Jag heter inte Miriam

“The story is fiction, but it is true.” YuanTsung Chen’s remark in her introduction to The Dragon’s Village is also a perfect description of Majgull Axelsson’s Jag heter inte Miriam.

Looking back at my year of reading at the age of 39, there was great deal of history, especially World War II. Using the strictest possible definition of history or historical fiction, the list is:

*Still only currently reading, so I might not finish before I turn 40, or even at all.

Some of it was intentional, some of it (for example, book club picks or recommendations from friends) was pure happenstance. A year of reflection.

Jag heter inte Miriam is a kind of bildungsroman, following the titular Miriam (née Malika) from her childhood in Germany through the Holocaust and finally to land in Sweden. The name change arises when Malika takes on the uniform and identity of a dead Jewish girl, Miriam Goldberg, during her transport from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück. Malika is Romani and has already experienced life at the bottom rung of the prisoners’ self-determined hierarchy. The Nazis might have the most animosity for the Jews, but most of Miriam’s day is spent among prisoners, not Nazis. There was more foresight in this decision than Miriam could have realized, as she ends up on one of the white buses out of the camps and into Sweden—whose immigration policy at the time denied entry to Romani people. As a result, Miriam spends more of her life passing as Jewish than being authentically Romani.

Her entire life story is presented across 450 pages, through the narrative framing device of celebrating her 85th birthday with her stepson and his family: wife, daughter, grandson. The gift of a silver bracelet, engraved with her name and of what looks to be Romani craftsmanship, prompts her to remark “Jag heter inte Miriam” (“My name is not Miriam”), which naturally sends the family into a small uproar. Is this dementia? Alzheimer’s? A strange joke?

Granddaughter Camilla is the one to ask Miriam about it directly, and about her experience in the camps, which sets up the framing device for the rest of the story. In between long episodes of Miriam’s past, we come back to the present day setting and her lakeside walk with her granddaughter, where Camilla tries to come to grips with this history lesson.

There’s obviously a lot in here, and Axelsson includes a long list of references and books for further reading at the end, as well as a lengthy thank-you to fact checkers, historians, and interviewees. (I recognized Hans Caldaras‘ name among them, whose biography continues to live rent-free in my head even though I read it six years ago.) However, even if many of the events of the book actually happened—including the “tattarkravallerna” in Jönköping in 1948 or the Roma uprising in Auschwitz in May 1944—the character of Miriam Goldberg is still just that: a fictional character. There’s advantages and disadvantages to this approach to presenting history, and I don’t think there will ever be a conclusive answer to the question “Historical fiction: good or bad?”. It’s just something to be aware of.

Jag heter inte Miriam was another one for my annual reading goals, one that I’ve owned for more than a year. It took a painfully long time to read, not only because it’s 450 pages but also because it’s a goddamn Holocaust novel. Still, I’m glad I read it. By all accounts it seems like Axelsson tried to be as respectful and thoughtful as possible, and like she genuinely wanted to tackle history through the lens of fiction rather than crank out some tragedy porn.

It doesn’t seem like the book is out in English, but the fantastic Asymptote has an excerpt available, an excellent translation by Kathy Saranpa.

1913: Århundradets sommar

Sometimes I wonder if specific book friends should get their own tag, for my own ease of reference if nothing else. So much of my reading can be traced back to recommendations and influences from people I like!

1913: Århundradets sommar, originally published in German as 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts and known in English as 1913: The Year Before the Storm, is simply the account of a single year in Europe from the perspective of numerous writers and artists (as well as a couple notable politicians). The same book friend for whose sake I made a third and final attempt to read To the Lighthouse and to whom I had gifted The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, who lives next door to the author of Årsboken and who had also recommended Njals Saga, pressed a slightly beat-up paperback copy of 1913 into my hands back in January or February. I started immediately, stopped when I realized I simply had too much else going on at the time (trying to get through Svälten and Kusinerna for assorted book clubs on top of Peak Work Season), and picked it up again on a long weekend in London.

