Tag: Swedish

Karavan: Alla dessa trådar

The theme for issue 2/2024 of Karavan was “text och textil,” which led to an interesting mix of fiction focused on textiles as well as how textiles have functioned as vehicles of meaning and narrative.

This issue’s author interview was with Nicaragua’s Sergio Ramírez, and as a result two more books ended up on my TBR (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea and The Sky Weeps for Me). You don’t usually see commercial genre fiction like mystery thrillers get a lot of discussion space in fancy literature circles (unless they’re Raymond Chandler) so I’m especially curious to see what The Sky Weeps for Me is like. Maybe an exception was made because Ramírez was very clear in the interview that the genre was the best tool he had for conveying political upheaval as he wanted to. Who knows! The other big author feature was a memorial piece on Maryse Condé, who passed away earlier this year. Luckily for me, several of her books are available at the Stockholm library, including a few in the original French.

This issue’s Diary of a Translator feature was from Anna Gustafsson Chen, who is at work on a Swedish translation of Liu Qing’s History Through Words. History is a sprawling novel of political upheaval in 1920s and 1930s Manchuria, so Chen describes her dive into Chinese advertisements, propaganda posters, and the numerous anti-Japanese resistance movements of the time.

The long-form reviews included  a pair of novels from Benjamín Labatut, Shehan Karunatilaka’s extremely hyped and much-lauded The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and a few novels from César Aira. The Labatut review was pretty lukewarm, but I’ve heard a lot about Seven Moons in a lot of different places, so I could be tempted into picking that one up. Aira’s novels were also pretty well reviewed and the one that sounded the most interesting ended up on my TBR. Less a review and more of a news item was a brief piece on the publication of letters between some of the titans of Latin American literature in a collection called Las Cartas del Boom. Interesting to note but currently only available in Spanish, so not much I can do there!

None of the shorter reviews caught my interest, though apparently The Three Body Problem has finally come out in Swedish! (Translated by Anna Gustafsson Chen from the earlier “Diary of a Translator” segment.) The state of science fiction and fantasy published in Swedish, whether originally or in translation, is a bit anemic so it’s encouraging to see huge titles like this get a Swedish release. Less encouraging that it only came out in 2024 (the original was published in 2006; the English translation came out in 2014), but more encouraging again that it’s a translation directly from Mandarin rather than indirectly via the English.

The themed selections took a surprisingly wide and educational tack. The first was a revised and expanded essay from Maria Küchen, originally broadcast on OBS P1, on weaving, stories, and memory: the Andean record-keeping knots known as khipu that we no longer know how to interpret, Malian bógólanfini, the core rope memory that helped send American astronauts to the moon, death shrouds from Windover pond.

The next piece was another author memorial, this time in the form of an interview with author Ericah Gwetai about her late daughter Yvonne Vera, also a writer. Karolina Jeppson visited Gwetai at her home in Zimbabwe to discuss Vera, sewing her own clothing, and the similarities between writing and weaving. Vera’s The Stone Virgins also ended up on my TBR.

The third piece finally delves into literature, with a short story from Karavan favorite Xi Xi, translated into Swedish as “Blusen”: a fantastic monologue from a cotton blouse to its new owner. Karavan features a lot of poetry from Xi Xi that I’ve struggled to enjoy (including this issue), but this little story was a gem and I loved it! Unfortunately, it’s unclear if the collection it was taken from has been translated in its entirety yet, so…that’s all, folks. The final Xi Xi piece in this issue was a collection of teddy bears Xi Xi designed and sewed herself, based on figures out of Chinese history and stories, selected from The Teddy Bear Chronicles.

Back to nonfiction, this time with an essay and artist statement from Marcia Harvey Isaksson. She combines weaving with performance art, and I’m disappointed that I’ve missed some of her most interesting installations.

Some more poetry, this time from Tamer Fathy’s poetry collection Yesterday I Lost A Button. All of the poems are from the perspective of clothing; one of the ones featured in Karavan is available in English: “When Clothes Were Small.”

The next short story was “Mattan,” from Narine Abgarjan, which was so good that I immediately put Abgarjan’s full-length novels on my TBR.

More weaving and multimedia art, this time from Eva Vargö‘s collection of paper weaving. It shouldn’t surprise me that people weave with paper, but there you go. Vargö goes into some detail about the differences in different kinds of paper, and focuses a lot on traditional paper materials from Japan and Korea.

