makes fun of the older but in a warm and reconciliatory tone, Backman gently brings them together and allows them to build bridges of mutual understanding, respect, and friendship. 

Objectively, “En man som heter Ove” is not a great work of art. The storyline is simple bordering on primitive and the characters are essentially caricatures or types, rather than complex representations of human beings, engaged in dialogues that feel a bit forced here and there. I also found the theme of Ove’s suicidal attempts overly melodramatic and even though it all sort of comes together in the end, I maintain that the book would have done just as well without that subplot. This notwithstanding, it most certainly deserves its audience and its success. It is sentimental, mushy, and corny but it works very, very well.

LEVIATHAN

Author: Thomas Hobbes
Year: 1968 (1651)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English

In 1577, Etienne de la Boetie’s work “Discours de la servitude volontaire” (see review on this blog from July 2021) framed the question why people, villages, cities, and entire nations allow themselves to be subjugated and oppressed by a single ruler who without their consent would have no means of exercising control over them. His was a simple but wildly controversial question and the book gives one of the oldest comprehensive arguments in favour of civil disobedience in European philosophy.

I have found no evidence that Thomas Hobbes ever read de la Boetie. Indeed, as tantalising as the thought is, efforts by scholars much more accomplished than I to connect Hobbes with de la Boetie have also amounted to nothing (see e.g. Reiss, Timothy J., “Utopia Versus State of Power, or Pretext of the Political Discourse of Modernity:Hobbes, Reader of La Boétie?” in French Connections in the English Renaissance by Catherine Gimelli Martin & Hassan Melehy (eds), London, 2013). And yet, Hobbes’s most famous book “Leviathan” seems to address perfectly the concerns of his French precursor. If de la Boetie asks “why?”, then Hobbes answers “this is why!” and moreover explains why it cannot be in any other way.

“Leviathan” is written in four parts, the first two of which are the ones most commonly cited in modern public discourse.

1.      Of Man

2.      Of Common-Wealth

3.      Of A Christian Common-Wealth

4.      Of the Kingdome of Darknesse

In its most basic albeit no doubt most useful and essential interpretation, “Leviathan” is understood to demonstrate how mankind, being the egotistic, violent, and greedy creature that we are (Hobbes’s opinion of humans seems to be akin to Jonathan Swift’s of yahoos (see review on this blog of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, By Lemuel Gulliver” from March 2022), would be unable to function as a peaceful collective had there been no overarching power to pacify us. Hobbes calls this primordial unfettered anarchy the State of Nature and in the most famous part of the book concludes that in such a state, human life would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes’s argument is that if there were no laws, and more importantly still, no one to enforce them, there would be nothing stopping individuals from murdering one another and stealing from each other. The state of nature is by definition a state of war. Hobbes specifies that war does not necessarily mean a constant ongoing use of force. For a state of war to exist, it is enough that the threat of force, or the suspicion that someone may use force, prevails. Consequently, it would make sense for rational beings to come together and agree on a set of rules that would limit the liberties of each of them to harm others in exchange for a corresponding limitation of the risk of being harmed by others. We know this line of thought today as the “social contract”, but Hobbes did not use that term. Instead, he uses the terms “covenant” and “common-wealth” to cover different aspects of what we understand as the social contract.

Without a central authority that has the power to enforce the contract the agreement as such has no purpose as it can always be broken with impunity for, as Hobbes writes, “the Passions of man are commonly more potent than their Reason”. This is why Hobbes introduces the sovereign; the Leviathan, with unlimited power to make sure that people live in peace within the framework of the covenant.

The sovereign is not a party to the contract but rather a result of it. The contract is not between the people and the sovereign but between people and people. The sovereign as an entity is the ensuing result of this agreement as a third party. Consequently, the sovereign is not bound or constrained by the contract. The power of the sovereign is unlimited and unchecked and must remain so. I understand Hobbes’s argument to be that since the amount of violence that can be wrought upon others by all of us is constant and unlimited, when the authority to exercise violence is transferred from us to the sovereign it follows that it must remain unlimited. Furthermore, analogous to the inability of people to regulate themselves, which requires the creation of the sovereign in the first place, the sovereign also cannot be expected to regulate himself which is why there can be no basis for a limit to his power or accountability for his actions. For peace to be guaranteed, and for the social contract to remain intact, the sovereign may not in any way be challenged or disobeyed.

