Tag: Swedish

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tordyveln flyger i skymningen

I once heard someone describe the experience of relocating to another country as “having a childhood that is now totally irrelevant.” The flip side of that coin is that you’re constantly playing catch-up with the childhood that most of the people around you share. Maria Gripe was part of that cultural catch-up for me. I’d never heard of her before I moved here, but weirdly enough no one mentioned her either. I only added her to my TBR list after a profile of her in a past issue of Historiskan, and when I brought home Tordyveln flyger i skymningen (“The Dor Beetle Flies at Dusk”) my partner was pleasantly surprised.

“I loved that one as a kid!”

Not enough to mention it to me, I guess?

Other books by Maria Gripe have come out in English but, as far as I can tell, this one hasn’t. Neither has the radio drama, and the new miniseries from SVT only has Swedish subtitles. Once again, I’m writing a book report in English about a book that’s not available to English readers.

One summer, three children in a fictional Småland village—siblings Annika and Jonas, and their friend David—discover a hidden cache of letters at the abandoned Selanderska house. With that a two-hundred-year-old history is uncovered that includes ancient Egyptian statues, curses, Carl Linneaus, unhappy love affairs, and psychic plants. There are discoveries and disappointments along the way, but in the end they come to a quiet but satisfying conclusion.

All of that would have been my jam as a tween, so it was a fantastic bit of escapism for me, a throwback to favorites like The Dark is Rising and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The only hiccup for me was the writing style: Gripe favors short, slightly choppy sentences with a profusion of exclamation marks, to the point where Child Me might have felt a bit condescended to. I felt the same way about books for children that didn’t use contractions, for example.

On a more positive note, much of the story is advanced through conversations and dialogue, and while that can get tiresome when poorly handled, in this instance it works. Tordyveln was originally conceived as a radio drama, after all, so that structure makes perfect sense. As an adult, and reading in a foreign language, I was also particularly interested in seeing how Swedish has changed over time. This wasn’t limited to specific words or slang, which of course cropped up—norms of etiquette were also different. Our protagonists soon enlist the help of the village priest*, and they always refer to him in the third person when speaking directly to him (“Vill farbror ha….?”). I don’t think that would be the case today, and I was a bit surprised to see it in something as recent as this.

And even if the language sometimes felt a bit oversimplified to me, an adult reading this middle grade fantasy novel, Gripe (and her co-creator, Kay Pollak) didn’t shy away from asking their readers to reflect on some pretty heady material. The book opens right away with a meditation on coincidences and chance and destiny; then, as more about Emilie and Andreas’s love story unfolds, Annika and David dig into surprisingly nuanced thoughts about feminism and gender roles in the 1700s. In a summary like this, I realize that sounds like it would come off as a bit precocious and moralizing, but in the story their commentary sounds like any conversation I could have had with a friend when I was sixteen. These are not the insufferable teenagers of a John Green novel.

Cute, cozy, but not at all cloying. A nice bit of new nostalgia for me.

Postscript: I pressganged my sambo into watching the new SVT miniseries with me. Later we found a statement from Gripe about how she was worried that a TV adaptation would strip the story of all of its more thoughtful, philosophical elements. Turns out she was right. I’ll close with a quote  from Pastor Lindroth near the end of the book that will sit in my head for a long time:

Och när jag nu tänker närmare på saken här, så tycker jag nog att ingen kan ta på sitt ansvar att döma sin egen tid. Det kallar jag högmod…Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

*Maybe pastor? I’m not sure which is the right title for clergy in the Swedish church.

Historiskan 1/25

The extended silence here was due to a train vacation throughout Europe—and as usual, another international trip meant time to catch up on my stack of periodicals. First up: Historiskan. Topics included:

  • The cover story about The Carter Family, the progenitor of country music as we know it today.
  • The lesbian girlboss and prolific diarist Anne Lister, who nonetheless remained a fervent Anglican Tory her entire life. The duality of man, or something.
  • Qiyan in the Umayyad Caliphate: women musician, composers and entertainers analogous (though not identical) to geisha.
  • Continuing on the music theme, the Swedish singer Ulla Billquist. Translating her Swedish Wikipedia page into English looks like a fun project for Future Me.
  • Women on board the doomed ship Vasa, including a few remains that were misidentified as men. Coincided neatly with an Australian friend’s visit to the Vasa Museum.
  • La Malinche, the enslaved Indigenous interpreter and consort of Hermàn Cortès.
  • The Soong sisters, which coincided relatively neatly with my reading of The Dragon’s Village. I’ve been meaning to follow that up with Wild Swans, maybe it’s finally time…
  • Tillie “the Terrible Swede” Anderson, a pioneering woman cyclist.
  • The Swedish non-profit organization Svalorna, which still operates today in Latin America and Bangladesh.