Usually I skip the children’s literature sections, but this time it caught my eye: an interview with Christian Epanya about his latest book, Les rois de la sape, a picture book about sapeurs and La SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes). La sape is a cross between a fashion trend and a social movement originating in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville that has become a part of the larger African diaspora, usually compared to dandyism. It’s even been codefied (somewhat) into, for example, ten commandments of La SAPE.  While I don’t have any particular reason to read the book, the article did send me down a fascinating rabbithole and I learned something new.

The education continued with an article from Tina Ignell on different forms of dying and patterns in textiles, from shibori in Japan and bandhani in West Bengal to grave goods in Peru and neckerchiefs in Mora, Sweden.

The next short story from Irenosen Okojie was a Swedish translation of “Synsepalum” by Birgitta Wallin. I don’t know that I cared for it much, but that might have been a matter of translation, so I’m glad that Minor Literature has the English original up for free for comparison.

The final piece on the textiles theme was an essay by Lars Vargö on costumes in kabuki and noh theater, and how their use reflects the different theatrical styles and traditions.

Solid issue! Too many books! Can’t hug every cat!

Grannskapsrevolution

A vacation is never complete without a book purchase! At my WWOOF host’s recommendation, my roommate and I dropped in to shop at the varuhall in Orsa while he went to pick up the sailboat for winter storage. The artisanal and tourist goods on display included copies of Grannskapsrevolution; if memory serves there was a sign about how it was a book from a local author. The topic matter was also relevant to a lot I’ve been thinking about recently, including my personal projects outside of work, so it seemed like a natural choice for a souvenir.

Author Lina Zakrisson works as a social sustainability consultant focused on helping various stakeholders (residents, property owners, etc.) create stronger, more vibrant local communities. Grannskapsrevolution is thus a combination of manifesto, marketing, and DIY guide on just that topic—she makes an explicit point of highlighting her consulting work, though you still get plenty of tips and information for your money without any scummy “sign up for my course to learn more” sales pitches. But Grannskapsrevolution seems like a condensed version of Melody Warnick’s This is Where You Belong tailored to a Swedish (Stockholm?) target demographic, so reviewing it in English feels a bit pointless. I’ll just wrap up by saying that I expect my copy will be circulating among the board members of my local buy-nothing association and by highlighting what was the most memorable anecdote in the book for me:

One of Zakrisson’s neighbors ran into her while she was out walking her dog and that launched a fair bit of smalltalk, since her neighbor was also a dog owner. As they parted ways, the neighbor invited her over for a fika sometime and Zakrisson agreed enthusiastically. Yes, of course! That would be lovely! Then when she got home, she thought, Wait, it’s a bit weird to just invite a perfect stranger into your home like that. Or what if she’s some kind of psycho? The fika gets put off and delayed for a while because Zakrisson isn’t sure what to make of it. Of course the story ends with her eventually making good on the invitation, and of course she has a lovely time, and in the end that neighbor becomes an actual friend. As an afterthought, Zakrisson adds that once she got to know this neighbor better, she learned that her neighbor was American, and even though she’d lived in Sweden for years by now, she had still had grown up in the US.

Me, an American: of course she was an American, lol

Also me, an American: so that’s how all of my invitations land with Swedes

Historiskan 1/2024

My airport read ahead of my trip to the US in May. What did this issue cover?

      • An interview about a feminist history podcast, whose name now escapes me
      • A biography of Aphra Behn
      •  Svenska Norgehjälpen, Sweden’s aid project for Norway during Nazi occupation
      • Holomodor, which seems highly relevant these days
      • Tehuanas: Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico who have long enjoyed a relative independence from, and equal standing with, men
      • And, on the flip side of history in the new world: a biography of Inés Suárez, conquistador
      • St. Vitus’ Dance
      • A fascinating biography of Maria Enquist, a notable “beauty expert” (and probable grifter) at the turn of the twentieth century who offered some of the first cosmetic surgery in Sweden (paraffin injections)
      • Queen Christina of Saxony, the reigning queen during the Siege of Tre Kronor
      • Sweden’s first theater, a project put together by two noblewomen but which no longer stands today because it was torn down soon after its construction
      • Brief little bios of women long-distance swimmers
      • And of course the cover story on Amelia Earhart

En rackarunge

My hosts in Dalarna had a fantastic library of children’s literature spanning the interests of three generations. What a curious thing to see the Sweet Valley High paperbacks of my own childhood on the same shelf as authors like Ester Blenda Nordström!