Hobbes certainly acknowledged that such a state of affairs would by necessity bring about a series of negative consequences for individuals and collectives alike but argued that any inconvenience would be preferable to the alternative which is the state of war. The only condition under which subjects are absolved from obedience is if their sovereign fails to uphold peace and security between them as per the covenant.

Lesser known is Hobbes’s analysis of Christianity with regard to the civil law and the division of power between God and the sovereign. Hobbes, who may or may not have been an atheist, goes to great pains to disconnect the power of God from our lives on Earth. He argues that obedience to God’s law is not obedience to God but to the sovereign who enforces it. In Hobbes’s view, God Himself is incapable of enforcing his own laws on Earth and needs to rely on kings and princes to do it for Him. In that dwells the difference between crime and sin. Both disrespect the legislator all the while the former is being enforced and the latter is not. Sometimes, but not always, they coincide.

In essence, Hobbes takes issue with the expectation that people are asked to obey a divine law professed by someone who claims to have received it through a revelation without being presented with any reason to believe that such a revelation has actually taken place. He refers to the Scripture (1 Kings 13) where a prophet sent by God to Jeroboam is deceived by a false prophet. If even a man of God can be fooled by a simple con artist, how are common people supposed to be able to tell true prophets apart from false ones? Therefore, it is rational for all humans not to rely on scuttlebutt about divine law, but instead to subordinate themselves under the fixed and unambiguous laws of the sovereign.

Hobbes’s second argument is that we are actually not living in the Kingdom of God in this era. He rejects the idea that the Kingdom of God is an ethereal existence but rather stresses that it refers to this world, though not this time. He identifies the Kingdom of God as beginning with the covenant between God and Moses and ending when the Israelites demand a king like other nations have, and the prophet Samuel anoints Saul to be their king. All of Samuel’s warnings about the consequences of having a king instead of being ruled by priests coalesce into Hobbes’s definition of the Leviathan but the words of the prophet fall on deaf ears and the people insist on a sovereign. God then speaks to Samuel “it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king” and Hobbes sees here the end of the Kingdom of God on Earth, with God’s approval. The obligation to obey divine law has thus been transformed to the obligation to obey civil law.

Hobbes finds a decisive piece of evidence in the fifth book of the New Testament wherein Christ sends his disciples to all corners of the world to teach, persuade, counsel, and baptise. Not to rule. Therefore, there is no conflict between being a Christian and obeying a heathen prince. Nor is it a sin to disavow Christ if commanded to do so under the threat of punishment. It is simply an act of obedience to once earthly sovereign. Lip service, as it were. “The (Unum Necessarium) Onely Article of Faith which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST.” All that is required of a Christian is that they believe.     

This is a decisive break from the traditional understanding of the king’s right to rule wherein the king used to be portrayed as being appointed by God to uphold his law. Hobbes throws that notion out and argues that the sovereign is appointed by the people and receives his authority from the people and not at all from God.

In the final section of “Leviathan”, Hobbes attacks the Church of his day and particularly its reliance on the teachings of Aristotle whom he calls absurd, repugnant, and ignorant. Aristotle’s teachings that the human being is a social and political creature naturally predisposed to thriving in a peaceful and well-organised community and does not fully bloom until they accept their role as a political participant in a large-scale society is the direct anti-thesis to Hobbes’s grim judgment of man as a savage beast.  

He goes on to call out four main sources of darkness in the church: ignorance of the Scripture, fascination with ghosts and demons, mixing in false philosophy (Aristotle), and confusing faith with tradition. The Roman Catholic Church in particular takes the brunt of Hobbes’s critique but the Anglican Church is not spared with all its rituals and ceremonies with regard to communion and baptism which the philosopher dismisses as “Incantation, rather than Consecration”.

The many important observations and well-founded conclusions notwithstanding, Hobbes, in my view, missed a crucial parameter in his analysis. It is commonly accepted that the docile and peace-loving philosopher was spurred to his work on government by the horrors of the English civil war which made him focus on peace within a common-wealth. This may also explain why he made no efforts to propose a solution to violence between common-wealths. Modern history has shown that the likelihood of two democratic countries going to war against each other is infinitely smaller than if any other type of government is involved. I imagine that this perspective might have inspired Hobbes to somewhat adjust his stalwart support for the absolute monarchy.

