Stöld

Stöld was another pick from the neighborhood book club, which I joined in order meet my neighbors and to ensure some kind of minimum Swedish reading level in my annual book consumption (25% I decided was a good, if arbitrary, goal).

Stöld by Ann-Helen Laestadius
Image courtesy Romanus & Selling

Swedish book club stayed on brand for this one: rather grim reading (animal cruelty and hate crimes) and literally dark, set as it is in the north of Sweden, largely during the winter. I have to admit that I wasn’t exactly hyped for this selection, but in the end I came out enjoying it, or at least not angry that I read it.

Stöld focuses on Elsa, a young Sami reindeer herder, and her struggle to carve out a space for herself among Samis and Swedes alike. This struggle is centered in one particular conflict: that with the book’s antagonist, Robert Isakson. Isakson’s harassment of Elsa in particular and the Sami community at large is the arena where most of the story plays out and whence the smaller conflicts arise. Is it worth it for Samis to try to turn to the local police for protection? Should they take matters into their own hands? What kind of relationship should they try to have with Swedes? Differences of opinions here underscore smaller, gender-based conflicts Elsa has with her own community, one that expects her to eventually become a housewife when she loves nothing more than being out with the reindeer.

The book fell down for me in narrative execution. There are small things Laestadius does that are often used in other genres as tricks to build towards certain kind of plot twists or reveals—that Isakson is actually a red herring of a suspect, or that a key death in Elsa’s social group was a murder, or the result of criminal negligence, rather than a suicide—but everything is played straight. The bad guy is the bad guy. The suicide is a suicide. The result is that the story feels a bit hollow; a bit shallow. I suppose that’s my fault for coming into this with vague expectations of “Nordic noir, but with reindeer herders.”

Isakson in particular isn’t a particularly satisfying antagonist. Laestadius gestures weakly at how the same system that fails Elsa is failing Isakson as well, and at how toxic masculinity and small-town snobbery (where everyone knows every other family’s business, and has known it for generations) have robbed him of a fulfilling life. Nonetheless, it doesn’t account for the levels of sheer cruelty Isakson reaches, and as a result he feels a bit flat and mustache-twirling.

But what the story lacked, the writing made up for. Laestadius captured a mood very well, where the point wasn’t how predictable or tense the story would be (I appreciate that none of the chapters end on cliffhangers) but more to illustrate “here is a distillation of what this life is like, more or less.” And to that end, I understand why Stöld won Bonniers’ Book of the Year Award for 2021. I’ve certainly read worse, so I’m not mad.

Vänligen Bygg Ingen Berg

Remember Instapoetry?

My arch tone assumes that Instapoetry is dead, and I hope it is. No one seems to have written a thinkpiece about it since 2019—maybe I’m lucky.

My one-sentence review of Lina Arvidsson’s Vänligen bygg inga berg: Swedish Instapoetry about working as a supermarket cashier.

Cover of Vänligen bygg inga berg
Image courtesy Konsai Förlag

I read an interview with Arvidsson alongside one of the poems from the collection in a magazine who knows how many years ago now and thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” I never made any concerted effort to track it down, but the title stuck enough in my head that I recognized it in the library’s shelf of featured books. In other words, I was going into the collection more or less favorably inclined.

But what works as an individual poem quickly becomes monotonous in an entire collection. Part of the blame is maybe on me; maybe I should have read slower and tried to savor more. Maybe that would have stopped all of the untitled, open-verse, e. e. cummings-esque lowercase poems from bleeding into each other. At the same time, not giving any titles to your poems is also a choice, and not a useful one when someone wants to highlight a particular favorite. But I’ll do my best anyway, since it would be nice to end on a positive note.

Så kommer den natten när jag drömmer om dig.

Och det är inget hemskt du sitter vid
toaletterna
till höger om stämpelklockan
ryggen emot men jag ser direkt på håret att det
är du
Fanny
du hade alltid en perfekt page
När du vänder dig om ser jag: du håller på med
något en flaska
är det hallonsoda? rosa
ja
drinker vi ska ju dricka drinkar

Snacka lite
tjata lite

det är en förfest eller kanske är det det här
som är festen

man får väl inte dricka alkohol här? du ler
med hela ansiktet säger
det skiter jag faktiskt i

och när jag kramar dig är det verkligen du

jag hade aldrig fattat tidgare
men man behöver ju inte ben
eller fötter
närman är död

eller nacke
eller rygg
du har rätt

det gör man ju inte.

Flera gånger ska jag komma att drömma om dig
och det är aldrig hemskt
du ler alltid ja man skiner ju upp

snacka lite bara
komma på besök