sweden Archives -

THE TRIO by Johanna Hedman

I had a lot of confused feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was quite more-ish, and I finished it very quickly. On the other hand, I felt kind of annoyed, and I can’t really explain why. It tells the story of a sort of love triangle involving undergraduates in Stockholm. If this is giving you fun TWILIGHT vibes, let me stop you right there. It is way more tortured than that, and ends with the girl getting with the wrong guy. Mostly because they DON’T COMMUNICATE. I was like: just talk to each other! How hard is it to say: are you my boyfriend?! Or: my feelings were hurt when . . .

Not to sound like I’m so perfect at relationships, but jesus. Also annoying was the almost mind-boggling level of safety in which these Swedish people live. It is deeply disorienting to read a book, especially a book about young people, that is not drenched in economic anxiety.

I spent a good 4000 pages in Stockholm a few years ago (shout out to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s MY STRUGGLE) so I feel eerily familiar with the upper-middle class of this city that I have never even visited. This book is very much of that world. There is a lot of describing grocery story visits and eating simple and healthy foods (grr!). There’s also a lot of this kind of writing:

That summer, August and I would bike to Djurgarden in the mornings, and pick a tree close to the water where we’d park our bikes and lay out our towels and then spend the day swimming, sunning and reading. I’d bring a thermos of coffee and August would come with tuna sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. The empty wrapping glittered in the sun after we’d eaten.

That last sentence in particular gives you a flavour of what we are dealing with.

OCTOBER’S CHILD by Linda Bostrom Knausgard

Linda Bostrom Knausgard’s husband, Karl Ove Knausgard, wrote six horrifyingly honest volumes about his life. Of course, you cannot write about your life without writing about the people around you. So despite my never having read a book by this woman before, I know a lot about her. More about her than most people I know in real life. For example: Karl Ove had such an enormous crush on her that when they kissed for the first time he embarrassed himself by FAINTING WITH JOY.

This book is about her time institutionalized for depression, and especially about her electroconvulsive therapy, which is as bad as it sounds. I didn’t know people still did this at all, but apparently Sweden is an outlier globally in using it heavily. It was a gripping little book, about the institution, and about the fragments of memory left to her by the treatment. It was interesting to hear the other side of Karl Ove’s version of their marriage.

Let me end with this fun aspect of their apparently very artsy marriage. They are on vacation:

When we finally got to the hotel all we saw were palm trees and greenery, endless shadows and hills. You looked over the landscape and said, What the fuck is this?
It turned out we were in Mauritius and not in the Maldives, your dream destination, and I spent the entire vacation in the shade with the children saying, Oh, how lovely it is here in Mauritius. Mauritius. Mauritius. It served him right.

How do you not find out you are going to Mauritius not the Maldives until you actually get there?!?

ACTS OF INFIDELITY by Lena Andersson

ACTS OF INFIDELITY is the sequel to the wonderful WILFUL DISREGARD, and the central character, Esther, is once again in love. It’s totally scarring. As the author says:

What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime. And it’s likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.

Esther is once again in love with an unavailable man, who acts as if he might be available. Putting it like this, you feel like you wouldn’t have sympathy with her, but you totally do. She tries so hard not to make the same mistakes as last time, but she does.

Friends always told Esther that men don’t leave their wives, but things had to change for her at some point. No two people were identical. If she kept trying, one fine day the course of events would align with her view of how the world should be.

Esther is a serious person, not a pathetic teenager, despite the fact that she acts a bit like a pathetic teenager. Please enjoy this sample of her misery, where she is thinking of giving up on a book she is writing

The world had enough books already and even if excess was a prerequesite for exceptional specimens she didn’t have to contribute to the rubbish so that the flowers of others could grow on the dump. She pushed through and stayed her course a little longer. Nothing ever got done if you thought it was meaningless. In order to have the energy to care about life itself, you had to exaggerate its importance.. . . When no reply came, she fell into a torture chamber. From down there, she called Olaf and asked how he was doing.
“Fine thanks. Just great. The birds are chirping, it’s spring”

WILFUL DISGREGARD by Lena Andersson

This book shows how love is a madness, and not in a cute fun way. This woman meets this semi-famous artist (I mean, let’s not be silly: artists not famous, except in a tiny bubble, but anyway she lives in that bubble). They go out to dinner a lot, talk a lot, but nothing HAPPENS. Then finally things HAPPEN, like three times, and then doesn’t call her very much and she loses her shit.

Thank god she does not do anything publicly embarrassing (e.g., cry at party) but she is a mess: thinking about him obsessively, changing her life to be nearer him, writing him lengthy and shameful emails about ‘their relationship’ Most harrowing is how the cycle repeats: every time she is about to break free, he offers her a little hope, and it begins again. To me it is obvious that he is enjoying the attention, and does not care what it costs her. (You can tell it is a good book because I am talking about it like I know them).

It’s a really unsettling book, because it shows how easy it is to slip into mania, be it about hand washing, about the second coming, or, as here, about a boy.