Needless to say, Hobbes’s work was hugely controversial in his days and decades to come. Hobbes was declared persona non grata in Paris for having attacked the Pope, the book was banned in England and even burned in public displays of outrage, and his follow-up, “Behemoth”, was graciously withheld from publication by King Charles II with the benevolent intention of preserving whatever was left of Hobbes’s good name until the philosopher had passed away. Among his contemporaries, John Locke, albeit critical of several of the propositions made by him, was one of few thinkers who recognised Hobbes’s work as an intellectual masterpiece that opened the door to a new way of thinking about government and power.

As time went by and the uproar subsided, “Leviathan” cemented its position as one of the most ground-breaking philosophical pieces of literature in history of Western thought, and went on to inspire such thinkers as Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and indirectly Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser.

 

TRAVELS INTO SEVERAL REMOTE NATIONS OF THE WORLD, BY LEMUEL GULLIVER

Author: Jonathan Swift
Year: 1980 (1726)
Publisher: Forum
Language: Swedish (Translator Anna Berg-Mortensen) 

Meaning is floating. It is well established in the study of semantics and semiotics that communication through words, symbols, gestures, rituals, artefacts, and actions vary with the place, context, and time. A word that means one thing in one situation may have a different meaning in another. A simple expression such as “thank you” can carry a meaning of such disparate sentiments as gratitude, command, distancing, and irony depending on the situation, interpersonal relationship, and tone of voice. Meaning is transitory and particular to the moment in which it is created.  

One of the most radical changers of meaning is time. Not the least in the realm of literature. Literary history is littered with examples of masterpieces that have been morphed over the centuries so that they are today read and enjoyed in a completely different way than they were intended and received at the time of their birth. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe as a testament to the rational Christian man’s superiority over the elements (and other peoples) but is in our times considered an exotic and somewhat naïve adventure for teenage readers. Mark Twain’s intention with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn was to highlight the social injustice in 19^th century America but has since then moved through a period of nostalgic literature only to end up in the same category as Robinson Crusoe. Moby Dick by Herman Melville seems to have moved in the opposite direction. I was written to impress the masses but has slowly been incorporated into the canon of American literature and is frequently mentioned in discussions on the essential Great American Novel.

Similarly, Jonathan Swift’s peculiar novel “Gullivers resor” (“Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver” or simply “Gulliver’s Travels”), has not been spared. The most recent movie adaptations as well as the cover art on most modern publications of the novel give no signs of it being directed at political scientists, pundits or policy-makers. Instead, they are in matinee-format and even musicals and the books are brightly coloured and often richly illustrated. This presentation is far removed from the original intention of the book.

Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland in 1667, less than 15 years after the end of the Confederate Wars. He soon moved to England where he tried to establish himself in the circles around Charles II. His ambition failed and after some years he was sent back to Ireland with the modestly prestigious seat as Deacon of St Patrick’s parish. This is where he began to write his most famous work of literary fiction intended and designed as a fierce assault on all things that the London elite pretended to: politics, power, money, knowledge, and honour.

Swift sends his protagonist, Dr Lemuel Gulliver, on four different voyages to imaginary lands, each of which allows him to dwell on particular features of English high society.

Gulliver’s first journey takes him to the land of the Lilliputians. Here he is faced with tiny people who make great problems out of tiny issues. They go to war over pointless matters, choose their senior government officials according to preposterous criteria, carry grudges, lie, and deceive. By Liliput, Swift ridicules the English political elite that dons ostentatious robes, use fancy vocabulary, and make all the pretentions of great men.  Through Gulliver’s eyes, the thick display of pomp and circumstance going on around his ankles can only appear as parodic and ludicrous.

The tables would soon be turned. In his next journey, takes him to Brobdingnag which turns out to be inhabited by giants. Having been left behind after a shore leave on an unknown coast he is captured and put in a cage. Although well taken care of and eventually settling into a reasonably comfortable lifestyle at the royal court, where he earns the friendship and attention of the king and queen, he remains a prisoner used for entertainment purposes. In his conversations with the king, Gulliver tries his best to impress him with accounts of the intricacies of English governance, judiciary system, and codes and morals. The deeper into his descriptions he ventures, the more absurd English customs appear to the king. He shrugs them off as unintelligible and without merit.

