Northern Climes: Sweden and Finland

Johanne Lykke Holm: Strega, translated by Saskia Vogel, Lolli Editions, 2022.

There is a real yellowish-green Strega liqueur in Italy, supposedly adapted from a secret recipe created by witches. The town in which it is made (Benevento rather than Strega) is in the Apennines, close to Naples, a bit further south than I was expecting from the description of the Alpine setting for the fictional town in Swedish author Holm’s novel. In fact, the setting is not important in this strange and unsettling little novel (only 180 pages): it is enough to know that it is a grand hotel in a remote location, with only a convent of liqueur-producing nuns as the nearest neighbour. Moreover, it is a grand hotel where no guest ever comes to stay, thus continuing my theme of unsettling Gothic mansions.

The narrator is one of nine young women who are being trained as hotel maids, sent by their families in the hope of acquiring good skills – but for what purpose? For a career, for marriage, to learn obedience, to stop being a nuisance at home? Everything is fluid and ambiguous, we are never quite sure what is going on. The work is repetitive and mechanical, apparently fulfilling no purpose whatsoever; the trainers/managers are matron-like and strict (as if they were in fact in a convent), and something feels decidedly wrong about the whole set-up. The similes imply violence, the hotel remains eerily empty.

We quickly learned that each day was a reproduction of the last. Morning after morning, we set out coffee and bread in the conservatory facing the park. There were large porcelain bowls filled with black marmalade. There was silverware on linen napkins. Morning after morning, a metallic light fell through the room like a butcher’s knife. I stood and watched it happen… For a moment I thought I saw someone coming, but I must have been mistaken. I went back to work. Refilled the coffee pots, sliced the tin loaf. No guests arrived.

The girls start to form bonds with each other, but the way they are treated gets more and more uncomfortable: they are examined, prodded, starved, made to kneel, humiliated. Above all, it appears that they are having their individuality stamped out of them.

All punishment in the hotel was collective. They treated us as one body, so we became one body. We forgot our individual traits and our individual responsibilities. If one of us stole a coin, all of us had stolen a coin. They poured boiling water over our feet and made us dip them in tubs of ice. The pain was unbearable, but no marks were left.

And then, one night, the hotel fills up with guests. The girls are expected to look their best, be on their best behaviour, serve the guests impeccably, yet all the while this sense of danger and disquiet persists. This is not a jolly, happy occasion, although it is a raucous one. Sure enough, one of the girls goes missing after the party. Search parties look for her in the mountainous terrain, but the girls are convinced that she is already dead. They are frightened yet feel trapped, they have nowhere else to go – but whether the sense of entrapment is real or all in their minds is not quite clear. The narrator Rafaela has chilling imaginary conversations with the murderer.

I knew the murderer was never far. I had seen him step out of the walls. I had seen him among the bed sheets… In every woman’s life, there’s someone waiting at the gate. We are all candidates, but only some of us are chosen. I knew there were holes in the earth waiting for us… One might have an urge to say: We would rather be martyrs together than live another second in this order. One does not. One bides one’s time. One waits for one’s murderer, one sees him everywhere. One imagines the night it will come to pass. One knows all about that night. One knows the lines.

As a metaphor for the violence that is constantly being perpetuated against women, both mentally and physically, and how they collude in their oppression, this is one of the most unsettling books I’ve read in a long time. I was not sure where this book was going most of the time, but I could feel its lingering poisonous atmosphere in the sickly sweetness of the liqueur. As you can see from the quotes above, the style is very simple: short sentences, repetitions, gradually building upon the previous passages or chapters, much like the ripples in water after you throw in a stone. A steady accumulation (or drip, drip, drip) of something very dark, which caused an almost visceral reaction when reading the book.

I knew a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene. I had yet to understand that I was already living inside the crime scene, that the crime scene was not the bed but the body, that the crime had already taken place.

Antti Tuomainen: The Healer, translated by Lola Rogers, Harvill Secker, 2013.

