Next up in our A Year in Reading series is Eva Wissting, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Sweden. A book reviewer and an avid book club member when she is not contributing to Asymptote, Wissting shares with us the literary discoveries that lit up her 2019.
At the beginning of this year, I started reviewing books for a Swedish online site, Dagensbok, which has published one book review every single day since the year 2000. I first stopped by the office to pick up books to write about around this time of year, during what we in Sweden call “the middle days”—the slow and lazy days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve that feel like holidays, even though they’re not really. The entire office building appeared to be empty, except for me and the editor whom I was there to meet. To walk up to a filled bookshelf and be told that I could pick anything, get to write about it, and people, supposedly, would read what I’d written—this, for sure, was a second Christmas.
One of the books I picked up that day I most certainly wouldn’t have come across otherwise. It’s an amazing Finnish-Swedish poetry and graphic book by Jolin Slotte and Pauliina Pesonen, about finding your own words and your own voice in difficult circumstances, even when it labels you a traitor. The word-for-word translation of the Swedish title is All These Dead Eyes. The whole book is in black and white, and each right-hand side in Finnish is accompanied by a left-hand side in Swedish. I don’t speak or read Finnish, but this book is constructed so that you only need to understand one of the languages. And then, of course, the words are also accompanied by the beautifully drawn images, which is yet another language. Considering how many of us live with multiple languages—whether we fully master them or they exist more as a backdrop—it surprises me how rare truly multilingual books are.
Another book I discovered thanks to Dagensbok was Kristen Roupenian’s short story collection You Know You Want This, which I read and reviewed in the Swedish translation by Amanda Svensson. It wasn’t until I got to the story “Cat Person” that I realized I had read this author, and this short story, before—though by then I was already completely hooked on this careful study of evil. The stories are written with a great sense of craft, not only in carving out a narrative, but also in understanding how humans operate. These are also horror stories, though not the kind with monsters or ghosts or other supernatural elements; the evil in these short stories comes from within the relationships between people––normal, everyday people like you and I—which is the most horrifying kind of horror stories there are. “Cat Person” differs from the other stories in the collection in that the evil is not so clearly expressed. This is the short story that was published back in 2017 by The New Yorker and went viral. Not a lot of short stories go viral. Not a lot of emerging writers have their short stories published by The New Yorker and then have them go viral. This is certainly an author I look forward to following.
Other translated favorites from my Dagensbok harvest this year were new editions of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry and Nikolay Gogol’s short stories. Just as literature, in a small country like Sweden, is something that keeps us connected to other places, other languages, other ideas—for me, staying involved with the Swedish literary scene (the local as well as the translations introduced) is also a way to stay connected to my home while living abroad.
I’m keeping that connection also through a global book club for Swedish readers that I joined last spring. One of the highlights of this year’s readings was Johannes Anyuru’s novel They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears. It’s a story about terrorism and what direction society is going, and about identity––and fear. The book was published in English this year in translation by Saskia Vogel.
Another book I got to reread thanks to the book club is my personal all-time favorite The Expedition: Solving the Mystery of a Polar Tragedy by Bea Uusma. This fascinating book mixes fiction with nonfiction in the form of diary notes, tables with facts and letters. Uusma goes to lengths that take her all the way to the Arctic in her attempts to find out what really happened to the polar expedition of Salomon August Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel who disappeared in 1897.
An additional nonfiction work we read in the book club was Hans Rosling’s memoir and follow-up to the successful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think. Rosling was the statistician and physician who developed Gapminder and devoted his life to spreading information about world development. The memoir, not yet translated into English, is written together with Fanny Härgestam and is titled, in Swedish, Hur jag lärde mig förstå världen. It was written in a rush while Rosling was dying of cancer.
Oh, and there was also the Swedish classic Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg. When it was first published in 1905, it was controversial because it tells the story of a murder from the perspective of an unremorseful murderer. I’ve read this book several times, and have also seen versions of it staged. Söderberg may have written from over a hundred years ago, but his streets of Stockholm from a previous century bring me right back home.
I’ve always read slowly; that’s probably why I never used to think of myself as an avid reader. Writing has invariably been my thing, but with reading, there were always others who seemed to be “better” at it. In the last few years, though, I’ve realized that I may not be a fast reader, but I’m thorough.
Skimming a text can be useful, and I’ve learned to force myself to do it when I need to, especially with specific kinds of texts, but to skim a novel? Or a poetry collection? For me, the essence of literature is not this or that character, this or that setting or this or that turn of events. The essence is the voice, the perspective, the tone, and all the little things hidden inside sentences and between lines. When you skim a text, you fly above voice, tone, and hidden details, and only catch what’s on the surface. For me, it’s necessary to slow down to step into the world that each work of literature creates.
It felt like a challenge this year to increase my reading load by reviewing books and joining a book club, because I knew I’m not great at digesting large amounts of pages in a short amount of time, even when I have to and even when I love the works (sometimes, especially then). But it turned out that having more of an incentive to read in Swedish, after some years of mostly focusing on English literature, was extremely pleasurable.
Pleasure, I found, was great for getting things done and for getting through those last chapters. Now I can’t wait for our book club discussion in January and for my next visit to Dagensbok to pick up the books for the spring of 2020. This year, I’m bringing a larger bag.
Eva Wissting is Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Sweden. She is currently studying towards a second degree in English literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto.
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