Tag: humor

Döden och pingvinen

Nothing like book clubs for finding new books and keeping you on track for reading goals!

Andrey Kurkov’s Döden och pingvinen (Death and the Penguin) was the pick for my WhatsApp book club, a motley international crew put together by an American online acquaintance currently residing in Türkiye. She also happens to have a background in Russian literature, so between her own history and the diversity of geographies in the group, the selection ends up being pretty eclectic.

Döden och pingvinen is a satire and a farce, and was generally a fun relief from other books I had on the go at the same time (e.g. a revisit of Rien où poser sa tête, which deserves to be required reading in the face of ongoing ICE raids in the US). Viktor is a struggling writer in post Soviet Kyiv who suddenly finds himself with a new job: writing obituaries for still-living people of note. He also happens to own an emperor penguin named Misha. These two factors bring a whirlwind of new people into his life, but of course things quickly spiral out of control and Viktor eventually finds himself in the crosshairs.

A lot of the satire probably missed me since I’m not intimately familiar with the post-Soviet politics of Ukraine in the mid-90s. That knowledge might have provided some structure to the story; as it was, most of the time the story revolves around things just happening to Viktor. This works fine as satire—when absurd things happen to a straight-laced protagonist, there’s still narrative satisfaction to be had—but in the last act of the story, the satire takes a backseat to actual pathos. People have died (or are at least presumed dead), Viktor’s life is in danger, and an aura of menace hangs over his newly-found loved ones. In that kind of situation, the protagonist’s lack of action becomes more frustrating. There are also events in the first part of the book that have a foreshadowing aura, where you expect they will be part of a coming plot twist or complication, but nothing ever comes of them. When Döden och pingvinen is straight comedy, it’s fantastic, but when it starts to dip into spy thriller territory it gets slightly confused and deflating. The ending, too, is much more of a downer than the first several chapters would suggest. Black humor is definitely a thing, absolutely, but for me it wasn’t quite the same. I don’t want to get too into the weeds with that, though, because I consider it a spoiler.

It’s also not worth noting except in passing my deep, world-weary sigh at Viktor’s love interest. Another man approaching 40 who gets a “barely legal” ingenue dumped in his lap, as was the style at the time.

Most of us were in agreement that the book started off strong but that by the end we were the most concerned about what would happen with Misha the penguin. Good news for us, Kurkov wrote a sequel!

En man som heter Ove

I deeply resent that En man som heter Ove made me cry.

I’m inherently distrustful of media that makes me cry and my first instinct is always to take a step back and pick apart the story to see if it used any gimmicks or cheap tricks to manipulate me. (See, for example, Ali Smith’s Summer.) And while Fredrik Backman did a great job with strategically revealing the significant pieces of Ove’s backstory so that each moment hits with maximum impact, that’s good storytelling, not a cheap trick. Likewise certain story elements could have landed as overly melodramatic if the rest of the book wasn’t more or less farcical.

No, En man… hadn’t cheated to get those tears out of me. So why the resentment?

The book follows a man called Ove (quel surpris) in the weeks after being nudged into early retirement/laid off from his job. A chance accident with a car trailer and his mailbox gets him drawn into the lives of his new neighbors, and then gradually some of his older ones. In the process we flash back to the important episodes of Ove’s life up until that point, none of which I’ll go into detail here because they count as spoilers in my view. It’s not a spoiler, however, to note that the climactic point of conflict in the story is a faceoff between agents of the municipal social service authority on one side and Ove and his neighbors on the other. That’s when I had the thought: I wonder how Backman votes.

By that point in the book, it’s become clear that one of the consistent themes in the challenges Ove has faced in his life is “men in white shirts,” which function very clearly as a stand-in for the state. Which is fine and good; I’ve had my own very personal struggles with Swedish authorities and how they have either failed (from my perspective) to carry out their function or how they have enabled (again, from my perspective) individual bad actors to gatekeep access to resources that are essential for a decent quality of life.

However!

I’ve also had experiences where they (from my perspective) carried out their function, and in doing so furthered the best interests of myself or my loved ones. It has been, on the whole, a mixed bag of personal experiences.

The bag in En man… is not mixed; it’s uniformly pretty bad. Sometimes it’s a kind of bad that seems (sadly) pretty likely or reasonable, but other times it’s a kind of bad that made me raise a metaphorical eyebrow. Was it drawing from a lived experience, or was it drawing uncritically from the rumor mill about state overreach?