An aside about the weekend jaunt to London: I scheduled a dinner at a Korean restaurant in London, the irresistibly named Koba, as a reward for surviving the first part of Kammarkollegiet’s authorization test for translators. (I passed that part, by the way!) I also have a friend in London who lets me stay at his place when I turn up there, the same friend who recommended Miljosvennar and who gifted me a few of his science fiction favorites (including Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco) after he cleaned out his bookshelf, who is one of the few people in my life to get a birthday present from me every year without fail only because I have a strong sense of Books He Should Read. It seems to be a fairly unerring sense as well, since he actually reads them and during one visit to Stockholm even remarked that I always manage to find interesting books he would have never known about or picked for himself. The same friend was also knocked the heck out from a gnarly viral infection, so his natural urge to play host and show off Hackney Wick was severely dampened by the sad state of his physical constitution. After a solo morning museum visit and walk through the park, I spent the entire afternoon of my last day there in bed reading while my host picked away at a programming task.

“I’m sorry you’re cooped up in here,” he said after an hour or two of companionable silence.

“No! No. This is exactly the kind of vacation I wanted. It’s fine.”

That is how I managed to read the bulk of 1913 over a single weekend. That’s exactly the kind of attention it deserves, because it’s full of names and events that keep recurring or developing; you don’t want to take a two week break and come to find you lost track of what Franz Kafka or Carl Schmidt was up to. Illies turns what could have been dry reportage into insightful, dare I say sensitive narrative. Presumably some poetic license is taken (did so-and-so really see so-and-so walking down the street as he gazed out his window?) but Illies has pages and pages of personal diaries and letters to draw from, so he can get quite close to his subjects. His background as an art historian probably means much of the subject matter was stuff he already had at hand, so to speak. Fair play also to Illies for giving as much consideration as possible to the notable women of the era, including their own perspectives and diary entries instead of just offhanded mentions about muses or mistresses or so on. Much like Svälten, Illies turns history into a narrative and the whole thing becomes deeply enjoyable reading despite the whirlwind of names and places.

The Swedish translation was done by Karin Andrae, who does not seem to have her own web presence anywhere that I can find. Here’s one selection from her translation catalogue over at Världslitteratur.se. She’s not listed at ÖversättareCentrum.se. There’s an article (and interview?) by Emilia Söelujnd behind the paywall of at least three regional newspaper clones: Tranås Tidning, Falköpings Tidning, Vetlanda-Posten, and probably more.

Imagine having such a reputation in translation that you don’t need to be worried about marketing yourself or having A Presence. The dream…

Svälten: Hungeråren som formade Sverige

Magnus Västerbro’s Svälten (Eng: The Famine) was another Swedish book club pick, but life conspired to keep me from actually attending the meeting so I don’t know what anyone else thought about it.

This was a rare foray into nonfiction for the club. Västerbro’s absolute brick of a tome dives into the three years of famine and food scarcity that plagued Sweden in the mid 1800s, bringing to bear not only a wealth of primary sources but deep research into famines and hunger as a whole and drawing connections to more recent events. It would be easy for this kind of book to become overwhelming, but Västerbo keeps the reader from getting lost by anchoring events to specific memorable characters. Each chapter also takes a very granular focus: one on the physiological effects of hunger, for example, or another on crime rates during famine.

For someone like me, who has at best only a fuzzy, broad-strokes understanding of Swedish history, this was a fantastic resource for filling in at least some of those gaps. As an American, it’s also interesting to read about the factors behind this or that wave of immigration from the inverse perspective, so to speak. Our textbooks never get too deep into this kind of national trauma, often distilling things into a few phrases or concepts: poverty, religious freedom, Irish potato famine, etc. In Svälten the historical tragedy takes center stage for its own sake instead of being the mere setup to the Great Experiment of American Democracy. My only complaint is that the concluding remarks feel tacked-on, with much less actual research and much more The Moral Concerns of the Zeitgeist—by which I mean some facile commentary that could be summarized as “oh ho ho, isn’t it ironic now that our biggest health problem is obesity instead of starvation???”. Granted, that’s always going to be a sore spot for me, but there is much less research here (measured in footnotes and bibliography references) than in the rest of the book. It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except to be an obvious, if uninteresting, way to tie things up.

