New Swedish Books. Spring 2016 1
NEW SWEDISH BOOKS LITERARY CRISIS MANAGEMENT Poet
ry and Prose Our society is marked by crisis, conflict and catastrophe. During the summer the refugee crisis became a reality throughout Europe, resulting in both a political and humanitarian disaster. Simultaneously the internet has been flooded by all kinds of conflicts and an environmental catastrophe will soon bring an actual deluge. To some extent that which characterises our society also characterises our literature. Environmental and humanitarian catastrophes are the fiercely disruptive forces at play in Khashayar Naderehvandi and Johannes Heldén’s poetry, whilst Henrik Bromander’s impressive novel Champion of Order portrays an otherwise anonymous internet troll. Horace Engdahl’s The Last Pig describes masculinity in crisis and the fundamental conflict of Western heterosexuality: the conflict between man and woman. It’s the swansong of the last remaining male chauvinist pig. In Erika Bernalt’s striking debut the gender neutral Bluebird is in an unsolvable conflict with both nature and culture. It’s a painful state of being at odds with one’s surroundings, which could also be compared to the ongoing life crisis of Lyra Ekström Lindbäck’s character Christoffer in her ironic urban novel In Our Time. 4 What Stefan Lindberg has chosen to tackle in the novel Nights at Mon Chéri is nothing less than a national trauma: the unsolved murder of the Prime Minister Olof Palme. It’s a coping process that’s still ongoing, for example online, and with many committed participants. The conflict in Katarina Taikon’s autobiographical debut Gypsy from 1963 is between the conditions under which the Romani lived and the Swedish welfare society that was supposed to be inclusive but clearly wasn’t. In Johan Jönson’s poetry the conflict takes the form of a call to arms against the market economy, idiocy and wage slavery, a conflict that also occurs within the body of the poet, with the body itself, and with the writing. This brings us to the existential conflict of being alive yet at the same time in the process of dying. Birgitta Lillpers, Ann Jäderlund and Elis Burrau’s poetry positions them all beneath this radiating white light. Death, however, is a final inescapable conflict. Neither life nor literature can escape it.