During his penultimate excursion, the ship on which Gulliver serves as a ship’s doctor is captured by pirates and Gulliver is put in a canoe to fend for himself on the open sea. By a stroke of luck, he reaches a previously unknown archipelago where he lands. Here he is soon surprised by an island floating in the air which turns out to be Laputa, the dwelling and communication vehicle of the ruler of Balnibarbi. In this episode, Swift goes after academia which he perceives to be aloof and disconnected from reality. Every senior citizen on Laputa is followed around by a servant, called “flapper”, whose main purpose is to nudge or strike their master with a cane or a bladder filled with pebbles from time to time to bring their attention back to the world around them, be it for the purpose of following a conversation or not to walk off a cliff. Gulliver seizes the opportunity to also visit the university town Lagado where various scientists have invested lots of thought and made absolutely no advancement in areas such as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, turning human excrement back into food, or constructing a solar calendar based on the wind.     

Gulliver’s final and most decisive journey would also be the one that would ultimately change his life. After having been deposed as captain in a mutiny, he is marooned on an unknown shore. The first creature that he runs into makes an altogether adverse impression on him. He observes that they had no tail and most of the time walk on their hind limbs, their heads and parts of their torsos are covered with thick hair but the rest of their bodies are naked. Moreover, they are dirty, smelly, and loud. Surrounded by these beasts, he is rescued by two gallant horses which quickly disperse the screeching flock. Slowly it dawns on Gulliver, that the masters of this world are the highly intelligent, peaceful, and serene horse-people called Houyhnhm, and that the vermin he had first encountered, known locally as Yahoos, are in fact humans. Equally slowly, but infinitely more painfully, he must eventually reconcile with the fact that to the Houyhnhm, he is simply an unusually clean and communicative Yahoo. After his inevitable return to England, disgusted at himself and the Yahoos which we all at our essence are, he secludes himself from his family and society and spends the remainder of his days professing the glory of the horse-nation. Swift, finally, condemns forever mankind in its entirety.

As I read the novel, it seems to me that Swift grew increasingly bitter as he progressed. There is evidence that speaks against this proposal, most convincing of which is that he wrote the part about Houyhnhm before he had finished the visit to Laputa. Nevertheless, the leap from criticising the English elite, as he did by Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to dismissing humanity as a whole seems like a drastic escalation of Swift’s grievance. As the book was written over several years, such an emotional evolution is by no means unlikely. The publisher even had to delete some parts from the manuscript for fear of prosecution. This is political satire through and through.

But as we concluded at the beginning of this review, material changes with time. Even if we accept that “Gullivers resor” is satire and designed to visualise the absurdity of politics, I suspect that we read it differently than its contemporaries would. To us, the satire appears largely Menippean showcasing a broad criticism of general characteristics of our society, but to the contemporary reader, it would have constituted a vicious attack on specific institutions and even individuals more or less carefully veiled. After all, our time would to Jonathan Swift be as foreign as Lilliput or Brobdingnag ever were to Lemuel Gulliver.    

PROFILES OF MODERN COMPOSERS

Author: Göran Bergendal
Year: 1967
Publisher: J. A. Lindblads Bokförlag
Language: Swedish

The Swedish musicologist Göran Bergendal spent most of his adult days promoting contemporary Swedish art music and spreading knowledge and awareness about serious music to the general public. During his tenure at the now defunct Rikskonserter Foundation and his advisory capacity at the state-owned Caprice Records and Swedish Public Radio, he worked relentlessly to unite the composers of the time with a moderately enthusiastic Swedish audience. One of the tools in his toolbox was writing. His most famous publication was “33 svenska komponister” from 1972 which contains easily accessible biographical articles about some of the most notable (and most promising) Swedish composers. However, 5 years prior to that, he had tried the format in a less celebrated but equally worthwhile book titled “Moderna tonsättarprofiler” (not available in English but translated it would be “Profiles of Modern Composers”).

In this book, Bergendal provides short articles of about 8-10 pages each about 15 classical composers and three jazz artists that he claims changed the face of music in the 20^th century. The book can be read as a complement to Axel Hambaeus book “Mästare i tonernas värld” from 1933 which occupies itself with composers from Bach to the break of the 20^th century. Bergendal argues that modern composers are just as important in our era as Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Dvorak were in theirs and wants us to read “Moderna tonsättarprofiler” as a continuation of Hambreaus’s work.