Even though Svälten originally came out in 2018, it doesn’t seem like there’s been an English translation yet. More’s the pity, because I think it would be of immense interest outside of Sweden.

Stacken

Stacken (Eng: The Colony) was a Swedish book club pick and it generated a range of responses, which is exactly what you want in a book club pick I suppose. Unlike the previous meeting I attended, where everyone agreed that Orbital was pretty underwhelming.

What made Annika Norlin’s debut novel a non-starter for me was that it ultimately seemed to lack cohesion. Norlin’s previous fiction release was a collection of short stories, and Stacken feels like an unsuccessful attempt to glue seven or eight short stories together in a single narrative. We have an ensemble cast consisting of Emelie, a young Stockholmer who has fled to the countryside up north after serious case of burnout, and the cult-adjacent group she stumbles on out there: Ersmos, Aagny, Sara, József, Sagne, Låke, and Zakaria.

If I were to summarize Stacken in a single sentence, it would be “Midsummer for scaredy cats.” It has the kinda culty one-with-nature commune, but without any murders. (There are a couple of murders in the backstory, but that’s a separate matter.) Wikipedia tells me it’s “being adapted for television,” but I can’t find any unpaywalled source for more details, so who knows. I can see how it would work as an anthology series of character studies, like LOST, but that is in no way a compliment. For lack of anything else to say about the book, here is the cult character gallery in brief:

Ersmos is around Emelie’s age. He grew up with a tyrannical single mother in the house that would eventually become cult headquarters. Not very brainy, much more mechanically oriented.

Aagny is well into middle age. After doing a stint in prison, the only job she can find is caregiver for Ersmos’s horrendous mother. She’s the first to move in to the house.

Sara is also around Emelie’s age, gifted with incredible charisma. She served a prison sentence following an animal rights stunt (unsuccessfully trying to liberate some chickens), spent a few years at an ashram in India, and eventually moves in together with József.

József is ten or fifteen years older than Sara, the son of two Hungarian Holocaust survivors. Intergenerational trauma has made him something of a people pleaser, and when he meets Sara he’s working as a church choir director.

Sara and József run into Aagny up north visiting some of Sara’s extended family, and they’re the next to move in.

Sagne is a a huge bug nerd, distantly related to Sara by marriage? a cousin? marriage to a cousin? and relatively local to the area. She goes off to get a PhD studying ants, but then A TRAGIC BACKSTORY happens to her and Aagny finds an extremely pregnant Sagne out in the woods. Sagne doesn’t move in so much as she’s brought in.

Låke is Sagne’s son, born and brought up on the property. Despite József’s protestations, Låke is kept out of school and so gets a very singular and uneven education on their off-grid little homestead. By the time Emelie shows up he’s a teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen? Sagne spends most of the book avoiding him, and the rest of the commune can’t quite seem to decide what to make of him.

Zakaria is the last to arrive, again brought in by Aagny when she meets him in a drunken stupor, on the run from the law. He is young and Greek and gorgeous and naive, and everyone’s a little bit horny for him. Aagny especially is desperately in love with him.

By the time Emelie runs into them, they have amassed several idiosyncracies. They talk about Out There and Outsiders in hushed tones. They sleep outside as much as possible. They thank nature for every gift of berries, vegetable, animal. Sara has morphed into a cult leader and dictates, with charisma and soft power and suggestion, their goals and activities.

I often joke that I would read about absolutely nothing at all happening so long as the writing was good, but Stacken really put that assertion to the test. Norlin can write lovely prose, but that still wasn’t enough to get me interested in the story. Maybe because she never gets beyond the surface of things: of events, of feelings, of character psychology. Really grim, serious things happen to the characters and Norlin just skims over it. Not to mention how she handwaves things things like how this bunch of amateurs learned to build proper shelter, and garden, and tend chickens, to the point where they became almost completely self sufficient. I get that you didn’t want to do the research, Norlin, but then maybe you could have told a different story.

