Finlandia candidates announced - 2

FILI has issued more details of the Finlandia fiction prize nominees and their books:

Turkka Hautala: Salo (Gummerus)

The theme of Turkka Hautala’s debut novel is one of human destiny.One by one the residents of Salo take their turns speaking, in a chain-like structure. The spectrum of viewpoints extends from the anguish of a factory manager to the everyday compassion of the seller at a sausage kiosk, but the personalities merge into a cohesive whole. Hautala takes ordinary people as his characters and he knows how to see the humorous side of their actions. The novel is written in supple language using different registers and dialects. Salo builds a mosaic portrait of the declining Finland of today, and the author’s gaze is sharp and fresh.

Kari Hotakainen: Ihmisen osa (The Human Lot, Siltala)

At a bookfair, a writer meets a button seller who sells him her life story for 7,000 euros. Along with the sale, the reader receives a large slice of Finnish life and the history of entrepreneurship. The small business owner’s grind grind is replaced nowadays by endless meetings and imagination for sale. Like its characters, broken under the blows of an unrestricted market economy, Kari Hotakainen’s novel is customer-oriented but strongly resistant to change, critical of society, warm and intelligent.

Antti Hyry: Uuni (The Oven, Otava)

In Hyry’s novel, the reader’s interest is not directed to a plot or character portraits. There are no dramatic turning points in this description of the construction of a baking oven. On the surface,Hyry’s writing is reminiscent of the kinds of modernists who build their texts on simple perceptions of the world of objects in order to emphasize incompleteness in their sketches of the world. Instead, the person in Hyry’s book is taking concrete steps to establish a home in the world. His tasks gain their significance from the meaningful places of life in its entirety. This portrait of everyday life thus opens out into a cosmos where the central character is living the life he was meant to live.

Marko Kilpi: Kadotetut (The Lost Ones, Gummerus)

Kilpi’s work explodes the conventions of the detective genre,because attention is focused not on the intellectual puzzle of solving a crime or understanding a criminal’s motivation. Instead, crime is taken seriously as a psychological, humanistic moral and societal phenomenon. The violent criminal is seen as psychologically abnormal, while at the same time his activities provide the impetus for the popular media’s pursuit of simple labeling of our society.

The police are shown as psychologically stressed due to their experiences of the human suffering and cruelty inherent in violent crime, and the victims of crime are examined not only in the narrow terms of rescue or death – rather, the possibility that those “rescued” are so psychologically wounded that they may never be able to live a normal life is seriously considered. Kilpi’s book reveals how deeply traumatic violent crime is for everyone it touches.

Merete Mazzarella: Ingen saknad, ingen sorg (No regret, no sorrow,
Söderströms / Atlantis)

Merete Mazzarella’s novel is a nuanced and empathetic description of a day in the life of 79-year-old Zacharias Topelius, at the same time viewing Topelius as tied to his own time, giving the portrayal a delicate irony. On the one hand, the novel is a study of old age with all that it entails: memory, renunciation, loss, emotion, the reevaluation of perceptions, even doubts about one's past deeds and thoughts. On the other hand, the book is a study of the Finnish mentality of the 1800s through the contemplation one who would in future be a central cultural figure. In a Topelius family circle made up for the most part of women, women’s issues in various historical eras gain particular significance.

Tommi Melender: Ranskalainen ystävä (The French Friend, WSOY)

Tommi Melender’s novel is about friendship in a world where friendship is a diminishing resource. At the beginning of the novel, a well-known academic, identifying with Gustave Flaubert’s disgust with modern life, leaves his job and escapes to a small town in France, where he encounters certain darker aspects of contemporary European reality. The novel’s skillful composition combines a contemporary portrait of the European literary heritage with the bleak and pessimistic tones of a reluctance to believe in solidarity between people, or the possibility of friendship, or love itself.

See also: Finlandia candidates announced

Nordic fingerprints

Reviewing Don Bartlett's translation of The Consorts of Death (Dødens drabanter), the thirteenth of Gunnar Staalesen's sixteen Varg Veum novels, in the Independent last month, Tone Sutterud relayed the news that Arcadia Books intend to publish all sixteen novels in English. This is welcome news, although I wonder why it has taken so long for Staalesen's work to reach an English-speaking public, when other Nordic crime writers, several of them somewhat less talented than the pioneering and innovative Staalesen, have fared so comparatively well. I have to confess an interest here: back in 1985 I translated an earlier novel in the Varg Veum series - At Night All Wolves Are Grey ( I mørket er alle ulver grå) - which attracted some favourable reviews in the British press, but  is now, more than two decades later, out of print.