The texts are written in an educated but casual form, with some linguistic manoeuvres sounding a bit dated to a modern ear. The articles usually give a short introduction to the life of the composer and then move quickly into his (they are all men) output and a simple analysis of his music. The cross-references to other composers, some of whom are also represented in this collection, are plentiful and help to put the musician and his work into a global context. Each of the articles is thus a pleasure to read.

What is particularly interesting to observe 55 years on is Bergendal’s choice of composers.

He starts off with Maurice Ravel who was, perhaps, the most conservative of the whole lot. However, sensitive to foreign influences as he was, he may have been the first European composer to incorporate the nascent jazz sound into his music, most famously his piano concerto in D major for the left hand, commissioned by the piano virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein.   

Russian music is represented by Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Prokofiev while leaving out the brilliant Dmitry Shostakovich. Although personally, I am a huge admirer of Prokofiev’s ingenuity, I will concede that Shostakovich probably had a more important impact on Russian and European music which is why I am not sure about this choice.

Bergendal then continues to the Magyar Béla Bartók and his lonely search for acceptance despite being repeatedly rejected by audiences, each time for a different reason. What surprised me was Bergendal’s silence on Bartok’s importance as an educator through his widely influential “For Children” suite of some 80 piano pieces of varying difficulty for the youngest musicians.

Moving on, Bergendal dwells for quite some time on Arnold Schönberg and his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Their cooperation in the “Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen” which for a few years after the First World War gave them the space they needed to introduce their music, particularly the twelve-tone-technique, to the stages around Vienna, is given ample space across here articles. It is perfectly warranted. Theirs was the first serious and coordinated challenge to the musical form, including harmony, melody and tonality, and would transform the way serious music would sound for the next half a century.

Since both the writer and the expected readers were Swedish, it is understandable that the Swedish composers would be over-represented in the book. Bergendal chose to include three of them in his book: Hilding Rosenberg, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, and Lars-Erik Larsson. All of these brought the modern musical influences, such as the twelve-tone-technique, to Sweden but none of them made any decisive contributions to the evolution of serious music globally, although the latter wrote some amazing music that is still played by orchestras worldwide, such as the Pastoral suite and God in Disguise.

Paul Hindemith, in Bergendal’s narration, is the study of a young revolutionary who bit by bit loses sight of the future and falls back onto the ancient and traditional. This is something Bergendal obviously laments and so the article on Hindemith is perhaps the one where the author’s own opinions and preferences shine through the most obviously. The article ends with the bitter words “Hindemith amassed much wisdom during his life, /.../, but he had apparently forgotten all about his merry 20s and stupendous 30s”.

Moving on to Benjamin Britten, who is presented as a friendly fellow with a talent for music and for making friends. His Aldeburgh festival, which he co-organised with his life partner Peter Pears and which is still an annual event, hinged entirely on Britten’s connections and his ability to persuade world-class performers such as Mstislav Rostropovich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Sviatoslav Richter to come to this small coastal town in Suffolk.

The three jazz musicians in this collection are Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker. These articles are written by Krister Malm whose expertise in this genre apparently far exceeded Bergendal’s. Apart from their contributions to their musical field, their lives were also a struggle against racism and bigotry. When a British music critic compared Duke Ellington’s music to Stravinsky and Ravel, Ellington’s agent Irving Mills who was trying to sell the band as “music from the jungle” was apparently furious. Serious music was simply not the black man’s domain at the time and reviews like that could hurt Mills’ business.

The final three articles are dedicated to Edgard Varése, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage. Whereas the avant-garde until that time had fought hard to liberate music from established rules based on rhythm, harmony, keys, etc, Varése, Stockhausen and Cage each in their own way worked to abandon the sounds from the known musical instruments as such. Varése’s use of loud but ill sounding contraptions such as foghorns, Stockhausen’s electrical instruments, and Cage’s experiments with silence as the backdrop to the natural sounds around us are a few ways in which instrumentalists of the time were challenged.

It is an obvious flaw that composers of much greater importance, such as Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and Shostakovich were omitted in favour of less influential names, but it is easy for us to say in hindsight. Therefore, I was thrilled to step into the 1960s for a while and take in what a distinguished Swedish musicologist considered to be the most important work being done in his field by his contemporaries.  I recommend this book, not primarily to music lovers as there are probably far better biographies about each of these composers out there, but rather to those interested in the modern history of music while it was unfolding.