Nordström’s series of children’s books, starting with En rackarunge, is purported to be an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Astrid Lindgren. The rackarunge in question—Ann-Mari—bears a resemblance to Pippi Longstocking in character as well as appearance, and predates the first Pippi book by some years. Admittedly, it’s hard to prove these things either way, so who’s to say for sure.

The Swedish half of the couple saw me paging through the book during my downtime and remarked on the differences between children’s literature now and then.

“I tried reading some of those older books to the kids when they were small, and it’s just a completely different experience. They’re so slow, nothing happens, there’s so much description. Books these days, there’s always something happening. It’s such a different energy.”

Indeed. En rackarunge is also more of a short story collection than a novel. Each chapter is a self-contained little adventure, although there are some recurring characters and situations throughout that (kind of) tie all of the adventures into one loose story. Not to mention it touches on pretty dark stuff for a children’s book of today: one of the red threads throughout the book is Ann-Mari’s friendship with a Josef, young man newly released from prison for murdering his physically and emotionally abusive uncle. He’s only scraping by at the margins of society when Ann-Mari first meets him, a total outcast from his hometown. Nordström’s reportage consistently highlighted the marginalized and the suffering, from her initial breakthrough as an undercover journalist investigating labor conditions for domestic help to her condemnation of the brutality of the bullfights she attended in Spain and her advocacy on behalf of destitute Finns starving near to death in a famine. Josef’s arc in the last third or so of the book is another culmination of Nordström’s concern for the downtrodden, and of course it’s Ann-Mari who decides to help him.

Why did Pippi become such a mainstay, while Ann-Mari vanished into obscurity?

Motorcykel genom Sverige

I’ve mentioned before that my reading habits as an adult have largely moved from “obsess over one author and read everything I can get my hands on” to “sample as many authors as possible in the time I have left on this Earth.” There are a few authors I still binge on, and one of them is Ester Blenda Nordström. It’s nice to have a reliable comfort read in a foreign language, someone you can trust to write in language accessible to your limited capacity, which is probably why the authors I binge on anymore are all not in English.

With Nordström in particular it seems like publishers have yet to really make the bulk of her work readily available to the public. Bakhåll has put out some collections, of which Motorcykel genom Sverige is one, but it seems that her reportage from other trips—Chile and Argentina, Japan and China, France and Spain—hasn’t been collected in the same thematic releases as Amerikanskt or Byn i vulkanens skygga. Indeed, contrary to its title, Motorcykel covers more than just her 1914 motorcycle journey throughout Sweden with her father. It also functions as a “greatest hits” collection from those aforementioned travels, an appetizer or sampler tray before the main course. We catch glimpses of her crossing the Andes on mule, attending a bullfight in Spain, surveying the damage of the 1925 North Tajima earthquake. Arranged in what appears to be chronological order, the collection also rather poignantly includes Nordström’s last published article, a reminisce about life out in the countryside. The timeline seems to encompass most of her active career.

There isn’t much need to review Nordström herself here. It’s a collection chosen to represent the best of her writing, so of course it’s good. Any one piece would qualify as a stand out selection, but the first that springs to mind right now is the account of her “hat pin” tram journey, a small piece of undercover reportage during what the above Smithsonian link calls “the hatpin terrors.” Another really excellent chapter is the bullfight, with no punches pulled about its inherent brutality. If I were a comparative literature professor I would probably assign this chapter as reading alongside Hemingway.

It’s a fun collection, though as an introduction to Nordström it might need extra context or explanation. It’s also a shame that the main course feels so incomplete. While all of Nordström’s reportage for papers like Vecko-Journalen, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm Dagsblad and so on is probably well archived for academics,  the collections that are readily available for general consumption only seem to be new editions of the ones already published as collections in Nordström’s lifetime.

Singulariteten

Balsam Karam is my most recent Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: I first heard of her when an Internet associate announced that he had been invited to host a panel discussion called “Read the World,” with Karam as one of the guests, at the Fold literary festival. Not long after that, a précis by Karam about Brazilian author Jeferson Tonorio was featured in the issue of Karavan I was reading at the time. Then when skimming the events for Litteraturmässan I saw that she would holding a talk with Peter Englund about the role and potential of libraries. Three points make a line and all of that.

I looked up Karam as soon as I learned she wrote in Swedish, always trying to fight the inertia to read books in English by default. If the timestamps in Discord conversations are anything to go by, then, I’ve been working on Singulariteten since February 20. I have Händelsehorisonten on deck, too, but Singulariteten was just so much that I might admit defeat with Händelsehorisonten for the moment and save it for later.