I'm still equivocal about the rise of Nordic crime fiction in the Anglo-U.S. publishers' lists. When so little serious Scandinavian new writing and poetry is published in English translation, it seems wrong that quite so much attention should be given to what's really, in spite of attempts to characterize it otherwise, an escapist entertainment genre.  Also, when raising this point, I've constantly been struck by the intensity of the negative reaction that usually follows. There's a defensiveness in the reaction which suggests that some of the more central issues concerning the crime genre and the effects of its popularity are being avoided, and I feel that there's a reluctance to discuss those issues in public (though much is said in private).

Voces intimae - 4

(continued)

November

3) Mood up – the Himalayas again! [deleted words]

8) Have been in Hades. A valley such as never was.

9) Better already. [hairpin crescendo] Business H:fors.

15) Mood has been good. Not much appetite for work. Hard to learn to work without a stimulus. A must!

21) Have worked well – freudvoll, leidvoll – for a few days. Business tomorrow.

30) Axel Carpelan was here. I admire this fine talent. His powers of discernment are outstanding even though he is physically worn out. Appetite for work has been very poor. Yet this evening it is good!

December

14) In Memoriam, the funeral march, finished. 3 [green box] Op 59

15) Melartin, that neuter, has been with me. A refined nature.

17) A deep valley again! Horribly dark and empty, and concentrated feed! Will the sun never shine again? My life is ebbing away before I have been able to carry out what I had sight of. My business affairs are dragging me down. My destiny! Is this to be the end of my composing = life?

21) Melartin! I admire his method of working. How to achieve this "nulla dies sine linea." And the technique! Starting on the ballet in earnest. [deleted words] And my business affairs! A miracle that I produce anything at all. Not out of the valley yet.

26) Abandoning the ballet because of too little reward for too much time. "Up and at ‘em” again! Damn it, do I sound like that?

27) Himalayas again. Everything bright and strong. Worked like a giant.

28) My throat! Good God! Worked a bit

29) Have even given up the Lottery Music. I am burning my boats deliberately. Holding high the banner of true art. Don’t let go of pathos in life. And one’s "grip".

30) Worked, though ill.

31) Another year. Everything still "pending".


translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Voces intimae - 1
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(continued)

September

15) My old suffering (even not to be... etc.)! Will I really never escape from this pettiness. Always suffering - about everything! Suffering that gives me a metallic taste in my mouth!

23) At last signs of life from Breitkopf via Paul. – Verträge geschlossen. Result again equal to zero, I think! Mikael's "lizard" [op. 8] torments me. Must get rid of it as soon as possible. So it has taken a month to sell the piano stuff [op. 58]. Good God! My nerves!

Maud Allan again! Suppose I shall have to write her some music. Got 3000 Rmk. from B.& H. The first swallows in a long time.

[in pencil]

3000

27) [September]
− October 3)

In Koli! One of the greatest impressions of my life. Planning "La montagne"! Ill. Business affairs.

13) Sent off 'Shakespeare Songs "[op. 60] and "Christmas Song" [op. 1 No. 4]. All bagatelles. Still on “The Lizard”. [op. 8]. Appetite for work = 0.

15) “Lizard [op. 8] finished.” Yes. Yes.

21) Loafed about and attended to business in H:fors. Now the important thing is to get it all finished and out of the way. [deleted words]

23) How infinitely far I am from that rational work which brings life and joy to the practician and to those around him. I suppose I ought to console myself with the thought that this "joy" is always selfish, whereas my misery - - -!

Working on "Marche Funèbre" [op. 59]. Want it to have the most monumental form possible. Strange to think that it will probably be played when I am a corpse.

24) Have, I believe, a “sight” of "Marche Funèbre" [op. 59].

29) We must see how my brother holds up. He has enemies who want to bring him down. Him – a soul of the purest, a man of work and ideals. (My business affairs are taking up all my time).

(to be continued)

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

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The Cities Inside Hall

Michel Ekman, reviewing Johannes Anyuru's Städerna inuti Hall (The Cities Inside Hall) in Hbl (excerpt, my tr.):

...The Cities Inside Hall is a daydream, or rather, given its grim tone, a waking night dream. At the beginning we meet the poetic “I” on a park bench. To be on the safe side, the bench is left empty, so all one has to do is sit down in the author's position. Then we set off on a journey, an inner journey, but still in a largely recognizable world, with concrete features (troubles) to make up our minds about. The distinguishing characteristic of this world is described in the title. Hall is a Swedish prison: the whole world is locked up in it.