The biggest conflict out of all the “men in white shirts” conflicts is where a man in his 60s with pretty profound Alzheimer’s will spend the rest of his days: at home with his wife or institutionalized? For maximum drama, during this scene the Bad State Dude is present with three other assistants to (implicitly) physically overpower the elderly wife who wants to take care of her husband in their home herself. The state has a monopoly on violence, yes, yadda yadda yadda, but the intimidation here is so blatant that I had to wonder: in a real life version of this situation, is this how things would go?

(Contrast this scene with a recent story from Hem och hyra about how elderly individuals currently residing in regular apartments who apply for a spot in senior living facilities are often denied one, including people with severe dementia, Alzheimer’s, or depression. The state isn’t coming to kidnap people out of their homes but is rather refusing to let them move into one that they feel would be much more suitable.)

Backman also includes scenes with the inverse dynamics, so to speak: problems that could potentially be solved through the intervention of a state or municipal authority are instead addressed by individuals. The municipality refuses to build a wheelchair ramp at a school for one of the teachers, or to provide wheelchair adaptations for her kitchen, so Ove builds all of that himself. An abusive husband gets beaten up by Ove and another neighbor, after which the abuser just disappears out of his victim’s life forever, never to return*. After trying and failing to get problem tenants evicted, the same neighbor plants some narcotics on the property and then calls the cops. (I guess you can split that last one either way, since at the end of the day involving the police is a way of involving the state.)

*Rarely how it works out in real life situations of domestic violence!

It’s a bit like re-watching Ghostbusters with an adult’s political understanding and sensibilities: all those scenes with the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency have a tone that’s more than just comedy. Subtext and all of that.

That said, Sweden is not the US. A plot point (or recurring theme) in a novel about the uselessness, incompetence, or even malice, of municipal authorities maybe is less toxic or remarkable here because you don’t have the same years and years of toxic discourse in the culture. I’m not sure how all that works.

Therein lies the resentment, I suppose: the vague feeling that I got judo’d into agreeing with an implicit argument I wouldn’t have agreed with if it were presented more explicitly in something like an essay or opinion piece. That I had maybe fallen for a form of propaganda. The fact that I really liked the book despite myself.

Another contributing factor to the resentment for me is probably also the portrayal of Ove’s fat neighbor, Jimmy. While Ove’s fixation on the size of Jimmy’s body and constant narrative comment on it can be attributed to coming from a perspective character with certain beliefs about the world, it’s the author who chooses to portray Jimmy as constantly either eating or about to eat (and always too much, is the implication). This is presented as incidental comic relief, but it’s not particularly clever or original. None of the other secondary characters—the neighbors Ove ultimately comes to befriend—are reduced to such a flat trope, so Jimmy’s treatment feels out of place.

None of this is to be read like I think Backman has some kind of agenda with En man…, either. I emphatically do not. If he did, then the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good as it is because agendas ruin (most) books. But stories arise out of our beliefs about the world, from the grand to the banal, and there are enough recurring themes in this story that it makes me wonder if I can see the beliefs behind them. There’s even an extent to which I think I would probably agree with him in some of those beliefs. Way before I was ever wondering about Backman’s politics, I had the thought: is this the collective Swedish cultural fantasy? “This” being: wanting a friendly stranger to just land on your doorstep with nearly aggressive kindness and to forcibly include you in a social group.

It’s not at all surprising that En man… struck such a nerve with Swedes. Zakrisson mentions the book by name in Grannskapsrevolutionen and the research that she presents there supports the general background feeling in the novel: that the average person (Swede? Stockholmer?) feels isolated and lonely and disconnected from the people around them. And unlike some of the conflicts with the “white shirts” Ove has throughout the novel, the solution to that problem is maybe only possible at a grassroots, individual level. There’s no municipal authority that can come and declare by fiat that this or that collection of buildings is a community. Individual actors have to decide to say hello, or help change a bike tire, or whatever else. The happy ending of En man… no doubt reflects the world a lot of its readers wished they lived in, where they felt like part of a meaningful social network.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TEDtalk about a  goofy comedy novel that clearly didn’t deserve THIS much critical analysis.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann

Jonas Jonasson’s novels are hard to miss in Sweden, with their striking and consistent titles and cover designs. Yet at the same time they’re nearly invisible, fading into the background, precisely because they’re everywhere: the books that everyone’s read, to the point where it feels not at all urgent because at this point you’ll pick it up via cultural osmosis. So I never gave much thought to Hundraåringen beyond rescuing it from the junk pile at a friend’s apartment just to have it around—just in case—but promptly forgot about it, except to periodically confuse it with A Man Called Ove. What finally got me to pick it up was 1) a personal recommendation from a friend and 2) its appearance as Sweden’s entry in the EuroVision book contest.

