New Swedish Books, spring 2017 1
31 Spring 2017 often sharp and tragicomic, the ti
tles raw. Her debut from 2009 was called Många människor dör som du (Many People Die Like You), followed by Bret Easton Ellis och de andra hundarna (Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, 2012). So isn’t the title of her third book, De polyglotta älskarna (The Polyglot Lovers) incredibly pretentious? Well yes: at the novel’s core is a manuscript with the same title, written by an author by the name of Max Lamas. Not only is he incredibly pretentious, he’s also a narcissistic male chauvinist. Over the course of the book, he and his manuscript are put though their paces multiple times, not least in encounters with women who refuse to play the role he has sought to ascribe to them. ‘The way masculinity works is that the more you get to know it, the less you understand it, and yet you still get more and more drawn in,’ one of these women, the fist-fighting Ellinor, says. Those words are perhaps a distillation of the novel as a whole. Wolff’s feminist ambitions consist not so much in explaining power structures as in exploring their attraction. In De polyglotta älskarna, she explores the allure of a pompous kind of masculinity, as well as a desire to transcend it, to have an encounter beyond dominance and subordination, to speak all the languages of the other. “ Because the jury tends to select debuts that have received less media attention, its choices are often difficult to determine” New Voices For just over twenty-five years, the Swedish Writers’ Union has awarded the Katapultpris for the year’s Best Swedish Fiction Debut. In 2015, the prize went to Agnes Gerner’s existential Skall (Bark), a Ted Hughesinfluenced poetry collection on humanity’s animalistic tendencies. The previous year’s winner was Anna Fock’s darkly radiant novel Absolut Noll (Absolute Zero), which depicts the precarious life of several homosexual men in present day St Petersburg. Both poets and prose writers are eligible for the prize, as are the many Swedish debut writers whose texts fall somewhere between poetry and prose. Because the jury tends to select debuts that have received less media attention, its choices are often difficult to determine. But in 2016, the winner was a given. Stina Stoor’s short story collection Bli som folk (Beasts and Other Stories), which was also nominated for the August Prize, was the year’s literary sensation. Over nine stories, we encounter rural northern Sweden, where the author grew up, and where she has remained, with its people, pikes, streams, grass, cars, dogs and derelict houses. Rooted in a distinctive linguistic Stina Stoor photo by Nasti Roos