THE ANTARCTIC OF LOVE

Author: Sara Stridsberg
Year: 2018
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish

”Did I really think that he was going to kill me? Yes, perhaps I did, but I didn’t think it would be the end. All this time, I thought I would return as someone else, and that I’d be forgiven. Forgiven for what? I don’t know, just forgiven. For being born. For existing in this world. For being killed and for returning. Lost. Liberated. ”

The voice we hear comes from the beyond. The narrator, a prostitute and heroin addict, is dead – murdered. Her head has been sunk into a contaminated cesspit where the acids quickly consume her face as if to ultimately seal her namelessness, while her body is now dissected and disposed of in two suitcases in separate locations in Stockholm. Her body is partitioned in death as it was mutilated by hundreds or even thousands of men in life. Her face obliterated just as she was defaced in life by men who were interested only in her body, rendering her face, her thoughts, and her feelings irrelevant. A life not worth living thus ends in a death not worth dying.

In her latest novel, “Kärlekens Antarktis” (“The Antarctica of Love”), Sara Stridsberg tells a story from the perspective of the weakest and most exposed individual in her weakest and most exposed moment. The narrator knows that she is dead and she has complete memory of her moment of death. Her tale is her life passing in front of her eyes in the moment of her death. Only contrary to the common rendition of this recurring trope, it is not flashing by. Instead, it is grinding slowly and with crushing force, dwelling on every detail, every feature, and every grain and every particle. The moment of her death starts before she is born and continues in perpetuity after she is dead. Bit by bit, her life is disclosed to us: her childhood, her failed parents, her destructive relationships and marriage, the fate of the son and daughter she gave birth to, while regularly returning to the moment of her assassination. It is as if her entire life was condensed in that moment.

Verily, this is a taxing read. Stridsberg’s prose is graphic and expressive, and she does not shy away from the most grotesque details. The reader is dragged through every harrowing second of the narrator’s torturous demise. The same way the murderer did not spare her, so does she not spare us from going through the agony of her experience, if only in our imagination. The writing is powerful and direct and hits you in your gut like a donkey’s kick. True, some imperfections remain. The rhythm could be improved here and there and on a couple of occasions I was ejected from the immersion by an unexpectedly lazy choice of words. Yet, all in all, it is a well-crafted novel.

Given the plot and the characters, it is impossible not to think about a high profile murder that was perpetrated in Stockholm in 1984 where the body of a young woman, also a prostitute and a drug addict, was found cut into pieces and hidden away in different locations. Two physicians were later prosecuted and found not guilty to the murder although it could be established that they had dismembered the woman’s body after her death. I was eight years old when this story made the headlines. Stridsberg was twelve. Brutality made a debut in my life, if only from a distance. Maybe in hers, too. The reality of the violence from which this story is born had been uncloaked.   

I can only speculate about what the author aims to achieve with “Kärlekens Antarktis”, especially since this is the first book from her that I have read and therefore am unable to put it in a broader context. In the afterword, Stridsberg denies that her book is about any specific person or event. Maybe this is accurate. For in the final words of the novel, the narrator addresses her daughter.

“The tales about how the universe continues to expand, make it somewhat easier for me to let go now. The thought that we are all part of the same endless motion. I am thinking: whatever happens to us, only one second of eternity has passed.”

It seems that in Stridsberg’s mind, the line between individuals is blurred and so the divide between the writer and the fruit of her imagination can be, too. The moment Stridsberg reaches out to her they become the same. Her erudite and poetic voice becomes the voice of the simple and unschooled dead woman thus enabling her to speak despite her throat being cut and her mouth filled with dirt and acid. The literary language cannot belong to the victim but certainly to the writer who together with the victim becomes the narrator. They both speak and they are both cut into pieces and stored in suitcases.  

“The space which we, the dead, once occupied in the world is filled with the living faster than one would think.”

* All quotes are translated by me from the Swedish original and are not necessarily identical to the official English translation of this novel.

