La voix du terroriste (Claude Kayat, 2023)

This book by fascinating writer Claude Kayat can be seen as a meditation on the current state of identity and the shifting kinship and enmity between different faith groups. The setup is shockingly direct; during a deadly terrorist attack and hostage situation in a Paris synagogue, the terrorists inexplicably let one of their key hostages go, without any explanation. The newly released captive, Ludovic Lévy, is deeply relieved, but dumbfounded as to why he was set free. And didn’t he recognize something familiar in the voice of one of the captors?

After some investigation, he believes that the terrorists were his childhood friends Abdallah and Mourad, since estranged. Lévy wants to understand why they became terrorists, and the terrorists, naturally, want to avoid identification. A sort of detective story ensues, where they negotiate their respective positions with reference to faith, history, family and power. We get to follow both parties in interspersed chapters, adding to the suspense of the narrative. An interesting subplot is that one of the terrorists is a “grand blond” who has a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, whose aberrant appearance is part of how they can be identified.

It is a story of how we are all human, and that we should be able to live together. Themes from Kayat’s earlier novel la Paria can be discerned, which also deals with the sometimes taut relations between Jews and Arabs – but this time in Paris instead of the Galilee. As with la Paria, the intertwined stories and fates of the characters must be reminiscent of pre-colonial Tunisia were Jews and Muslims lived closer to one another. One can sense that Kayat hearkens back to those days and wants to recall that it is possible to achieve again. Only a writer like Kayat, who is familiar with both of these milieux would be able to write a story like this, and he does it with aplomb. Sometimes it veers into implausible territory (the final journey of Mourad to Stockholm), but then one has to be reminded that it is meant as a parable. La voix du terroriste is a short novel, but it packs a big punch throughout 143 pages, and its message is loud and clear. The absence of a final resolve is surely meant to mirror real life, as if to remind the reader that it is up to us (you and me and everyone else) to change things.

Review of La Voix du terroriste in English by Christophe Prémat
review in French by Albert Bensoussan
My review of Claude Kayat’s La Paria (2019)

Svenska bilder (Carl Snoilsky, 1886)

This is a collection of poems about Swedish history, written by the eminent 19th century poet Carl Snoilsky. I understand these poems as a way to deal with history and ultimately making sense of one’s predicament. Ranging from Gustavus Vasa to Carl XII, Snoilsky collects gedichte from various moments in Swedish national history, mostly from the 16th to the 19th century. I once heard American sociologist Richard Sennett scoff at the idea that stone age dwellers of Sweden were Swedes. He was shamelessly unaware of the Swedish viewpoint on the matter.

I have always liked kings etc, but whatever. Some poems take the perspective of the common man, like “På Värnamo marknad”, but mostly it is a royal affair, along with some noblemen who were generals. I like recognizing historical information in the poems. I think Snoilsky based a lot of the poems on Anders Fryxell’s book of Swedish history. It is a nation-building exercise. I found the book at our family summer cottage. Written before the spelling reform, lots of words have old-style orthography. A favorite among the poems is “Den gamla fröken” which is a meditation on the passage of time and memories passed on through generations.

As a child, I often took walks along “Snoilskyvägen” in Stockholm, a fact which made me unconsciously sympathetic to this name – which must be slavic in origin, but belonged to a family of German-speaking nobility when Carl Snoilsky was born. Snoilskys grandfather was Johan Banér, who named banérgatan. The family name was originally Znojilšek, then Snoilshik, Snoilski, von Snoilsky, Snoilsky. It seems to be of Slovenian origin! The name Znojile is derived from znoji(d)lo (‘sunny or sun-facing area’) from the verb znojiti (‘to be warmed by the sun’).