The poetic “I” is suffused by a never-ending flood of pain and discomfort. Prison scenes, riots in Paris and Copenhagen, flashbacks to the war in Algeria, expressions of alienation and suffering in modern society fill the poems like short, specific scenes of violence. On a more abstract level Anyuru chooses – with a shade too much didacticism – the lock as a symbol of oppression. Detailed descriptions of various locking mechanisms pop up repeatedly. Another motif – the law – appears with lesser frequency, becoming lost in airy ambiguity.

There is obviously something impressive about a poetry collection that runs to 358 pages, and one feels that the sheer mass of print would be enough to knock the critics on their backs. For myself, however, I think that The Cities Inside Hall suffers from monotony and lack of conceptual focus. The poems seem to constantly generate new poems because they find it difficult to stand on their own. It is, after all, impossible to read a colossus like this as carefully and with the same attention to the whole that one would devote to an ordinary collection of poems. The question then becomes: what is the poetry form really being used for?

That question is reinforced by the fact that the form itself is also problematic. The staccato idiom employed by Anyuru often does not work particularly well in print. Presumably, it was originally conceived for reading aloud, but in contrast to two of his obvious models, Göran Sonnevi and Bruno K. Öijer, Anyuru finds it hard to create a style that also works in print. He falls short of his predecessors on another point, too. This has to do with the poetry’s political potential. Anyuru has been hailed as a renewer of the political poem, but I find neither the political acumen of a Sonnevi nor the provocative anti-politics of an Öijer in his work. Anyuru ends up in a tepid middle ground where much centres on the idea that policemen are not nice people.

The Cities Inside Hall strikes me as a book that is only half-finished, written by an author who is feeling the heavy hand of expectation on him. That doesn’t alter the picture of Johannes Anyuru as one of the most promising voices in Swedish poetry.

Voces intimae - 2

(continued)

May

15) A shock because others (?) write compositions to my texts. A sign of their weakness. Nobilitas unfashionable! Working on 8 songs to texts by Josephson, six of which completed today [op. 57]. – Beware this dreadfully cynical view of life. You cannot go through your entire life playing the cold cynic. Though can probably get away with the "man of honourable jealousy", etc. Ugh. Is this really worthy of Jean Sibelius?

18) 8 Songs Op 57 finished [the green line under the box] Have fulfilled the terms of Lienau’s contract. Went to bed at 9, dead tired.

21) Must go home. I can no longer work here. A change of style? Was at Lienau’s. He believes in my art. And knows how to keep company. Deswegen: write a Piano Piece for him.

[in the left margin]

Got home at 11pm.

Järvenpää. Bad conscience because of laziness.

28) Regarding the piano pieces [op. 58]. Do I really need to follow this advice – as this piano technique is rather alien to me. So. Nothing "for piano" yet, at least. "The Hunt" [op. 66 No. 1]! At the planning stage.

June

3) At work again. My business affairs compel me to write the piano pieces [op. 58].

July

12) Continuing with the piano things [op. 58]. They are starting to interest me. Evil tidings about business. Summer! Wonderful to live in the family.

26) Contract with Mikael Lybeck. "The Lizard" [op. 8]. (19) Music for it.

August

5) Bad reviews in Russia. Abuse. Where do they want to go? In England, too. My nerves are already pretty bad. A happy 30 years!

28) 10 piano pieces finished. Op. 58. It seems to me that the technique in these is better than in the other ones. Business affairs atrocious. I am beginning to think that the debts are impossible to settle. However, it depends on how I am paid. Reading proofs of Romance in C major Op 42 [op. 42]. Happy days when I wrote this music. "Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

(to be continued)

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Voces intimae - 1

Voces intimae - 1

From Jean Sibelius: Dagbok, 1909-1944, edited by Fabian Dahlström (Atlantis, Helsinki, 2005):

1909

February, London


18) Began work again (repaired IInd movement of the Quatuor) [op. 56].

I

25) Wrote some of Sketch III and working on 1 ½ (!) [Op. 56].

I

27) Met with Debussy. Interesting. Compliments.

The dark shadow of "business".

I

March

7) Fleeced by my compatriots, a terribly desolate mood. How to escape from this dreadful fate. Still on the Quatuor [op. 56]. All is lost! No glimmer of light!


15) Still on quatuor [op. 56]. Business affairs in a terrible state!

25) The snake Delius.  My heart bleeds over Bantock: I never thought that I should lose him. Slowly but surely my fate approaches: lonely, ruined, shame and sorrow! Met with d'Indy.

April

1) In Paris. Wherefore do I flee the quatuor [op. 56]? René d'Avesac Castera, compositeur, troubadour!

