As winter threatens with increasing menace, literary inspiration may soon turn to ideas of a lonely detective marching through deep midwinter, bemoaning the latest grisly murder to have occurred within their unfortunate jurisdiction. This is an introduction to a Swedish novel, or rather several Swedish novels. To outsiders, it can be perceived as part of a broader genre some might call Nordic Noir. Film and TV have familiarised many of the recurring characters for us by this point: Wallander wallows around in despair, Beck smokes his way up policing’s greasy pole, and a dragon-tattooed girl seeks solace in cyber-espionage. Settings are bleak, crimes are horrific. Stories lack a certain clean-cut morality, instead leaving scope for wider social criticism to be imposed onto the desolation and depravity that has somehow ameliorated into popular international appeal.
None of this is a sudden development. Swedish literary history can be defined through the lens of realism, sustained by the dark narrative turns of plausible events, striking chords almost too recognisable to the native population.
But for all the recent Nordic Noir successes, no country’s literature is homogenous, no stereotype is precisely accurate. Consider, therefore, the following few paragraphs a gentle rebuttal of international perceptions; a showcase – however constrained – of Swedish literature’s diversity. Literature that has escaped the gloomy preconceptions of Noir, if not the societal grit.
The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden – Jonas Jonasson
Perhaps best known for The Hundred-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared, Jonasson has refined the art of drawing laughter from the most bitterly unfortunate circumstance for his characters. Key to his method is his character’s seeming passivity to events around them. The empowered are diminished by the simplicity of their trains of thought. Villains – if only lurking for a fleeting moment – are undone by their own incompetencies as much as any vanquishing. The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden follows a run-over school girl from Soweto during apartheid, incidentally finding herself working in a nuclear weapons laboratory where none of her drunken superiors are aware of the young cleaning lady’s mathematical competencies. Dogma gives in to delusions, intelligence enacts intentions. The ensuing adventure is unexpectedly delightful – chaotically neutral in its assessment of society, Jonasson instead lays out dots for the reader to connect for their own whimsical pleasure. Narratively independent from his other work, there is no better introduction to Jonasson’s rational absurdities than here.
Popular Music from Vittula – Mikael Niemi
Much as literary masochists set themselves the goal of reading Ulysses in a day, Popular Music from Vittula should be read in as few sittings as possible. Rarely have I been captivated by a story that merges reality with the magic of fading ambitions, leather jackets and The Beatles. Set in villages of Sweden’s far north, in barren landscapes represented by only two pages of a school textbook, the story identifies the otherness of Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect far detached from any nationwide recognition in 1970s Sweden. It is a coming-of-age story, of growing up with hopes, dreams and adventures that are slowly subsumed by the bleak lack of identity and career prospects that drives friends into cycles of despair and abuse. It is estimated that around 1 in 15 Swedes read the book in the two years after its release, swept up in the mysterious exoticism attached to a part of their own country. It’s a mystery still worth exploring today.
Kalla det vad fan du vill – Marjaneh Bakhtiari
A modern classic, Bakhtiari’s book is all but impossible to translate into English, a revealing and at times painful reflection on the Swedish immigrant experience, told through the lens of an Iranian immigrant family whose second-generation teenage children are trapped in their identities between Swedish societal expectations, and their parents struggling to either integrate or assimilate to anyone’s approval. Translated as ‘Call it what the fuck you want’ (Certain Swedish expletives carry less weight in the mother tongue) Bakhtiari incorporates accents into her written Swedish – emphasising every mis-intonation, drawing attention to each grammatical anomaly or anglicisation. It is harsh on the parents, denied the societal welcoming they clearly desire, but also revealing towards the wide berth of native Swedish dialects, similarly transliterated to varying degrees of intelligibility. Only then do the dividing lines appear truly thin, exposing both the inescapable and artificial differentiators that constitute immigrant identity in a way seldom expressed elsewhere.
Illustration courtesy of Marnie McCallum.