Singulariteten is a tale told backwards, starting at the end of two stories, two lives. The paths of two nameless women cross, briefly, along a trendy corniche in the tourist district of an unnamed country recently emerged from (or perhaps still intermittently engaged in) sectarian violence. One of the women is a mother in search of her missing daughter; the other is a pregnant tourist who witnesses the first woman’s suicide. Later, back home, she has a miscarriage. Out of this intersection unfolds lifetimes of loss and trauma, as the rest of the book looks back to tell each story in its entirety. The whole thing is so grim and heavy that I was surprised when the living, breathing Karam in the discussion on stage was light, breezy, quick to laugh and quick to make jokes. Serious emotional whiplash.

Which is not to say that Singulariteten was so dour and joyless that I didn’t enjoy it; I came out the other end with a sense of satisfaction and catharsis (Aristotle would be pleased). This was due in part to the dense, complex language that forced me to read passages multiple times and to construct little sentence diagrams in my head, so all credit to English translator Saskia Vogel for excellent work. This isn’t Karam’s first novel, but thanks to Vogel it’s the first available in English.

The topic matter does prompt reflection over the kinds of novels we expect from certain kinds of authors. I want to say that there’s a James Baldwin essay, perhaps his own commentary on Giovanni’s Room, on the limitations of being expected on certain topics (in Baldwin’s case, racial discourse) simply by virtue of a facet of one’s identity (race), but maybe that essay doesn’t exist. Maybe I’m thinking of (and misremembering) “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Unsure. But there is a tension for me because I can’t help wondering: for a Kurdish author like Karam, do publishers, reviewers, readers expect a certain kind of book? If Karam had instead written an easy read feel-good romance, would it still have been published? (I have every confidence that it still would have been good.) Or do themes of being marginalized, racialized, and elsewise Othered have a demonstrably limited appeal to a mainstream audience that mean they get scrubbed down and sanitized? (Thinking again of Giovanni’s Room, which Baldwin was advised to burn lest it alienate his audience.)

Nell Irvin Painter to the rescue, with this essay for LitHub that I got in my inbox this morning but that is not yet available on their website.

I asked: who can I and we write about when I and we are Black authors? Those accomplished authors I mentioned [Imani Perry, Honorée Fanon Jeffers, and Zora Neale Hurston] wrote about Black people, and Black people and race in America are the subjects of virtually every book by a Black author of fiction, of nonfiction, and of journalism. I’m tempted to conclude that literary convention limits Black authors to a limited range of subject matter. Yes, there’s infinite variety within the realm of Blackness. Yet still, Black people only.

Painter is describing an English-language publishing industry with an American audience, but I think there are parallels to be made with Sweden. In the end I suppose I just have to trust in the fact that Singulariteten demonstrably exists, and take the book as proof of the fact that Karam wanted to write a story, any story at all, and accept that speculation about how that story may or may not have been crafted according to particular expectations from her publishers as unknowable and therefore irrelevant.

Historiskan 4/2023

Since I’ve made such a deliberate point of trying to summarize what I’ve read in the Delayed Gratification magazine that I subscribe to, I thought I would do the same for Historiskan, another periodical I subscribe to.

1. A brief essay from Cecilia Nordlund about founding Popkollo.

2. A highlight on three women—Gerda Meyerson, Maria Forsell, and Emma Anstrin—who were part of fighting for Deaf rights alongside an article about plans for a Museum of Deaf Culture that will open in 2026.

3. An interview with Eva Dahlman about her upcoming book about women photographers in Sweden from 1848 to 1968.

4. The cover story: Eva Bonde writing on basically A League of Their Own, aka the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Bonde points out that part of the post-war decline of the AAGPBL was the advent of television and televised games: people who enjoyed watching the sport no longer had to actually attend games, but could watch from the comfort of their homes. An interesting point I didn’t think much about before, though I also never thought much about women’s baseball in the US except with respect to, well, A League of Their Own. And it was of course segregated, so Black women weren’t included and instead played alongside men in the Negro Leagues. (I remember reading about the Negro Leagues in elementary school but not finding it all that interesting as a ten-year-old; it’s since become one of those things that I feel like I should read about now as an adult, in part because I’m more interested in baseball now than I was as a ten-year-old.)

