Tag: novels

Grupp Krilon

Eyvind Johnson’s Group Krilon went on my TBR after I stumbled onto a panel about him at last year’s Stockholms Litteraturmässan. An anti-Nazi allegory and condemnation of Sweden’s policy of neutrality during WWII? Writing allegorical fiction to circumvent censorship in the press? Sign me up!

And yet, Grupp Krilon would have languished on my TBR for a good while longer if the Storygraph TBR challenge I signed up for in  January didn’t include a prompt about reading the first book in a series. Given the other prompts, and what seems to be fair assumptions to make about the reading habits of most of the people using Storygraph or Goodreads, this prompt seemed to be an acknowledgement of more recent popular fiction, seemingly endless series of novels as constant content. The total opposite of what I usually read, in other words—especially with the break up of the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, which had been one of the few tethers I had to new books. We read the first book in a few series that I either continued reading (A Memory Called Empire, Gideon the Ninth) or intend to continue reading (Ancillary Justice).

Did I have anything to fit the bill I had added to my TBR myself, though?

As I scrolled through, I saw in small text under the title that Grupp Krilon was labeled “Krilon #1”. Bingo! Not necessarily the kind of book the creator had in mind with the prompt, probably, but what did that matter for me?

On a plot level, Grupp Krilon circles around a group of friends in Stockholm during World War II. The original core of the group is the protagonist Krilon and Hovall, who meet on a streetcar and then strike up a friendship at the tobacco and newspaper stand. Other men are quickly drawn into their company: first Minning, a widowed carpenter who Hovall was on his way to meet when he crossed paths with Krilon; then the cousins Odenarp and Arpius, the builder Frid, and the surgeon Segel. They meet every Sunday to discuss heady and important topics, a rotating dinner club.

One Sunday evening, on the way home from such a meeting, Frid has a moment straight out of “Once in a Lifetime” (this is not my beautiful house! this is not my beautiful wife!) and decides to retreat to the summer cabin he’s been restoring to contemplate the anxieties of his ascendancy into the middle class. He sneaks out without telling his wife, she panics and calls Krilon. Not the police—she doesn’t want to involve them. Krilon calls the rest of the group and decides to organize a search effort.

The search effort is half-hearted at best. Things come up for some of the members: Arpius is out of town, Segel’s ex-wife Ann needs emergency surgery, Minning’s daughter has been kidnapped. Odenarp and Hovall make a search of different neighborhoods, while Krilon stays at home to call around, including (I assume) the private detective firm he’s hired. Frid, meanwhile, has two squatters living in his cabin. Even Odenarp and Hovall have such bizarre experiences on that first night of searching that their allegiance to Krilon is sorely tested.

Because Krilon, as it turns out, has enemies. And they’re not above trying to work through Krilon’s friends to get to him. (Remember the kidnapping?)

A few days go by, but Frid eventually sends a note to his wife explaining the situation, and the search is called off. Whether because of the rumors or personal crises, Krilon’s friends have just about decided they’re tired of this friendship, or at least his friendship. Even though Krilon can sense this, he tries to rally everyone again to intervene in the case of the wildly depressed Segel, who has just lost Ann. They refuse; Krilon tries on his own and is immediately rebuffed. A few days later Segel kills himself.

This news prompts Krilon to make a last ditch effort to get the gang back together. He writes Hovall, his first and oldest friend, to explain that the men should continue meeting, even if they vote Krilon out; but can’t they at least meet one last time to get this all straightened out? Hovall passes the message along to the other men, and they all agree for one more meeting at Krilon’s. One by one, the members of “grupp Krilon” turn up, telling Krilon not to expect anyone else. No one wants to admit to anyone else that they’re going to visit their old friend, it appears.

They hold a last meeting, where Hovall formally lays out their complaints and charges against Krilon. He’s been a busybody, he’s put them in uncomfortable or even dangerous situations, he’s refusing to change with the times, etc. Krilon responds to these charges and makes a plea for their friendship, and in the end the group resolves to meet without Krilon and take the matter of his membership to a vote. They promise to let him know by ten o’clock in the evening a following day (maybe the next day). In the very last scene of the book, Krilon is wandering around Stockholm in the early spring while he waits for the result of the vote, contemplating nature and noting topics for discussion “in case I am allowed back, otherwise I shall mention it to Hovall.”

What a cliffhanger!

Given that ending, and that the whole trilogy was published in a single volume in 1948, one wonders if there was a Lord of the Rings style publishing decision there. “No one’s going to read this huge tome in one sitting, Johnson. Let’s split it up.” Even Grupp Krilon, the first book, is 500 pages.

