New Swedish Books. Autumn 2016 1
NEW SWEDISH BOOKS THE ART OF MEMORY Fiction, Non-
fiction and Poetry Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the privilege to step into a treasure trove. That’s how it feels to read a huge swathe of the coming season’s books in one go. Memories, whether person or collective, fictional or more or less biographical, sweep through these books, forming the basis of many of them. Regardless of the form it is presented in, memory is a key starting point for narrative, for literature. Events, pivotal moments, wellkept secrets: they’re all there, and the narrator, the author, the portrayer, selects, hones, calls them forth into the light to be regarded and pondered over by the characters in the narrative, and by us, the readers. I’m thinking of Ida Andersen’s novel The Public Right of Way Ends Here or Sara Mannheimer’s novel Un-unifying us, or Magnus Ringgren’s poetry collection Wind Player. In other works, such as Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Tempest, it is instead our own time itself that bears the weight of memory, or weighs down those now living with recollections of war and betrayal. A frequent topic is the way class identity and social relations are linked to concepts like dignity and memory, integrity and memory, such as in Anneli Jordahl’s Like the Dogs in Lafayette Park and Ola Larsmo’s Swede Hollow. To read is to have stories blown through you. Characters are constantly flowing through your senses: everyone who talks, loves, fights and travels in Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947; the fictional scatterbrain Ofissim in Malte Persson’s On Ofissim; an unhappy, yet fascinating Carl Fredrik Hill in Kristofer Flensmarck’s novel I Am Hill. Later, they speak to you in your thoughts. And they all tell of history and of the present. They reflect our, or their authors’, take on the past, and our current time is reflected in that which happened decades or centuries ago, as in Nina Björk’s The Red Dream (a biography of Rosa Luxemburg) or Caterina Pascual Söderbaum’s 4 posthumous work The Oblique Place (a novel about Spain). In Peder Alexis Olsson’s Post-war Music, the reader hears the noise of the politics, economics and propaganda of war. The people of that time act on their own terms, but also in the minds of the authors, and later inside the reader. Our ingrained image of how things have been, and are now, is changed by what we read: that’s something we have to be aware of, as we are aware of our own lives and our surroundings. This spring and summer, Sweden’s literary world has grown significantly poorer – authors and critics such as Bodil Malmsten, Göran Palm, Lars Gustafsson, Nils Schwartz, Leif Nylén, Tomas Löfström and Mats Gellerfelt – they have meant a lot and will be deeply missed. Their deaths will impact not only those who were close to them, but also those of us who have read and followed their writing over the years, often altering our own views upon reading it. During the summer, Sweden’s arts pages were full of discussions of criticism and ethics, of criticism and the gaze, of what it is possible to critique – book, author, or both – when a book is published. That debate is of prime importance where criticism is concerned: what should be taken into account when a critic assesses a work, how are things to be weighed up, how is the book read, with whose eyes – political, ethical, religious – do we see? Criticism is crucial to literature and to our understanding of it. The foundation of criticism is independence and integrity – as important for the discussion of literature as the author’s integrity is crucial to the work itself. In the intersections and differences of opinion, literature becomes a genuine and rich treasure trove, a concern that reaches far beyond the glow of the reading lamp.