Kusinerna

I first heard of Aurora Venturini’s Kusinerna (Spanish: Las primas) in a review in an issue of Karavan a few years ago. I remember sitting in Konserthuset during intermission and reading about a pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair. Then I forgot about it until my international WhatsApp book club picked Las primas—more specifically than that, I forgot about it until I came to a chapter in Kusinerna with a…pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair.

Ah hah!

Kusinerna is a story about an impoverished family told through the perspective of the daughter Yuna, who claims that all the women in her family are “freaks” in some way or other, including herself. The nature of her own disability is unclear except that it’s tied to a difficulty with language, which gives rise to a distinct literary style and occasional breaks in the fourth wall. Her sister Benita is the one in the wheelchair, and seems to be seriously handicapped both physically and mentally. One of their cousins on their mother’s side, Petra, has dwarfism while the other cousin, Carina, has six toes on each foot. There we have our titular cousins.

Yuna and Petra are the only two who are capable of living more or less independently in the world. Yuna shows an early knack for drawing and art that more than makes up for her struggles with language, and as the book progresses she is easily able to support her family. Petra, on the other hand, quickly turns to sex work to earn money.

Lots of other reviews talk about the book’s portrayal of misogyny, patriarchy, abuse, and any other number of awful things. Very true, this is all in there! There is definitely a lot that happens in the book, and most of it has to do with suffering and abuse. But getting too into the weeds where plot is concerned would spoil quite a bit and somehow feel overly reductive. It doesn’t seem like Venturini is trying to shock anyone with the events of the story; they’re more the foundation of some seriously acerbic dark comedy. Lorna Scott Fox’s review at the Times Literary Supplement calls Cousins “breezy and brutal,” a perfect description. When you use Yuna’s distinctive, almost manic narrative voice (run-on sentences abound, for example, because she finds punctuation tiresome and complicated) to relate some of the worst things that can happen to a person, it transcends misery porn and becomes that most vaunted of all things: Social Commentary.

The comparison that springs to mind for me is Paul Pen’s El brillo de las luciérnagas (English: The Light of the Fireflies). It’s not a fair comparison, maybe, since the only thing they have in common is Spanish and brutality towards women. But without a narrator like Yuna, the brutality never really elevates and it just stays at a deeply unpleasant level of misery and torture porn for the entire time. Brutal yes, breezy not so much. While I blazed through Cousins at lightning speed, Fireflies is one of the rare books that I have consciously, deliberately chosen to not finish. This is where spoilers come in handy, and I’m glad GoodReads users delivered so I could decide to spend my time reading something else instead.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Venturini was also just a really cool and interesting and talented person! Nothing else to add there, just felt I should make that clear.

The Swedish translation by Hanna Nordenhök was also a delight to read, and a credit to her craft considering how many puns and plays on words there must have been to translate. More than a lot of our other WhatsApp book club choices, Cousins led to a lot of discussion about puns and translations: for one original Spanish joke about snacks and pickaxes early in the book, in English it was rendered about bird beaks and pecking, in Swedish about rodents and gnawing, and in German about sofas and canapés.

The best possible book club pick!

Orbital

Still reading books, bad at posting here!

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize, which was a significant factor in its selection for my monthly Swedish book club. There is a Swedish translation, but we all read it in English.

We all hated it, too! Gratifying!

Orbital gives us 24 hours in the life of astronauts on the International Space Station. Cool concept, but since Harvey spends most of the book describing Earth from space instead of really getting into anyone’s heads, or dissecting any relationships or examining any characters, it’s just pretty blah. It feels like reading an Instagram account: each chapter its own post, with a meticulously described view over the Earth and then an accompanying “caption” in the form of a crew member’s thoughts, always too short to plumb any depths.