The above 600 word summary still only skates over the absolute surreal weirdness the story takes, the sheer paranoia. Krilon, it seems, has crossed paths with everyone in the book. Random strangers that Krilon’s friends meet during Frid’s disappearance have dramatic stories about this or that man they remember, who did this fantastic or horrible thing, and of course the big reveal is that this man’s name was…Krilon. In another book it might be too much to take, but because other things get so weird, it makes sense. Especially considering the extremely clearly allegorical nature of the book as well.

A screenshot from "Garth Marenghi's Dark Place," with Matthew Holness in yellow-tinted aviators and a leather jacket with slicked-back hair as his Garth Marenghi character. At the bottom is the closed caption text, "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards"

The book definitely starts off slow, with a deliberate attention to details in Krilon’s appearance and landscape that I initially found to be a hard slog. Not because of the writing itself, since it has a rhythm and a lyricism to it; rather it was because books today (or at least books I’ve read recently) move at a snappy, breakneck pace. Where are the careful, lingering descriptions of yesteryear? But Krilon is the central figure, and it’s important for the reader to have clear idea of how moral, thoughtful, considered (even how lagom) Krilon is, so Johnson takes his time. While the urgency of the book picks up soon afterwards, I think my focus also reset early on and I was able to get lost in a slower, more thoughtful pace.

Grupp Krilon  was the “Stockholm Reads” pick in 2018 and came out in an appropriate paperback edition for the occasion, the cover you see in the image at the top with dark purple Stockholm landscape and the author and title in bright yellow. It also has this quote underneath that perfectly encapsulates what the book is driving at, what Johnson wants to say:

“The world is so dark now,” said Krilon. “It is of the utmost importance that people gather together in groups and speak openly with each other, without lying; that they seek the truth without giving any thought to the threat of punishment, or the tempting promise of rewards of gold and honor.”

It hits harder when you actually get to the quote. Krilon is begging Segel to see him, if not to talk about anything then at least attend a concert or otherwise spend some time together. But Segel can only think of Ann’s upcoming surgery, and Krilon’s plea goes unanswered:

“What’s everyone else doing, do you know? Do you know why they’re drifting away now, when the world needs them?”

“No,” Segel replied tersely, “I don’t know.”

Heartbreaking in 1941, heartbreaking in 2018, heartbreaking in 2026.

To my absolute astonishment, Grupp Krilon has yet to be translated into English. For that you’ll have to be content with Return to Ithaca (maybe timely now with Nolan’s version of The Odyssey in theaters?) and The Days of His Grace.

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger,  the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Kyra Kyralina

This was an international WhatsApp book club pick because Panait Istrati seems like an interesting guy, and Kyra Kyralina specifically occupies a niche as the first Romanian novel with a gay protagonist and the first novel in Istrati’s Adrian Zografi cycle. A landmark novel in many respects.

Landmarks aren’t necessarily a fun read, however, and it was a struggle to grasp what Istrati was trying to do. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts, but with a rather disjointed chronology and a lack of interiority. Despite the book’s inclusion in the Adrian Zografi cycle, here Adrian is only a side character. Kyra Kyralina is really the story of Stavro, né Dragomir, as told to Adrian on different occasions over the stretch of several years. The first section focuses on Stavro’s most recent past: the story of his unhappy marriage. The second section then goes all the way back to Stavro’s earliest childhood, and the third and final section fills in the gap between that childhood and the unhappy marriage. The first two sections are narrated rather close in time to each other, with only a few days in between. Adrian doesn’t hear the last section until several years later when he happens to meet Stavro in Egypt.

To put it chronologically: Stavro was born in Braila, Romania, and spent his earliest days with his mother and sister, the titular Kyra. They were wealthy largely due to his mother’s inheritance, though his father and older brother ran a very successful wagon business. The latter two eventually move to the other side of the city to be closer to the wagon workshop, but they periodically make visits to the other home. In their absence, Stavro’s mother and Kyra live the good life, dressing up and hosting parties full of dance and music, attended by young suitors. Young Stavro’s job is to keep a lookout for his father and brother, so the suitors have time to escape out a back window. During these visits home, and just about every day before relocating to the other side of the city, Stavro’s father beats his mother.

The turning point comes when Stavro’s mother decides to throw the party to end all parties, perhaps because she can sense that things are about to take a turn for the worse, or perhaps because she has some kind of death wish. Either way, it turns out as she expects and Stavro’s father beats her within an inch of her life, blinding her in one eye. Kyra is locked in a wardrobe and Stavro taken back to the other house by the workshop. He manages to escape and to rescue Kyra and his mother, and they flee Braila.