I guess most of the material concerns the 18th century. Some of the people that are mentioned throughout the collection:

Gustav Eriksson Vasa (1496-1560)
Erik XIV, King of Sweden (1533 – 1577)
Johan Banér (1596-1641)
Gustav II Adolf (1594-1632)
Torsten Stålhandske (1593-1644)
Erik Dahlbergh (1625–1703)
Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702)
Hedvig Eleonora (1636-1715)
Kristina (1626-1689)
Carl XII (1682-1718)
Gustav III (1746-1792)
Bellman (1740-1795)
A M Lenngren (1754-1817)
Kellgren (1751-95), Stiernhjelm (1798-1872), Lidner (1757-1793)
Carl Olof Cronstedt (1756-1820)
Anders Fryxell (1795-1881)

The Dunning-Kruger Effect (Andrés Stoopendaal, 2021/2023)

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a name given for the tendency for low-performing people to overestimate their performance, and for high-performing people to underestimate their performance. In other words: dumb people see themselves as smarter than they are, and smart people see themselves as dumber than they are. Why this phenomenon has been chosen as the title for this Swedish novel (in English translation this fall by Simon & Schuster) commenting on contemporary culture is not totally clear.

It all starts with a dinner party (or parmiddag in Swedish) where the protagonist mentions Jordan Peterson, a psychologist who has been vocal about the policing of language around trans issues. But because Peterson’s name isn’t followed by a clear condemnatory diatribe, the other guests become uncomfortable. “You can’t possibly mean he has something noteworthy to say” is the response, and just in time for dessert the evening becomes increasingly uneasy. It is this tension that the book is based on.

One could assume it is a joke on the reader, to sprinkle the text full of culture war-laden buzzwords and terms gleaned from Wikipedia articles describing psychological research. But I don’t think it is. I think the writer has immersed himself in this world and let it tumble around in his writerly mind for a while, and the end result is this book, which I don’t think is premeditated or really planned. It is a pretty funny book. I wonder though, to what degree the humour is culture-bound to the Swedosphere (suèdosphère?). I should be in prime position to judge, as I am pretty well-versed in both Swedish and English.

Some parts of the book must be hard to translate, like the Sweden-specific dread around a certain political party, and lots of comments on social customs or Swedish middle class culture. I almost felt embarrassed at times. Stoopendaal dissects the Swedish cultural obsession with consensus and general avoidance of social tension. Several sections of the book deals with current events and cultural upheavals like the metoo movement, and its repercussions on the Swedish literary establishment.

In Swedish there is a word for English terms taken in directly as loanwords without consideration – anglicism. This book is FILLED with them, both intentional and unintentional. A lot of English words and expressions are employed, as if they have slipped through to the Swedish usage. Sometimes they ring very false. This might be an intentional effect, but I don’t know. It has to be nearly impossible to convey this linguistic interplay in the English translation though.

Sometimes i get the sense that Stoopendaal wanted to review a book or just express a fleeting thought, because there are a lot of digressions of that kind. This is common practice in contemporary novels, an autofictive influence. Stoopendaal drones on about Pomeranian dogs (which inspired the choice of cover design), the culture of the ultra rich through a book by Sigrid Rausing, and some notes on writing with Stephen King and Swedish stalwart Jan Guillou.

He also dedicates a chapter to French writer Michel Houellebecq, which invents a story where Houellebecq is visited by an agent of the French Secret Police. This chapter has captured the attention of Houellebecq enthusiasts internationally, and might be a contributing factor to why he book has been picked up for translation. Stoopendaal also seems to have found inspiration in the writing of C.G. Jung, alt-right expressions and computer game lingo. It is refreshing to read satiric treatments on current cultural trends like podcasts, words like “safe space”, New Public Management, and various current thoughts on masculinity, sexuality, class, politics and “just-in-time production”(!).

Another astute observation is the now ubiquitous phenomenon of couples sitting at home each with their own tablet och phone watching separate screens, but sitting next to one another in a sofa. Here is the excerpt (translated by the reviewer):

Something about this situation, this setting, with me in the easy chair with my laptop computer, Maria with her iPad, resting on the sofa, felt very, even brutally familiar. Which it was. It was most certainly a painfully ordinary situation in the everyday lives of millions of people, regardless of where on the globe they lived. Two or more people in a living room, each of which are busy or rather wholly absorbed by their electronic plaything, together and close to one another physically, but at the same time very much solitary. Did Maria need my physical presence in this room? Did I need hers? No, in a fundamental sense neither of us needed the other, not in this situation, not until one of us started to demand something of the other. I could at any moment request Maria’s attention. But why? For her to give me some sort of validation? I didn’t feel any need for such validation, in any case not in this particular situation.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect by Andrés Stoopendaal

All in all, a pretty funny book, with things to say about our current moment which amounts to a good time, with plenty of moments of mirthful recognition. I’m not sure it is meant as a comedy, though. My take is that the book doesn’t have a set purpose, it’s more of an expression of one person living in the early 2020s.

