New Swedish Books, Spring 2018 1
21 Spring 2018 Writing the History of Everyday Li
fe This autumn marks one hundred years since the end of the First World War. Even though Sweden didn’t take part in the war, many of the country’s non-fiction writers are looking back to those years, seeking a long view on our own times. Aside from some of the books highlighted in the following pages, it’s also worth mentioning Jesper Högström’s biography Lust and Loneliness, about the author Hjalmar Söderberg (1869– 1941) and Görel Cavalli-Björkman’s study of the artist Sigrid Hjertén (1185–1948), Woman of the Avant-Garde. Both titles demonstrate the continued vitality of historical biography as a genre. But there are other ways to approach the landscape of history. The historian Peter Englund’s series The Beauty and the Sorrow of War – of which the fourth part, 1917, came out in 2017, depicts the First World War through the lives of a host of different people. The series is an example of one approach to the retelling of history, in which the ‘big story’ is avoided in favour of a portrait composed of many individual, sometimes contradictory, human stories. It becomes a kind of patchwork, in which patch after patch of individual stories are drawn together so that the pattern of the bigger picture finally emerges. The idea that the historical events that later get fixed in history books can be reflected in people’s everyday lives is one that recurs in many of this year’s titles. Two examples are Kalle Kniiviläs’ reportage Tanya’s Road, which tells the story of a St Petersburg street from 1917, the year of the revolution, up to the present day, and Yvonne Hirdman’s Gently the Raindrops Fell on My Hand as the Children Burned in Berlin which is dubbed a “collage novel”: the material is made up of a collage of articles and pictures from a daily newspaper over the course of the spring of 1945, ranging from advertisements for clothing to the longed-for headline containing the word “peace”. Stina Otterberg