5. A bio of author Maria Gripes by Lisbeth Håkansson Petré in honor of the centennial of her birth. The headline called her one of Sweden’s most read authors of children’s and young adult novels but I’d never even heard of her until this, so I guess that’s another cultural gap filled. A big part of the reason I subscribe to these kinds of magazines.

6. A history of political protest music in South America by Bella Stenberg. A lot of it focuses specifically on nueva canción in Chile and the women involved with the movement: Violetta Parra, Margot Loyola, Gabriela Pizarro, and Mercedes Sosa.

7. A brief biography by Karin Tegenborg Falkdalen of Kristina av Holstein-Gottorp, a queen of Sweden. Not my favorite Drottning Kristina but still an interesting read nonetheless.

8. A brief on the “tickle torturers” (les chatouilleuses) of Mayotte by Victoria Machmudov. It’s kind of wild to read about a colony rejecting independence, but maybe my brain is melted from being American. Some of the major players in the movement to break away from the rest of the Comoros archipelago and retain a connection with France were women, including Zéna M’déré. Unsurprisingly, things aren’t going great in Mayotte at the moment. Their wealth relative to their neighbors in the archipelago has led to a lot of immigration, but they’re still the poorest departement in France.

9. A look at the women in the animal rights movement by Camilla Bergvall: Lizzie Lind af Hageby, Leisa Schartau, Princess Eugénie, Elna Tenow, Ellen Börtz, Birgitta Carlsson, and Ruth Harrison.

10. Another historical biography, this time Olga of Kiev, by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson.

11. A look by Pauliina Räsänen at what the circus life entailed for women at the turn of the 20th century and its role as a space of relative liberation: a break from gender norms, the ability to travel freely, being able to support one’s self (and out-earning a lot of men, at that). Too many names for me to bother listing but I thought Laura Madigan was interesting if only because of the tragedy surrounding her and her family.

12. Mette Hardenberg and her encounter with a demon, as summarized by Julia Håkansson. It’s a mildly interesting story, certainly moreso than that skeletal Wikipedia entry makes it out to be, so I’ll summarize the summary here:

Hardenberg got married off, as women tended to do back in the 1500s. Her husband published an account, in which he claims that his wife is unwilling to share the story herself but that he thinks it’s worth telling. For a period of six weeks, she was tormented by an evil spirit that beat the shit out of her if she mentioned God. Then she had a vision (in a dream?) of God, who told her to make a pilgrimage from Totterupholm to a tower in the Vallø castle. It was a trip of thirty kilometers and she went disguised as a beggar, and then at the end she had a showdown with the demon in said tower, where she won thanks to her knowledge of the Bible.

It’s hard to know what to make of the account today. The go-to explanation is that it was some kind of mental health struggle, and historians point to similar problems that had afflicted other members of her family. Others have more recently suggested that it could have been a form of marketing as a show of Hardenberg’s spiritual strength in conquering a demon—and modesty in not wanting to talk about it—that would win her esteem in the eyes of the church.

13. And finally, a longer piece by Sari Nauman on the first refugees in Sweden: from then-Swedish Latvia to Sweden proper during The Great Northern War which lasted over twenty goddamn years, what a grim thing to consider. (People were already fleeing religious persecution before The Great Northern War, of course, but the first time the Swedish word for refugee—flykting—appears in text it’s in connection with a woman fleeing Russian aggression in the Great Northern War.)

Rätt och rättfärdigande: en tematisk introduktion i allmän rättslära

After I walked out of Kammarkollegiet’s auktorisationsprov last October, I sent a joke about going to law school to a friend married to a lawyer. Her response was, “It’s OK, we all have intrusive thoughts sometimes.”

Not that I would actually make a huge life-altering decision just because I found a particular translation assignment appealing, of course. I sent the same joke to the lawyer husband of the aforementioned friend and he observed that legal texts will probably the least likely to get outsourced to machine translation, so not necessarily a bad career move. He’s certainly not wrong!

After I found out I failed the legal translation portion of Kammarkollegiet’s auktorisationsprov, the joke became a bit more serious. Again, I wouldn’t actually make a huge life-altering decision just because I failed a test… but if it was the legal text (and specifically, incorrectly using legal terminology) that knocked me out of the running, I could at least make sure to be better prepared. I found the reading list for an introductory course in business law and dutifully added the most relevant volumes to my TBR, including Christian Dahlman’s brief introductory text Rätt och rättfärdigande: en tematisk introduktion i allmän rättslära.