If all you have read so far of Finnish crime writer’s Tuomainen’s work is the series featuring hapless insurance assessor Henri which started with The Rabbit Factor, or the dark (and sometimes slapstick) comedy of standalones like Palm Beach Finland or Little Siberia, then you are in for a major surprise. In this early work, the first of his books to be translated into English, we are in a water-logged world that is nearing the end. The sea levels have risen and people are fleeing to the northern parts of the globe. Helsinki appears to be too far south to be safe, and we get to see a city that is half-abandoned, with damaged buildings and infrastructure, where missing people and laws mean nothing at all anymore. The scenes of railways stations overrun with climate refugees are memorable:

All around there were shouts, arguments, pleas, entreaties and threats. There were trains going north every hour, but even that wasn’t enough to lessen the flood of people. More and more people kept coming from the east, the south and the west. There was a black market on the plaza for ticket touts, purchasers of valuables, hundreds of thieves and swindlers with hundreds of tricks and scams, and of course ordinary people, each one more desperate than the last.

Yet Tapani Lehtinen, although he is normally a sensitive observer of his surroundings, a poet who writes daily although he knows no one is reading poetry anymore, is only focused on finding his wife Johanna. Although she has only been gone for a few hours, he is worried, because they had the habit of constantly communicating with each other. Johanna is a journalist and Tapani starts to suspect that she might have been researching about a serial killer known as ‘The Healer’ and that this might have something to do with her disappearance.

I recently rewatched the film Children of Men and this book was very much in that vein of an all-too-plausible, not-at-all-glamorous vision of the near-future. Everything feels dingy, hopeless, lawless. Who cares about a missing person or even a murder or two, when there are so many crimes happening daily, when people are dying of so many natural causes, when so many buildings are boarded up and dangers are lurking around every corner? The newspapers are only out to entertain people with stories about celebrities doing gross things rather than bring any real news or uncover ‘truths’. Nobody cares about any of that.

So, all in all, a bleak view of the world, although the love between Johanna and Tapani shows that there is still some beauty and hope left. However, this frail blossom is very effectively quashed by the cynical realism of the chief of police who half-heartedly agrees to help Tapani, much against his better judgment.

Whenever some lunatic gets it in his head that a few individuals are responsible for the world falling apart around him, we go after him. And what happens when we catch him? Some new lunatic comes along, and the world keeps marching towards destruction. That’s nothing new, of course. History tells us that this kind of things has happened many times before. Civilisation blossoms, and then it falls. It’s happened on this planet in our own lifetime, to millions and millons of people… But you take it harder, somehow, when it’s your own little world that’s dying.

I was planning to read more books from Northern Climes this month, but I started the rather depressing Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament and stalled. Life just got really messy, I fell down other reading rabbit holes, library books I’d reserved kept appearing and… and… I just didn’t have the strength to review much and often struggled to finish any of my books.

Northern Climes: Sweden and Canada

As if I guessed that March might bring more snow, for this month I decided to focus on countries that are situated just below, on or above the Arctic Circle. The first two books I read both featured stressed mothers of young children, haunted by memories of past freedoms and creative ambitions.

Linda Boström Knausgård: October Child, translated by Saskia Vogel, World Editions, 2021.

This is a memoir rather than a novel (although it is officially described as the latter), describing the author’s struggles with mental illness and the horrendous effects of the electroconvulsive therapy to which she was subjected. What was most frightening for her as a writer was that the treatment, described euphemistically as ‘restarting a computer’, actually caused her to lose some of her memories. This book is an attempt to remind herself of who she is, why she chose to write, and also reignite her relationship with her family and friends, especially her children.

It has also been described as the ‘revenge story’, for Linda is also famous for being the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s ex-wife and he wrote about her, their children and their domestic arrangements in painfully candid and exhaustive detail in his hugely popular memoir/novel series My Struggle. To me, however, it felt more like self-chastisement for not being strong enough to avoid falling into the maws of ‘the factory’, as she calls the psychiatric ward, for not being good enough as a mother, a writer, a wife, a daughter, a friend.

Having been so close to my children when they were small didn’t matter… because what they remembered most was that I was a mother who could disappear. I wasn’t only hurting myself, like when I was young; I was also hurting my children each time I left them to stay in these rooms, these corridors. Not to mention how much I had hurt them before, serving up my bad judgement for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, weeks in a bed… I wasn’t their mother anymore but someone else, someone they feared and didn’t understand.