The orbital perspective—the fact that we are constantly presented with the image of the Earth as a whole, as a single planet out in space—suggests profundity, but in the end goes no farther than suggestion. Nothing is asked of the reader. If you find the constant descriptions of Earth repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over them does nothing to diminish your experience of the book. If you instead find the internal narrations and thoughts of the astronauts repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over those parts likewise changes nothing. The super typhoon that the astronauts track throughout the book, whose damage Harvey occasionally zooms in to describe, doesn’t actually have personal repercussions for any of the characters since we never find out if loved ones lived or died. The omniscient narrator informs us of a crack in the hull, but nothing comes of it.

The judges have their reasons, I suppose, but I wonder if one of the most important reasons was their sheer exhaustion with the world. If I were still in academia I might be tempted at this point to write a monograph on the concept of the “burnout novel,” with a nod to my boy Byung-chul Han. That’s the new genre to which I’d say Orbital belongs: the burnout novel. Every day we are inundated with crises and catastrophes that demand our attention and our empathy, and maybe it turns out those are not boundless resources. Likewise it seems our ability and our means to renew those resources are becoming increasingly stunted. In that context, Orbital is a book that can gently wash over a passive reader with no effort whatsoever. There is no urgency, no message. How easy to read a book that makes no emotional demands. How relaxing.

How pointless.

Baby Driver

Finally, I’ve finished writing all my dorky little book reports for the books I read in 2025 and can move on to 2026! While this entry is backdated to January, I’m writing it in May. It’s just been that kind of year.

Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver came into my life by way of a massive tome of Beat literature, Beat Down to Your Soul, that I’d lugged around with me totemically since I bought it in college. I didn’t actually read it until 2020 and it was one of those books that spiraled out of control in terms of additions to my TBR, full of names and titles that I’d never heard of before but that also sounded fascinating. In particular, all of the women who had been part of the Beat movement but who have been sidelined and forgotten, if not by academics then certainly by popular culture. Kerouac and Ginsberg are household names; not so Diane di Prima.

My TBR at this point is several hundred books, most of which I’ve outsourced to the Storygraph app instead of remembering myself, but I always had Baby Driver ready at hand. It’s a catchy title and an amazing promise of a novel: Kerouac’s own daughter! One essay in the Beat Down to Your Soul collection, maybe by the compiler herself, also painted a striking picture for me of Jack Kerouac as an absentee father and the overall tragic arc of Jan’s life, which probably helped further fix it in my memory. Imagine my surprise when, on the tail end of my Christmas visit to my family, I stumbled on Baby Driver at the local bookstore! Perfect. I’d already picked up The Extinction of Irena Rey as a gift from my mom, but this one was it: Baby Driver was THE book of the trip.

I don’t have much time for Jack Kerouac, to be perfectly honest. I read On the Road on a Greyhound trip to Chicago in my early 20s (points for pretention, I suppose) and even then I couldn’t match the literary idolization of Jack Kerouac the person to the Sal Paradise of the novel. While there are moments of exquisite, ecstatic prose,  beautiful wordsmithing alone isn’t enough to fully paint over or transform an uninspiring truth. Here’s a guy just constantly mooching off his aunt (read as: mother), and that’s supposed to be heroic and admirable and even a bit manly? As the kids probably no longer say, the math ain’t mathin’.

I also feel a bit bad framing this review of Baby Driver within the context of Jack Kerouac, perpetuating as it does a tendency to situate women writers in relation to the famous men in their lives instead of presenting them on their own terms. See also: Save Me the Waltz. But whatever! It’s clear that J. Kerouac fille very much engaged with, and was inspired by, J. Kerouac père in the best possible way. Baby Driver has a similar picaresque structure and literary style, except with a better narrator.

“Better” is certainly a loaded word here. What makes Jan superior to Sal? I suppose it’s a matter of taste, at least partially, but the word that keeps coming up when I try to describe it is awareness. Jan Kerouac, the author, has a distance and an awareness about Jan Kerouac the character, the Jan of several years ago, that her father seems to lack about Sal Paradise (and by extension, himself?). Kerouac fille can see, with the advantage of hindsight, how destructive and tragic some of her choices are and the ways that her situation, interpersonal relationships, and status shaped and limited her. Kerouac père, on the other hand, mostly seems nostalgic. No reflection over what enabled or supported those adventures, just the mad rush of a good time.