10) In Berlin. Back to see Geheimrath Fränkel, who dispelled the fear and clouds. Business affairs impossible! Maud Allan, letter! 

15) Quatuor [op. 56] finished!  I - my heart bleeds - wherefore this tragedy in life. Oh! Oh! Oh! That I exist! My God -! Four pairs of children’s eyes and a wife’s [two words deleted] behold me, ruined man! What have I done? Only composed well. Must consequently suffer.

17) In the afternoon, a horribly desolate mood – "without life and without wonder “.  In secret, new ideas and plans. - Yes - yes.

22) Still converting ideas into money. My affairs! Have I really been dependent on tobacco and wine? Always on the crest of the wave or down in the depths! When can I go home? It looks dark outside. Lienau  the Ginnungagap! 

28) Feel that my living arrangements are too simple. Pretensions to life! Munsterhjelm is modelling me.

(to be continued)


translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Second thoughts

The board of directors of Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (NTNU) in Trondheim have unanimously decided to reject the proposal for an academic boycott of Israel, Haaretz reports:

The vote resulted in total victory," said Professor Bjorn Alsberg, a member of the board of the Trondheim-based Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Alsberg, a chemistry professor, led a campaign at the Norwegian city against the boycott.

He said that the vote to boycott Israel - which drew condemnations from Jewish organizations in Israel and elsewhere - was rejected after none of the 11 board members objected when NTNU Dean Torbjorn Digernes suggested scrapping the motion from the board meeting's agenda.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post writes that Swedish journalist Donald Boström has "reevaluated his position" on the matter of claims that the IDF harvested organs from dead Palestinians:

According to the report, Bostrom recently canceled his participation in a Beirut conference, the goal of which was to slander Israel.

Sources close to the journalist related that Bostrom's recent visit to Israel and the fair dialogue he held at a Dimona conference caused him to think twice about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

See also: Fighting back

Finlandia candidates announced

The shortlist of candidates for this years 30,000 euro Finlandia Literary Prize has been announced (apparently leaked by Uusi Suomi a day early), Hbl reports, noting that Finland-Swedish author Merete Mazzarella's Ingen saknad, ingen sorg – En dag i Zacharias Topelius liv is present on the list in its Finnish translation (published by Tammi). The other candidates are:

Turkka Hautala -  Salo (Gummerus)
Kari Hotakainen Ihmisen osa (Gummerus)
Antti Hyry Uuni (Otava)
Marko Kilpi Kadotetut (Gummerus)
Tommi Melender Ranskalainen ystävä (WSOY)

In their statement, the members of the jury remark that many of the novels submitted for consideration this year show signs of the influence of the methods and conventions of the detective novel - even those which have little connection with the thriller genre. This is a tendency that has been pointed to on this blog more than once.

The prizewinner will be announced on December 2.

Karin Boye - a biographical profile - 9

(continued)

Kallocain, a strange, nightmarish novel of cells and staircases and corridors, is open to several interpretations. On one level, it may be read as a political satire in the tradition of Zamyatin's We or Huxley's Brave New World: it concerns events within a World State of the future, which resembles both the Third Reich of the Nazis and the Soviet Union of Stalin. A central role is played by a truth serum ('Kallocain') invented by Leo Kall, a worker in a state chemical plant, who seeks to overthrow the state and the lies with which it has indoctrinated humanity. On another level, however, the novel may be read as a meditation on inwardness and confession, or 'breaking-open'. It contains many passages of extreme power and evocativeness, underscored by the eerie presence of wartime Sweden, with its military personnel on the streets, its whispered conversations held in fear of being overheard.

When it appeared in the autumn of 1940, Kallocain met with enthusiastic reviews. Artur Lundkvist declared that it was in 'the international class', while another critic called it 'a thoroughly thought-through, thoroughly felt, one might even say thoroughly suffered work of art.' The poet herself wrote to Ingeborg Holst on 23 January 1941:

You asked me how it (the novel) had gone and how it had been received. It has had consistently excellent reviews and has even come out in a second edition... All kinds of people, friends and strangers alike, have written and thanked me...

As Margit Abenius writes in her biography, both Kallocain and the poems of The Seven Deadly Sins should be seen as the fruits of the liberation experienced by Karin Boye when she perceived that 'our most intimate and most extreme problems are and remain problems of life-philosophy and faith': 'It was an image of man that was formed in her view of life - an image that hads probably always been there in rough outline - a Spinozan image, in which man is a multiplicity of countless forces that strive towards the 'unity' which it reflects in its broken life-utterances. In 'Man's Multiplicity' the prophetess speaks as out of a dark Middle Ages:

We were born of mothers of heaven and earth
and of powers with no end in view,
nocturnal wills and wills of light
with names that no one knew.