Stavro is around twelve years old at this point.

Stavro’s mother leaves him and his sister in the care of her brothers while she seeks medical treatment for her eye and disfigurement. That’s the last we see of her, and given her declaration that she was determined to kill herself if she ever lost her beauty or ability to enjoy life, it’s safe to assume that she takes her life at some point off screen.

Kyra, meanwhile, immediately spurs their uncles into avenging the violence enacted on the family, and the uncles agree. Their older brother is killed in the ambush, but their father escapes and Stavro and his sister are sent to a safehouse. It doesn’t take long for them (or for Kyra, at least) to get bored with their new life, and they are soon kidnapped. Their kidnapper sells Kyra to a harem (which is only mentioned in an aside), while Stavro remains with him as, it is heavily implied, a sex slave.

(So ends section two.)

He manages to escape after a few years and immediately sets about Istanbul looking for his mother and his sister, to no avail. It doesn’t take long for another creepy old man to abduct Stavro, luring him in with false promises of helping to find his family only to once again keep him as a sex slave. More years pass and Stavro once again manages to escape, get some papers (this is the point where he becomes Stavro rather than Dragomir), and then get robbed. One day he ends up in Damascus, and sees a cart pass with a woman who looks rather like Kyra. Stavro tries to get her attention, following the cart all the way to a villa. He’s denied entry, of course, and that’s where an elderly salep vendor finds him and takes him in. They spend many happy years together, even after Stavro serves a stint in prison and is exiled from the city, until the older man’s death.

(So ends section three.)

Stavro ends up in Bucharest, a sort of itinerant merchant and maybe still selling salep. He boards with a family for a while and becomes infatuated with their daughter, telling her stories of his travels. This escalates until they are engaged to be married, but tradition dictates that newlyweds are obligated to prove that the marriage has been consummated (by means of some bloodied sheets). Stavro cracks under the pressure to perform, and under the pressure of his own presumed homosexuality, and promptly faints and then falls ill. His wife is understanding and compassionate about it, and the community at first see him as an invalid, potentially the subject of a curse. But days, weeks, months go by without any sex, and their patience runs thin. Stavro is once again a prisoner of sorts. Neither he nor his wife are permitted to leave the house, and Stavro in particular has become persona non grata in their quarter of Bucharest. The couple makes plans to leave the city, since they’re still otherwise happy and fond of each other and can imagine a life together. Then, mere days before their escape, his brothers in law find an old traveling companion of Stavros, presumably also a lover, who immediately outs Stavro. (Every translation in the WhatsApp book club seemed to use an interrupted slur for a gay man in this reveal. In Swedish it was rendered as “b—”, presumably short for “bög.”) The escape plans come to nothing, Stavro is driven out of the house, and his bride drowns herself in the river.

(So ends section one.)

The framing device is Stavro’s invitation to Adrian to come help him and another man, Mikhail (I think) sell watered-down citric acid as lemonade in another distant town. Adrian has encountered Stavro somewhere out in town, and we get our first impression of the man: a tragic figure, a bit of a buffoon but intentionally so, someone who is hiding something. His scheme requires some kind of go-between and he thinks Adrian is right for the job. On their first night on the road, the three men spend the night in a hayloft and Stavro makes an attempt to seduce, or at least fondle, Adrian. Adrian is a bit naive, while the worldly Mikhail knows immediately what Stavro is trying to do and berates him for it. By way of apology, Stavro then begins his tale of woe, as if to explain why he has become such a creature so burdened with vice. (“Vice” is the specific word used in the Swedish translation, at least, and is used again and again by Stavro to describe himself and by others to describe him.)

Stavro is a tragic figure. Any joy, any pleasure, any human connection he’s ever had is almost immediately tainted with tragedy. That much is clear. But it’s hard to situate Stavro in a narrative. We don’t see a progression from naive to embittered, or ignorant to more worldly. The inside-out chronology means that the book ends in the middle of Stavro’s life, a very deliberate narrative choice that immediately invites speculation. Why does this episode have such an ultimate ring of finality to it?

Putting aside the larger question of the disjointed timeline, it’s hard to like Stavro. It’s hard to like any of the people we’re supposed to feel sorry for. Yes, Stavro’s father is a petty, violent tyrant, but his mother and sister come across as party girls with no interest in taking care of themselves. Of course I’m reading Kyra Kyralina through a different lens than the original audience, in a different social context, but the way that Stavro’s mother insists that she is a creature made to enjoy luxury, love, pleasure, and that she cannot be other than what she is hits a sour note for me. I managed to find an English translation of exactly the passage I’m thinking of:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow.