Om det regnar i Ahvaz

I fell a little bit in love with Nioosha Shams at Stockholms Litteraturmässan two years ago in a panel discussion on the phenomenology of reading. I added her only book to my TBR, one of the more recently published books to end up there.

I’m still in love with Shams, but Om det regnar i Ahvaz is not for me. The premise is simple: the first teenage heartache, pasted over that most exciting of times, graduation. And yes, since we’re talking about teenagers, this is squarely within Young Adult territory. Just to pick up a copy, I had to creep in to the Youths TM section of the library like an interloper, past the sternly-worded Official Rules explaining that in order to keep the space friendly for the Youths TM, no one over 25 was allowed to sit and linger in this space. Not an auspicious start, perhaps!

Since I’m an old, and not particularly romantic, the drama doesn’t hit the same. Our protagonist Ava falls in love with the (only slightly) older, glamorous Nadja, a summer love that unravels over the course of the book. Ava also has her two obligatory Teenage Shenanigan Besties, with whom she shares a rather wholesome and aspirational bond, and her younger brother who has been ensnared by a different glamor: gang life. This last point takes up the intermittent B plot, which I would have liked to see feature more prominently (or just have its own book?), I guess because I find stories about navigating familial relationships more interesting than romance.

But if I were a queer teenager, this would have no doubt been fun escapism. The story wasn’t for me, but Shams has a fantastic way with words and populates the book with fun and relatable (if highly idealized) characters.

Hemlös: med egna ord

I have mixed feelings about street papers as a solution for homelessness, but I still buy Situation Sthlm more often than not. It goes on the stack with the rest of my magazine subscriptions and then I read them all while I’m traveling, depositing them in seat pockets and airports as I go.

The most recent edition of Situation Sthlm, which I bought right before boarding a train to Norway, included a separate paperback anthology of the Med egna ord section of the magazine from 2015 to 2025—that is to say, writing from the magazine sellers themselves. It’s an interesting  collection to have, not least because it offers a more permanent space for writing than a monthly periodical.

Or, it almost does. The book is printed and bound like a proper paperback, all very professionally, but when you look closer you realize there’s no ISBN. Even the free copy of Bara ljuset kan besegra mörkret that I just randomly got in the mail one day has an ISBN, meaning it’s a registered entity in the larger bookseller ecosystem. How is this edition of Hemlös: med egna ord, never mind the previous two paperback anthologies, supposed to survive? No ISBN means you can’t hop on, say, adlibris.se and buy a copy two or three years after publication, if reading this blog post inspires you to buy it. One copy each of the 2008 and 2015 editions are available from the Stockholm public library, but that doesn’t feel like especially robust data security.

Not so permanent after all, perhaps.

The anthology consists of poetry or brief little biographical pieces and daily observations, so it’s not exactly citizen journalism. But it’s citizen literature, if such a concept exists—outsider art—and it would be a shame if it disappeared from the conversation because it wasn’t included in the system.

Ormens väg på hälleberget

This was another move in my last-ditch effort to reach my yearly “books I’ve owned for over a year” goal. I doubt I’ll reach twelve (two more by the end of the year? unlikely), but reaching ten is good enough for me. That’s a nice round number.

Ormens väg på hälleberget has a whole cultural cachet that I was unaware of when my mother-in-law gave me a copy. I had no idea about the movie, about Torgny Lindgren, about anything. I put off reading it for years because I knew it would probably be bleak and unrelenting. Not only judging by the blurb on the back of the book but by the fact that my mother-in-law has a taste for the bleak and unrelenting. I think the same mechanism that allows David Lynch to be a relatively normal—even pleasant and cheerful—person while making incredibly disturbing movies is at play in her personality, too.

No surprise, Ormens väg på hälleberget is indeed bleak and unrelenting! But it was also good that I put off reading it for so long, because the novel is written almost entirely in a nineteenth century dialect that would have been incomprehensible to me when I first received it nine or ten years ago.

The story follows Johan Johansson, or often just Jani, as he bears witness to the exploitation of his mother, his sister, and eventually his wife under the insatiable lust of the local merchant family, first the patriarch Ol Karlsa and then his son Karl Orsa. It would be easy for this kind of story to descend into overwrought melodrama, but Jani is so disassociated from what’s happening around him that the tone stays firmly tragic.

Beyond that I don’t think Lindgren needs a review from me. Ormens väg på halleberget is a modern classic, Lindgren was a member of the Swedish Academy, who am I to have anything interesting to say about his work. But if anyone is in the mood for something bleak and unrelenting, it’s available in English as The Way of the Serpent.

Merry Christmas!