She tries so hard, probably piling too much pressure and unrealistic expectations upon herself, so she inevitably ends up disappointed, feeling that she’s failing to create the ideal family life. ‘The children’s summer vacations not being as rich and full of escapades as I would’ve liked. What kind of memories would they have? What kind of magic?’

As she addresses her husband directly in second person, we begin to suspect he is indirectly contributing to her dissatisfaction and anxiety: ‘I constantly worried you’d die of a heart attack and I’d be left to take care of the children all on my own. There was no doubt in my mind I wouldn’t be able to handle it.’ But overall, it feels more like self-flagellation, extreme vulnerability – but also anger directed at the medical system that allows such a misguided treatment for depression (so that they can tick the box ‘cured’).

I was very moved by Linda’s story, which somehow manages to avoid self-pity or self-righteousness. Although she describes truly painful situations, she remains factual and precise, almost detached, as if observing her life in the third person, but with the intensity of poetry.

Depression’s torpid darkness, its void and waking death, it’s what awaits me when I sink deeper. To where there are no words, no consciousness, just dull slumber, morning, noon, and night, the anxiety enveloping every cell.

I related perhaps a little too well with Linda’s marital struggles and occasional downward spirals. The scene at the airport when she loses her temper with the airline officials, which is the moment when she realised that her husband no longer wanted to be with her, is almost the exact replica of a scene from my own life. Yet I admire the way she writes not in red-hot anger but with calm recollection and restraint. This is, of course, because writing is the one thing in her life that gives her satisfaction, hope and meaning:

No one needed to tell me I was good at writing. I knew it deep down, even in the years I wasn’t writing… I’ve always known I can write as though it were a matter of life or death… You’d tell me to write instead of moping around and wasting my time and I’d tell myself that, too, because I listened to my own voice most of all. I appreciated your perfect pitch, but enjoyed mine more. It felt like letting all the horses run free.

Although many will come away from this book thinking that the author must have been incredibly high maintenance and that it is a messy, chaotic read, I felt like I understood so much of what she described and would have liked to be her friend.

Marian Engel: The Honeyman Festival, The House of Anansi Press, 1970.

If you thought Linda Boström’s story is messy and chaotic, then you should stay away from this day in the life of Minn Burge, a heavily pregnant mother of three, whose journalist husband is constantly away in far-off places. She is preparing for a party given in memory of a rather second-rate film director called Honeyman, who was her lover and protector in Paris in her youth.

Minn feels heavy and ugly, pulled in all directions by her children, her guests, a rental home that seems to be falling down around her, the so-called Flower Children who are lodging in their attic. She is intelligent and self-deprecating, but apparently unable to stand up for herself or say no. Just like in Engel’s later novel Lunatic Villas, the messiness of her main protagonist’s life is rendered in long, rambling sentences filled to the brim with ideas, descriptions, lists. The effect is often comical.

You weren’t supposed to take fat, hot baths in mausoleum tubs towards the end of a pregnancy, you were apt to fall asleep and drown or fall and break your neck getting out or grab the electric light to save yourself and be found blue, naked and rigid on the mat next day by a window-washer, or get Ajax up the birth canal. In some ways, life was comically reduced; sin a chocolate bar at a bus stop, adventure a forbidden bath.

Minn also feels guilty about not being a good enough mother, but she is far more realistic and provocative about family life. I had to laugh at her indignant reaction when the doctor tells her she is eating too much and should lose some weight:

There was beer in the afternoon after wiping the nap-shit off the walls, and peanut butter sandwiches when they got her up at night, and eating their leftovers, and guzzling and stuffing when you were too angry to consider hitting them. And you couldn’t walk it off, you didn’t have three hands, they took you along the street at a snail’s pace… you felt the flesh mounting and multiplying with frustration and knew that captivity was tolerable only when it was comfortable; you ate, you drank a little, you sat on the floor and rolled with them, indulged them, always tamping impatience down inside you, because it was their time now, not yours; you had had your adventures. But the spirit rebelled against their forced slow-march in little spurts and dangerous leaks. It was better to eat than to hit them even when they were naughty.