To point to that in the text, Baby Driver ends with Jan reuniting and reconciling with her mother. They sit in the kitchen and talk about restoring some antique furniture her mom has in storage, as well as the possibility of reuniting their broken-up family. Jan has come full circle and has, at least temporarily, restored one of the primary relationships in her life and acknowledged its importance for her. In fact, she’s grown and matured enough now to offer support of her own. On the Road ends with Sal sitting alone, daydreaming about Dean and Dean’s father. Not even his own family, but someone else’s. The hero ever apart from the crowd, never acknowledging his own past.

More than all that, though, Baby Driver is just a good book. It’s a wild ride full of characters and adventures and beautiful language and it’s just good. I’m not sure how it managed to get lost down the memory hole, but it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

Reading Goals for 2026

Still no great changes to my annual reading goals!

At least 48 books, of which:
at least 4 are in French, and
at least 25% are in Swedish
at least 12 are non-fiction
at least 10 have been in my library for over a year
at least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2026)
at least half are by women or enby authors
at least 10% are by Black authors
at least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2026)

For my own reference, the last book I added to my TBR before January 1, 2026 was The Rise of the Military Welfare State.

My thinking behind these goals hasn’t really changed in the intervening years, so I’ll just link to the blog post instead of repeating myself.

Årsboken

I added Årsboken to my TBR after my book buddy neighbor mentioned that the author, Sven Olov Karlsson, is his next door neighbor. I then forgot about it for a couple years, but conveniently enough it was available from the Stockholm library as an ebook so I could read it at my leisure while I was visiting my family in the US to fill a couple of my self-imposed reading quotas.

Now, writing this months later, I can say that Årsboken was…fine. As a concept for a short story collection, I like it: twelve stories, one for every month, vaguely seasonal or thematic somehow. But even if they were fine, competently executed stories, I didn’t really enjoy any of them. As I texted book buddy after I finished:

Otherwise it was a little underwhelming. He writes like this. Fragments. Like a telegram. Or a beginner driving a stick shift. Stop and go.

Honestly, even that much I don’t remember now, looking back. I had to scroll up in the conversation to find that quote. I still vaguely remember a couple of the stories, others I’m not sure if I’m mixing them up or blending them together somehow. Part of this could also be a Me problem: I don’t especially care for short stories as a form, full stop. Any short story collection is going to start at a disadvantage with me.

I’m not mad that I read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it, either.

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Does it count as professional narcissism if I want to read a book because it’s about translators?

I first saw an ad for The Extinction of Irena Rey in LitHub, though another bookish friend later mentioned enjoying it. But the only thing that made me add it to my list was translators! mystery! The author, Jennifer Croft, is also a translator of renown (Olga Tokarczuk’s  Flights, among others) and that only made the prospect even more tempting.

At its most basic, The Extinction of Irena Rey is about the search for missing Polish author Irena Rey. She’s always been very idiosyncratic about how her translators work, we learn, so this time is no different: she invites them to her house for a summit (as she calls it) and everyone works together to translate her latest work into their respective languages. They can’t talk about the weather, they can’t use their names, they can’t translate any other Polish author. There’s certainly a cult-like element to everything. This time around, however, the cult leader has mysteriously vanished. What to do?

This straightforward series of events is wrapped in multiple levels of metatext. The novel you as a person in the real world are reading is in English, of course, but within the world of the novel this is a translation into English from Polish that was (again, in the world of the novel) originally written by an Argentinian woman. Who just so happens to absolutely despise the translator. Oh, and the imaginary Polish original text is supposedly a fictionalized account of actual events!

This is where I have to regret that I fell so behind with my dorky little book reports here because I know there are a lot of things about the book that I’ve forgotten, in addition to the little scraps I remember but can’t find a place to shoehorn in here. It’s been several months now since I finished it. But I remember that I enjoyed every minute of it: it was weird and unhinged and just incredibly smart.