A WILD SHEEP CHASE

Author: Haruki Murakami
Year: 2003 (1982)
Publisher: Vintage Books
Language: English (translator Alfred Birnbaum)

In the spring of 2010, the Icelandic volcano at Eyjafjalljökull experienced a peculiar eruption. Seismologically, it was an insignificant event with the first phase barely reaching 1 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.  It gradually intensified and by the end of the event had spewed an, as volcanoes go, moderate amount of 0.3 km³ of tephra into the atmosphere. What made this eruption remarkable was not its force or longevity, but rather the composition of the tephra that it discharged. The matter ejected into the sky was in the form of tiny particles that formed a massive billow of ash which, propelled by the west winds, swept over Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Northern Europe. The microscopic silica-rich debris, threatening to blast aeroplane windscreens and disrupt the function of turbine engines, shut air travel down across most of Europe. The skies went silent, returned for a moment to the birds and the clouds.  

At the time of the eruption, I was on a business trip to Bulgaria. Realising that my flight home had been cancelled and that the chance of my getting airborne again in the near future was slim, I managed to book myself onto one of the northbound long-distance buses that opportunistic entrepreneurs had been quick to offer to stranded travellers. Preparing for the long ride, I purchased one small pillow and two books: Chuck Palahniuk’s “Choke”, and Haruki Murakami’s “A Wild Sheep Chase”. I read Palahniuk on the bus and finished Murakami about a week ago.

The synopsis for this novel is not terribly complicated. The protagonist is a bored Japanese man who runs a dwindling copywriting firm with his alcoholic partner. He is in the midst of a mundane divorce process because he and his wife got tired of each other. No animosity, no drama, just plain ennui. Our man is not an archetypal failure, just an average bloke in his early 30s who has reached the pinnacle of his existence and surrendered to the fact that his accomplishments are distinctly average.

One day he publishes an ad for one of his few clients using a photograph he had received a long time ago from his notoriously wayward and ultimately long-lost friend. It is a perfectly ordinary Japanese photograph showing a mob of sheep grazing on a meadow with a snow-capped mountain peak in the background. The man is understandably surprised when one day he is picked up by a black car and brought to the secluded office of a powerful politician/mafia boss who wishes to have a word about it. At closer inspection under the guidance of the boss, he notices that one of the sheep in the picture seems to have a star-shaped spot on its back. He is unceremoniously instructed to locate that particular sheep or else his company will be put out of business and he and his partner ruined. No further explanations are offered. He feels neither particularly inspired nor particularly intimidated by this, but as he has nothing better to do he sets off on what to the reader will be a highly enjoyable sheep chase.

Haruki Murakami has said that the secret to his success is that he prefers to write in English rather than in his native Japanese precisely because his command of English is limited. This forces him to write down his thoughts and images using simple words and short sentences. His greatness lies in that the resulting text is incredibly accessible without sacrificing any of its richness in colour, flavour, or scent. Murakami has an extraordinary talent for creating worlds that effortlessly envelop his reader. I have never travelled to Hokkaido but after reading “A Wild Sheep Chase” I feel like I have nevertheless been there.

There is however more to this read than masterful prose. On a deeper level, the way I read it, the novel is about detachment and loneliness. All of the characters are in one way or another lonely; aloof from the rest of the world. They function in it and affect each other but without ever really touching, similar to ships on a lake whose wakes rock nearby vessels without their ever rubbing against each other. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that none of the characters has a name. They are “the girlfriend”, “the man”, “the partner”, etc. It is as if everyone is expendable and replaceable to the point of not meriting a proper name. This way, “the cat” can be substituted for any other cat. The protagonist, his friend, his ex-wife, his new girlfriend, the boss, and the sheep with the star on its back somehow exist in the story without connecting, thrust to and forth through life like the ball in a pinball machine. They all construct different ways to deal with this reality, but none of them defeats the futility of being. In essence, “A Wild Sheep Chase” is about the vain hunt for mutuality and the utter disappointment that awaits those who believe that they have gained it. Not even those that go to extremes in order to liaise with another being are, in the end, successful.

The ending is actually the only section with which I struggled a bit. It both is and is not predictable and although the magic realism, for which Murakami is famous, is usually non-invasive and adds an interesting dimension to the universe, to me it partially clouded the final few chapters. Somewhat like the salt that, if used moderately, binds together and brings out the flavours of the other ingredients in the recipe but when over-applied ruins the meal.

I would be thrilled to hear what you have to say about it as I think it can be interpreted in any number of different ways. Come to think of it, while I do not know if this was Murakami’s intention, this seems like a valid statement about your and mine and everybody else’s time on Earth.