Swedish Contemporary Fiction 1
Jonas Hassen Khemiri (b. 1978) Families, and part
icularly father-son relationships, are one of the perennial themes of world literature. They feature in stories about everything from war and love to generational conflicts and bankruptcies. And every era has its own unique family problems. Families in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novels always combine different languages and cultures – and are always split along the same lines. His first novel, One Eye Red (‘Ett öga rött’, 2003), tells of Halim’s path from a childhood of limited means to an independent life and promising career as a writer. It differs from the usual template for stories of growing up and moving on, in that it is Halim’s father who advocates integration, modern ideas and critical thinking, while the son is a fundamentalist who demands faithfulness to history and tradition. Fathers have a special place in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novels. Fathers as deserters, fathers as misunderstood figures, fathers as their sons see them and create them. Khemiri’s four novels may appear to be thinly veiled autobiographies, but in fact they skilfully subvert our expectations. Today, when ‘autofiction’ is such a dominant genre, every novel written in the first person is bound to be regarded as autobiographical. Khemiri solves that problem by playing with roles and language in different ways. In his first book, he has Halim create his own version of what most Swedish critics misunderstood as genuine ‘immigrant Swedish’. In Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger (‘Montecore: en unik tiger’, 2006), personal pronouns are used in unexpected ways, so that the narrator addresses himself as ‘you’, while another character is ‘me’. In his latest book, The Family Clause (‘Pappaklausulen’, 2018), most pronouns are omitted in favour of designations like ‘a father’, ‘a son’, ‘a wife’ and so on – reminiscent of Expressionist theatre. Language conveys power. It also exercises power. Khemiri’s novels place themselves in a tradition with strong tropes, but then he breaks with that tradition by insisting that today’s Sweden is a different country from the one where writers like Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson could rise up from poverty and illiteracy to reach the Swedish Academy. Khemiri enriches the language with foreign words and new meanings, using them to take control of the narrative of his own ‘life’ and ‘self’ in the world. Ingrid Elam Rights sold to: 30+ countries 9 Swedish Contemporary Fiction The Family Clause 367 p. 2019, Albert Bonniers Rights: Wylie Agency An ode to families, their dynamics, their boundaries and their silences, in all their messy glory, it reveals one of the real challenges in life: how to stop your family defining your destiny. Everything I Don’t Remember 334 p. 2015, Albert Bonniers Rights: Wylie Agency A young man named Samuel dies in a horrible car crash. Was it an accident or was it suicide? By employing the detective novel’s narrative suspense and shifting perspectives, Khemiri has created a story that grips us by the throat and refuses to let us go. Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger 358 p. 2006, Albert Bonniers Rights: Wylie Agency A wild ride of unrelenting linguistic ingenuity that is as much about the power of language itself, as it is a heart-breaking portrayal of an estranged father and son. Foto: Pierre Björk