From the blog seraillon, who seemed to like Kyra Kyralina a lot more than I did.

Other places describe the story as a picaresque, but it’s hard to read consistently getting kidnapped and imprisoned by different abusers as a picaresque, since much of the time Stavro is confined and not meeting that many people or having that many adventures. Stavro himself isn’t particularly interesting, either. Things happen to him, but we only get surface level emotions in response.

There is also a question of version and translation: Istrati wrote the original in French, but then rewrote it and completely reworked it in Romanian. The Swedish translation, judging by the translator (Barbro Andersson), was from the Romanian version rather than the French. One wonders how much was different between the two versions.

Yellowface

R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was big and splashy in my circles when it debuted. It was one of the few new releases that I actually noticed, though it appears I didn’t take the step of adding it to my TBR. Alas, it won’t count for that goal!

Someone in my Swedish book club floated the idea of R. F. Kuang, though torn between this one and Babel. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I pushed for Yellowface out of the two, based purely on the opinions of other bookish friends whose taste I trust implicitly. I say “ashamed” because I’m not sure I liked Yellowface all that much and wonder if Babel would have been more interesting.

Juniper “June” Hayward is a struggling White author with one flop of a novel under her belt; her Chinese-American Yale classmate Athena Liu is a literary rockstar. When Athena chokes to death on a pancake after the women go out for drinks, June takes the opportunity to steal her latest novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War I. June revises the manuscript and sends it off to her agent, passing it off as entirely her own work. The final product, The Last Front, is a runaway bestseller—maybe in part because June capitalizes on her connection to Athena, blowing their ambiguous frienemyship entirely out of proportion. Her publisher, meanwhile, decides to publish under the name Juniper Song and shoots some new, racially ambiguous author photos. June becomes a darling of the literati and the online AAPI community, setting up scholarships, mentoring aspiring writers, getting retweeted on Twitter and liked on Instagram.

The facade doesn’t last, of course, and accusations of plagiarism eventually make the rounds, but rather than come clean June doubles down. She rides out the scandal in the short term, but after she publishes a follow-up novella called Mother Witch that opens with a line she gleaned from Athena’s old notebooks, there’s no way out. While she struggles to revise and rewrite the novel without the plagiarized lines, spooky messages on social media convince June that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost. The campaign continues until June spirals out into a mental breakdown that ends with her recorded confession being released to the public. Her reputation now in tatters, June ends the book by plotting her literary revenge: a tell-all confessional memoir where she frames the publication of The Last Front as an elaborate hoax to expose how misogynistic and racist the publishing industry is.

Yellowface feels like a punching bag of a story for the sake of a few moments. By that I mean, it feels like Kuang had some points she wanted to make, and built the premise of the novel and the entirety of June’s character around creating the opportunity to make those points. The result is that when Kuang gets to have those moments in the story, the criticism is sharp, on point, and biting, such as her account of June and her editor—two White women—revising a story by a Chinese-American woman to include more (good) White people, or the fickle nature of the Twitterati. But the only reason those moments can happen is because, after the initial (understandable if morally icky) theft, June continues to make incredibly poor choices that defy all logic or sense of self-preservation. She flatly refuses to send The Last Front to a sensitivity reader for no other reason than it might delay publication; she keeps the plagiarized opening line in Mother Witch. Maybe this speaks to my own risk-averse nature, but if I knew I was already skating on thin moral and artistic ice, I would do everything I could to cover my ass.

All the while, since this is from a first-person perspective, we’re getting June’s unfiltered inner monologue, and it really seems like the point of the perspective is to make it clear to the reader how entitled and clueless she is, even as a White woman with “good” politics. (“I even voted for Biden!” she assures us early on.) I won’t say these people don’t exist, because they do, but June feels more like a low-effort caricature of them than anything else, which she has to be for the story to work. Without giving away too much of a plot twist, refusing the sensitivity reader is a plot-essential event that contributes to her downfall. But then there are other scenes where Kuang really, really nails what it’s like to struggle with a passion, an art that used to bring you joy but is now just DOA. She also makes it clear that June has some real mental health issues, with a past that includes sexual assault and (it sounds like) childhood bullying. If these scenes are meant to humanize June and provide some depth to the caricature, they feel weird next to the scenes where Kuang’s disdain for people like her just radiates off the page. June doesn’t feel like a more complex character for it; she just feels inconsistent.