This one might be even more niche than Den högsta kasten or Språkets myller so literally the only point to me noting it here is for my own recollection. It’s short and it’s nothing I didn’t already have in the back of my head thanks to a background in philosophy, especially since one of my intro courses was taught by a member of the philosophy department who specialized in law. Worth having the vocabulary in two languages, I suppose? Though I don’t think anything in here is the kind of terminology I need for Kammarkollegiet.

Språkets myller

I went on a small library binge at the end of 2023 to stock up on holiday reading. With my goals for 2024 already in mind, I walked out with one book off of my TBR pile and two books in French (plus one spontaneous selection).

More accurately, I picked a book adjacent to my TBR pile. The title I was after was Margareta Westman’s Språkets lustgård och djungel, which the Stockholm library website assured me was available at Stadsbiblioteket. Alas, it was nowhere to be found, but another book by Margareta Westman was readily at hand, so I took that one instead. Språkets lustgård originally ended up on the TBR after it was referenced in another Swedish essay collection on translation that I read, though if I had any other thoughts besides “Hm, that sounds interesting” they’re lost to me now. We’re talking six, maybe even seven years ago at this point. And since Språkets myller is, unsurprisingly, on the same topic of linguistics, I’m willing to count it as a win for my TBR goal.

Westman was a (popular?)* professional language nerd and, among other achievements, head of the Language Council of Sweden. She wrote a lot about the Swedish language, and after her death the Council decided to collect several of her essays into one place: Språkets myller.

It’s hard to get too excited about a collection where the average age of the  content is older than me (collected and published in 2000, but original publication dates ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s), especially when it focuses on a topic that evolves as quickly as language does. Westman’s ideas are interesting and expressed with lucid prose, but any of the chapters about how young people express themselves “these days” are now historical relics rather than au courant observations. Other topics are a bit more timeless, like thoughts on the purpose of writing instruction in the classroom and how to structure it, or reflections on shifts in attitudes towards linguistic norms and mistakes.

Overall, trying to review, summarize, or even just discuss Språkets myller in English was a lot like trying to do the same with Den högsta kasten: it’s simply too Swedish. What’s the point? But at least with Westman I learned a thing or two along the way—and I crossed a book off my TBR—which is a lot more than I can say for Rydberg!

*Since I’m not Swedish I have no idea how Westman’s reputation lands in the general popular culture: was she a popular and accessible language authority akin to Susie Dent in the UK? Or…I’m not sure who in the US, actually. Or is she a name for nerds? I queried a very unscientific sampling of Swedes around my age who are all to greater or lesser degrees interested in language. The first answer I got (from someone who had studied linguistics at the university level) about whether they were familiar with Westman was “no, not at all.” The same pattern emerged as responses rolled in from others.

Kris

My last-minute scramble to read more Swedish before the end of the year led me to revisit Karin Boye’s Kris, a book I first read in 2017. I even wrote about it here! Ah, how embarrassing to keep any kind of public record of one’s life, but oh well. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

In 2017, I felt like I had pretty much conquered Swedish and that the world was my oyster. Yet reading Kris was a struggle. Yes, I was reading several books at the time, but that’s a convenient excuse. The honest truth that I didn’t want to fess up to publicly was that Kris was just really, really hard. If anything, that’s probably why I was reading so many books at once: I needed something to reach for that wasn’t Kris. Each reading session included frequent breaks to count how many pages were left in this chapter, in the whole book. I stubbornly refused to look up new words because there were so many in any given section that any sense of flow would have been ruined. Nor did I have the patience to, for example, note all the words I didn’t know, look them up afterwards, and then read the chapter again. All of this should have clued me in to my immense hubris with respect to my actual functional level of Swedish, but it did not. Instead, I contented myself with declaring the book “difficult literature” and prided myself on having a brain big enough to finish the book at all.

This time around I finished the book in less than a week. Finally, I’m actually a genius at Swedish! (I can’t wait to revisit this blog post in another six years and flinch at the hubris.)

Since the actual reading experience was much easier, I had more brain left over to actually take in everything else in the book: the depression, the anxiety, the theology. Or, more humbly, maybe it wasn’t leveling up in Swedish that made all the difference. Maybe it was also the result of reading such an intense book in the depths of Swedish winter instead during the height of Swedish summer, or fresh war in Europe, or changes in my own personal circumstances. At any rate, it hit different this time around. More personal.

The first (as far as I can tell) English translation of Kris came out after my initial reading attempt in 2017: Crisis. Which means that this post won’t be my last about the book.