“Finally, we’re releasing more than Nordic noir into the world,” I thought.

An SFI classmate years ago described Hundraåringen to me as “a Swedish Forrest Gump” and that just about covers it: 100-year-old Allan, as the title suggests, climbs out the window of his room at the senior home on the morning of his birthday because he’s just utterly fed up with living there. (If I’m reading later subtext correctly, it’s more an act of depression than adventure.) Things start happening as soon as he encounters a young man with a suitcase at the nearest bus station, and the adventure afterwards is interspersed with his life story, which is filled with some of the most significant events and people of the twentieth century. There Allan is in the margins of the Spanish civil war, the development of the atomic bomb, the downfall of the Soviet Union, and on and on it goes. Throughout all of this, Allan is phlegmatic and unflappable, escaping from political prisons and dispatching would-be criminals with fatalistic indifference.

Jonasson is careful—or thorough, maybe, is the better word?—to make use of every detail so that simple gags become essential plot elements. These moments would fall flat in a more serious or melodramatic story, and feel like deus ex machina, but because the whole story is farcical from beginning to end it instead becomes just a more elaborate joke, elevated from physical comedy to long-form setup and payoff.

From a translation perspective there are a couple words and jokes that I’m curious to see handled in English, so of course now I have to read it again in English. But by all accounts it seems to land well with English speaking readers.

The Best of Myles

Fresh out of college, I read At Swim-Two-Birds at the recommendation of a friend who went on a bit of an Irish literature kick after studying at Trinity College Dublin. Not long after that, I stumbled across The Best of Myles on a visit to The Strand in New York City; so well disposed was I to Brian O’Nolan that I added it to my basket. Plus it was an old, possibly original hardback edition (and pretty beat up at that), and I’m a sucker for old books.

And then it languished in my collection for something like thirteen years!

Push came to shove when an Irish co-worker moved into a new apartment. “Wouldn’t that make for a reasonably appropriate housewarming gift?” I thought. And then later, as I read it: “It certainly makes more sense in his library than in yours.”

Not that I didn’t enjoy it, or that it’s not funny, but I’m not Irish and I have yet to do an obsessive deep dive into Irish history*, so a good portion of the references were beyond me, including the occasional section written in Irish. Hardly surprising, considering that O’Nolan’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” column anthologized in the collection was written in both English and Irish.

An overall fun read, and a reminder that I should dip my toe back in the pool of O’Nolan’s novels. There aren’t that many, after all, so might as well read the entire collection.

*The universe seems to have heard my request in this matter and brought Fintan O’Toole as a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. I immediately put a hold on We Don’t Know Ourselves at the Stockholm library.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Sometimes the books we read transcend their mere bookishness in the world and become something akin to life milestones, mementos of a particular point in our lives. Under the Net is a fantastic book on its own, made all the more fantastic for me because I bought it at the now-defunct “What The Book?” in Seoul and read the bulk of it in Gimpo airport, hoping against hope that a seat would open up after I missed my initial flight to Jeju. (One did. I had a great time.) Naturally that specific copy that I own, with the handwritten note to the previous owner and a What The Book? receipt still in it, immediately transports me to South Korea in July 2012. But any discussion of that book in general, or Iris Murdoch generally, will also bring along memories of that time of my life.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Jerome K. Jerome is similarly of a specific time for me, though in a grimmer way. An acquaintance recommended it (another left field book) sometime in 2019 and close on to winter I was reading a free ebook version from Project Gutenberg on the subway to work. I remember closing the ereader app and pocketing my phone as I came up the stairs of Hötorget, dawn only just getting started, everything still half-dark. I remember pulling my phone out on my way home in the evening and dashing off a quick message to them to say, Thanks for the rec, this is hilarious! before opening the ereader app back up for the return trip.

And then I didn’t have many commutes for a long time after that, for some reason!

I also forgot about Idle Thoughts for a long while, though whether that’s because of Covid or because of my own distractability is hard to say. Here I am, three years later, and I finally finished it, and now the book has become emblematic of my journey through coronatider.

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. I have a good memory for a lot of things, but I would be hard pressed to summarize the entire collection and tell you which essays I finished before Covid, which during, and which after (if you want to say that there’s an after, which is debatable). Another book that needs no review, no introduction, no hype; Jerome has earned his place in English literary history. But for all of that historicity, reading Idle Thoughts today feels surprisingly fresh and relevant. Plus ça change.