I’ve read some reviews in which they say Minn is sadly a product of her time, but this reminds me very much of the conversations I had with other mums in the mid-2000s (thirty-five years after this book was written) and it didn’t feel all that different. The sheer drudgery of looking after small children, the sensation that you are now reduced to your animal functions, rather than using your brain, the way the juggling gets even worse once you have to return to work – well, when the male Knausgård moans about it in his book, he is considered revolutionary, but if a woman dares to complain, she is of course a bad mother. Still, perhaps after the lockdowns of the pandemic, when everyone was going slightly mad with too much domesticity, we can all understand Minn better.

Minn doesn’t have a greater purpose or high-flying career or artistic ambitions to justify her impatience with domesticity. She was once a (bad) bit actress, but what she really yearns for nowadays is her youth, lack of ties, the freedom to do what she wants, to love and be loved rather than just tolerated as a sort of housemate. Like a more modern-day and sweary Clarissa Dalloway, Minn tries to keep her higher (romantic?) aspirations intact.

There was no one to talk to. She stood and thought, do I love Norman? Does Norman love me? There was no answer… Love was an idea you lived through and came out on the other side of. It was slowly replaced by the necessities of devotion and duty. But it manifested itself periodically in little misplaced surges of carnality, and went away again. The spirit nourished on Lorna Doone and Jane Eyre and Le Grand Meaulnes did not give up adventure easily.

Although the two authors are almost exact opposites in terms of style – the ebullient overabundance of the Canadian, the more minimalist aloofness of the Swede – I certainly appreciated both of these accounts of the complex and ambiguous feelings surrounding motherhood and marriage. Can I see some potential male readers shuddering and giving these books a wide berth? Yes, possibly, but perhaps no more so than women who are not mothers and may feel this is all too domestic. What I think both of these books show so well is women’s endless capacity for reinvention and survival – and who can fail to find that inspirational, after all?

Comparing Reading Cultures

http://www.whytoread.com

Every three years or so the literary magazine Livres Hebdo  in France does an IPSOS survey of not just its readers, but the wider French reading public. The latest edition of this survey (April 2014) reveals that reading remains the second favourite leisure activity of the French (after ‘going out with friends’). 7 out of 10 French read at least one book a month and about half of them claim to read every day.

However, e-readers have not made that much of an inroad yet into French reading habits. Its popularity has grown only by 3% in the last three years.

And what are the favourite genres? Crime fiction (known as ‘polars’) tops the list, unsurprisingly, followed by spy thrillers, self-help books and historical essays/biographies.

So, are there any causes for concern? Well, the French admit that reading does seem to be a pastime associated with the middle classes, the better-educated and economically better off. This finding holds true in the survey of reading habits in England commissioned by Booktrust UK. In fact, there has been talk in Britain of a ‘class division’ in reading culture, with a clear link between deprivation and lack of reading enjoyment.

But perhaps the English are further down the road of using digital media to do their reading. In England 18% of people never read any physical books, while 71% never read any e-books. A quarter prefer internet and social media to books, nearly half prefer TV and DVDs to books. Only 28% of people in England (and I think it’s important to point out that this data is only for England, not for the UK as a whole) read books nearly every day, so considerably lower than in France. Fitting in nicely with the stereotype of ‘highbrow French’ reading books with boring covers and impenetrable titles?

Worldwide surveys of reading habits do tend to confirm somewhat national stereotypes. Self-help books are popular in the US, while in the UK there is a marked preference for celebrity autobiographies and TV chefs. The Germans, meanwhile, prefer travel/outdoor/environmental books, while the French, Romanians, Italians seem to prefer fiction.

But the most interesting result may be found in Spain. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, since the recession hit the country so hard, it seems that books have become that affordable luxury and has led to 57% of the population reading regularly. It has also become one of the biggest book-producing nations, bucking all the publishing trends. And what do they prefer reading? A very interesting mix of Spanish-speaking writers (including South Americans) and translations from other languages.

And what are we to make of a 2011 study from the University of Gothenburg showing that increased use of computers in children’s homes in the US and Sweden have led to poorer reading skills as well as less pleasure derived from reading?

At the risk of preaching to the converted, I leave you with a conclusion which has been replicated in multiple studies around the world and which refers to leisure-time reading (of whatever description):

People who read books are significantly more likely to be happy and content with their life.