I have to admit, for a minute I was hoping that the third act twist would be the slow reveal that Yellowface itself, the book you’re reading, is the tell-all confessional that June was planning to write. A meta ending like that would have done a lot to gloss over the failings of the filler. But Kuang doesn’t go there (I don’t think? maybe I missed some subtext) so I was left disappointed.

Obviously, a lot of the plot rides on June skirting the moral line of presenting as AAPI, or at least AAPI-adjacent. The title alone makes that clear. But I’m racking my brain to think of any equivalent scandal in recent literary news, of a White author passing as some flavor of AAPI to sell their novel because of its connections to AAPI culture. Expanding the field a bit, you get noteworthy racefaking cases like Rachel Dolezal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and the “Gay in Damascus” blogger, but none of them are masquerading specifically as AAPI or to sell a novel. If you start from the published author angle instead of the racefaking one,  James Frey made up a whole bunch of stuff for A Million Little Pieces, but he never pretended to be anyone other than James Frey. There was the big plagiarism brouhaha over Jumi Bello’s The Leaving in 2022, but again no racefaking. The only case I can think of that resembles June’s literary yellowface is from over a hundred years ago: Winnifred Eaton writing as Onoto Watanna, producing books like A Japanese Nightingale. Still, her writing was her own work, even if it she was still a British-Chinese woman writing about Japan, a country she had no personal connection to or had ever visited. Am I just out of the loop?

A Brief History of Seven Killings

There is a lot of discussion about A Brief History of Seven Killings in the translation world because the first and biggest decision to make when translating it is: how do you render Jamaican Patois in other languages? It isn’t used incidentally, like in other Caribbean literature I’ve read before, for snippets of dialogue or occasional idiomatic expressions; Marlon James employs the dialect for the overwhelming majority of this 600+ page book. Putting aside the question of sheer weighty wordcount majority, the shifts between Patois and standard English are important pieces of characterization. Each perspective character has their own voice, of course, but even a single character will slip from one to the other depending on who they’re talking to and how they’re feeling. An educated middle-class character sometimes switches to Patois for her inner monologue under extreme emotional duress; others play it up as a racial performance in order to appeal to powerful white Americans and get what they want. These are deliberate choices by the author to convey…something…that falls flat if you were to make it literal or textual.

I don’t know to do it! I won’t pretend to know! But that makes A Brief History one of the rare books published since 2000 that I’m actually vaguely aware of, and so I was excited to see this book proposed for my international WhatsApp book club. I fell behind, however, and only finished this sometime in mid-June even though it was May’s book—probably because I was still making a heroic effort to finish Jag heter inte Miriam.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, or maybe to put it more precisely, Marlon uses the assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a framing device for a story about Jamaica, Jamaicans, and their relationship to the United States that spans the course of fifteen years. Getting into any more plot than that would miss the point, because it’s less what happens and more how characters develop and inadvertently shape their destinies over the course of the book. In a way, plot is only incidental and is an excuse to bring together a particular ensemble cast that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Djinns

Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns was another selection for my international WhatsApp book club. We have a lot of Turkish and German (and expats in Turkey and Germany) representation, so a German novel about a Turkish family in Germany was a logical choice.

Djinns is a quasi-multigenerational story, where each member of a Turkish nuclear family living in Germany stars in their own sections. The book starts with the father, Hüseyin, who has finally retired and moved to Istanbul, to the new apartment he’s managed to purchase through years of hard work and meticulous savings and where he imagines his family’s future happiness. From there we spend a section with each of the children (Umit, Peri, Hakan, and Sevda) and end with the mother (Emine). That’s a very dry description of a very involved, serious, sensitive book, but any more details than that and I would spoil the whole thing. It’s a masterpiece, and the English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi is very thoughtfully done, with a foreword on various racialized terms and slang as well as a glossary of untranslated Turkish (and possibly also Kurdish?) terms in the back.

The Turkish-Kurdish owner and bartender at my local watering hole is probably around the same age as Hüseyin. He’s hospitable and very chatty, and if you show up with any regularity, you get to know him pretty quickly. His wife and kids are a recurring topic, and they must be about the same age as their counterparts in Djinns. They’re also a recurring topic between myself and my Njals saga book buddy and fellow patron: what’s it like to grow up as a secular Swede with a father like Ali, we wonder. What’s it like to be married to be married to him?

So I wonder if the secrets and relationships in Djinns are something Ali and his family would recognize. From my perspective, Aydemir captures how the tension between two cultures exacerbates the normal stresses and conflicts that arise in any family. No-No Boy is a comparison that comes to mind. But without that lived experience, of course, it’s hard for me to say for sure.

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.

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.