The Tennis Players (Lars Gustafsson, 1977)

This is a special case, as I listened to this book, read by the author in a series of TV broadcasts produced in connection with its publication. I was inspired to approach Gustafsson’s writing when I heard of the death of one of his collaborators, Jan Myrdal. The Tennis Players is about a Swedish professor of literature guest lecturing at the University of Texas and his incessant tennis playing. It is a short book, dealing a lot with differences between the US and Europe, and ideas the one has about the other. Me, having lived on both sides, figured it would be an interesting topic. It turned out to be mostly about American ideas of Europe, rather than the other way around. The main character is a lecturer on Strindberg, and one of the story lines is that an American student of his has found evidence that would revolutionize the world of Strindberg research. Our lecturer ends up withholding this evidence to the community of Strindberg researchers, much to his student’s chagrin.
Another line in the book is the constant tennis playing, both in rich country clubs and in humbler areas, where he meets different people and learn of their philosophy of playing. It seems that Gustafsson uses the game of tennis as a metaphor for life in general (much like the management book “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey, incidentally published 1972). Myrdal was married to literary critic Madeleine Gustafsson, but divorced her to marry a woman he met in Texas, with whom he had two children. Later he married a third woman, before he passed away in 2016.

Resor utan mål (Harry Martinson, 1932)

Harry Martinson – Travels without a destination (1932)

This short book by Swedish folk writer Harry Martinson is about his time traveling the world as a sailor. He writes about his nautical hoboing from Stockholm to Antwerp to Rio to New York and beyond. He is quite a poetic writer, and opens the book with a long paean to nomadic life (reminding me of Bruce Chatwin’s idealization of the nomad) and then continues to describe various incidents from his rambling years. He writes a lot about love, and of “eros” as he calls it. His perspective on race relations in the South was interesting. I noticed that he likes to use the word “electrons” to describe inner states; a curious but inspiring choice of word. I wish I could quote more from the book, as it really was peppered with funny expressions and turns of phrase, but my notes got lost in the mail. Martinson continues the travel writing in the subsequent volume Cape Farewell in 1933, which was translated into English and received positive reviews in the TLS. Resor utan mål, however, was never translated. 

Ancestral Tables (Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, 2005)

Stamtavlor (Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, 2005)

This Swedish book by a Kurdish-Swedish journalist about growing up in Kurdistan and Sweden is filled with stories about her family and relatives, and Kurdish culture. Written when she herself became a mother and started thinking about her own cultural heritage and what she wanted to transmit to her children.

A big part of the book is filled with proud disdain for a lot of the misogynist and patriarchal practices in Kurdish folk tradition. It is quite obvious that Demirbag-Sten is no fan of religion, and she describes her family’s missteps and the dire consequences that the Kurdish “honor culture” can have.

The tone reminded me of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other overeager pro-secularist writers. I sympathise with the secularist cause when I read these tales of backwards traditions and blind rage, but I am also wary of those who are too hardline about the secular perspective. It’s certainly a balancing act on a razor’s edge to try to reconcile both views.

The book sent my thinking to the Kurdish people and how their history compares to my own closest ethnic filiation, the Jewish people. For instance, the parts when she and her Swedish husband and small children visited military zones in Kurdistan reminded me of how other Swedes have reacted to military presence in cities like Tel Aviv. Demirbag-Sten portrays Kurds as not being a literate people, and that no written sources remain to tell about their origins.

Many of the stories are real gutwrenchers – heartbreaking stories about torture, deceit and love. It made me think of Svetlana Alexievich’s writings, who is quite expert at picking out and describing suffering. The difference when reading these stories compared to Alexievich is that they come closer to my reality since they have been lived by someone raised in Sweden, and someone I’ve heard speak at various conferences, to boot.

It was a timely read for me, as I too will soon have to think about the same issues of transmitting cultural heritage. It’s quite the conundrum.

(This review is based on the Swedish language version of the book, as it has not been translated to English)