My Favourite Scandinavian Crime Fiction

This is part of an article on Scandinavian crime fiction which I wrote during my seemingly endless offline period – actually, only about 2 1/2 weeks since I moved, but had no means of posting online.  Yes, I did not waste endless days on social forums and idle chat – but it will probably take me a few days just to wade through all th emails and interactions, to make sure that I don’t miss anything important.  And no, I did not finish my novel, although I did make some progress with it.  Having to live in boxes and using a box as a desk did not quite work for my fussy, pernickety creative muse!

What is it with the current obsession with Scandinavian crime fiction (loosely defined as crime fiction from those countries suffering bleak winters and darkness for half of the year)?  It’s not a new phenomenon: they are rooted in good ancient stock of storytelling in fur-lined caves around a campfire, when there is little to tempt you to go outside. The Gothic imagination of the North – the ghost stories of Scotland, Ireland and England, bloodthirsty Viking tales, the equally gory Nibelungensaga… Yet the latest batch of crime fiction emerges from societies that are well-ordered, neat and contained, where people consistenly report high levels of wellbeing (and fairness and equality) and where serious crime is fairly uncommon.  Murders are the exception here rather than the norm.  But it’s almost as though there is a fear that under the veneer of civilisation, that dark ancestral spirit is waiting to come out – as it sometimes does (I cannot tell you how devastated and puzzled Norwegian friends were about the shootings last summer).

It is nearly impossible (and not very productive) to lump together all Scandinavian crime fiction as a vast, amorphous mass: there are huge differences between Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell (both Swedish), not to mention between Iceland, Denmark and Norway. And I am not sure why Finland is habitually ignored and untranslated, as last time I looked, they too were part of Scandinavia, or at least as much as Iceland.  Yet if there is one thread that they all have in common, it is that they all use crime as a social commentary and in this sociological perspective they have all been influenced by the godparents of Scandinavian crime fiction: Maj Sjӧwall and Per Wahlӧӧ.  Not as well-known as they deserve to be (perhaps because they are not easily available: thank you to Harper for their reissue of the whole series under the Perennial imprint in 2007, translated with great verve by Alan Blair, Joan Tate and Lois Roth).

Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and reflecting that period of tremendous social change in Sweden and throughout the world, the so-called Martin Beck novels were planned as a series of ten novels by this husband and wife team (and Per Wahlӧӧ managed to live just long enough to complete the final novel in the series).  Much has been made of the authors’ Marxist sympathies and their criticism of the perceived failings of the Swedish social democratic welfare state.  But you will find no blatant propaganda beating you around the head here: merely razor-sharp observations, small details that can almost be overlooked, comments made by one or the other of the policemen or the people whom they interview.  All of which help to place the novels in their time frame, yet not enough to make them feel dated. And there is lots of humour, some gentle, some satirical.

Fifty years on, when the dysfunctional police team led by a middle-aged, sour-faced male detective with a troubled marriage have become clichés, it is hard to appreciate just how fresh and exciting these novels were when they first appeared.  Yet some of that freshness and novelty still comes through, even to (comparatively) younger readers like me, who were born after the novels were published, and who have been brought up on a steady diet of gloomy cities where even gloomier detectives investigate crimes that expose the underbelly of a society in decay.  The writing is sparse and powerful, no word is carelessly flung on the page.  Without fuss, extreme posturing or excessive interior monologues, we are privy to the complexities of characters in this ensemble piece (for, although Martin Beck is the main character, his colleagues Kollberg, Larsson, Melander and Rӧnn are well-rounded figures in themselves, rather than just convenient sidekicks).

It is hard to pick a favourite among all the books, but perhaps ‘The Man on the Balcony’ (third in the series) and ‘The Laughing Policeman’ (fourth) lingered most in my mind, although the series gets more ambitious,complex and darker as it progresses.

So, if you like crime fiction, if you like the Nordic countries, if you admire and devour  Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum and all the other Scandinavian crime writers increasingly available in translation, then I do recommend going back to the source: Maj and Per. Their names almost say it all, don’t they?  The Ma and Pa of all the writers that came after them…