May one of the many
not gain power over us,
though she be of heaven's race
and shine in magnificence.

In us a multiplicity lives.
It fumbles towards unity.
Its capturing, gathering burning-­glass
we were born to be.

Great is man's striving,
great the goals it has set ­
but much greater is man himself
with roots in universal night.

So give, that we shield a secret room
and never a flame do lack
on the altar of an unknown god,
that may tomorrow wake.

The last year of Karin Boye's life was one of tragic contrasts, paradoxes and deepening insight. Realizing the depth of her love for Anita Nathorst, she also realized that that love could not be returned to her. In a letter to a friend, she wrote:

That not even the times and the decline of the West should prevent one from collapsing like a house of cards and burning like a piece of tinder and that when one finally attains something that has lain in one for twenty years, the person concerned is dying of cancer and sufficiently exposed to radium not to have a spark of sex left. We agreed that life is macabre in a way that no reforms can ever remove, macabre to its innermost kernel.

Yet this was also the year in which she visited Denmark, which was now under German occupation. Conscious of the propaganda value of cultural visits, the German authorities in Copenhagen had arranged for a delegation of German writers and poets to come and give readings there. No one attended them. Then the Danish cultural authorities invited a group of Swedish poets and writers, including Karin Boye, to take part in a 'Swedish week' in the Danish capital. Karin Boye was introduced to the Danish royal family, and Kallocain was written about enthusiastically in the Danish press. This visit was perhaps the nearest the poet ever came to a direct political action, and it also set the seal on her fame and international reputation. She is now considered one of the major Swedish poets of all time, in the same tradition as Viktor Rydberg, Gustaf Fröding and Vilhelm Ekelund. She was also a seminal influence on the development of Swedish modernism, in particular the generation of 1940's poets that included Gunnar Ekelöf, Harry Martinson, Erik Lindegren and Artur Lundkvist.

The inner conflicts that split Karin Boye and which were reflected in her tortured love relationships gained the upper hand over the artist in her. Inwardly doubting about Anita, whose move away from Alingsås to Malmö may not have been entirely for medical reasons, and deeply ambivalent about Margot Hanel, who was still completely emotionally dependent on her, Karin Boye succumbed to an access of despair. On 23 April 1941 she left the house at Alingsås and walked off into the surrounding countryside, taking only a bottle of sleeping tablets with her. Some days later, after a police search of the district that proved fruitless, she was found by a passer-by, dead from exposure. A month later, Margot Hanel gassed herself. Anita Nathorst died of cancer in August.

(the end)

Biographical Profile - 1
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Biographical Profile - 8

Land of one language?

In Finland the vexed and perennial question of the position of the Swedish language in the country's affairs continues to provoke discussion in Finnish and Finland-Swedish media. Last week Ulla-Maj Wideroos, chair of the Swedish People's Party group in the Finnish Parliament, gave an interview to the regional Finnish dailyTurun Sanomat in which she said that

the climate within the government had changed to the disadvantage of Swedish-speaking people over the past two legislative periods... "There has been a change of generation and today's politicians do not relate to the Swedish language in the way earlier ones did"...(Helsinki Times)

Last month the youth wing of the Perussuomalaiset (True Finns) party demanded (Turun Sanomat) that Finland should become a monolingual country, and that the special official status accorded to Swedish should be removed, "because the language legislation does not correspond to the real declaration of will in our country". In their statement, the campaigners said that too much of Finnish taxpayers' money was being spent on maintaining Swedish as the country's second language relative to the small area in which Swedish is actually spoken. Alluding to the growing numbers of Russian-speaking migrants to Finland, they asked if Russian. too, would be made an official language when the numbers of Russian-speakers reached the same proportions as those of Swedish-speaking Finns.

In the Swedish-language Hufvudstadsbladet it's possible to follow an ongoing discussion of the issue. Some of the contributions illustrate the intensity and bitterness of some of the debate. Excerpts:

• Our history with Sweden was horrible and vile. We don't want a Little Sweden here in Finland any more.
  

• It is simply that there is no need to learn Swedish. Everywhere in Scandinavia one can get by with Finnish and English.

• Swedish Finland (Svenskfinland) - that's not something one talks about in Finnish. What is it , exactly? 
  

• In the metropolitan area nearly all Finland-Swedes speak "proper" Finnish. But there must be something wong with  the Swedish teaching in Finnish schools, because Finns don't learn Swedish? The majority of Swedish teachers in Finnish schools don't know Swedish well enough and are also incapable of inspiring their students to learn it.

Note: to an outsider, it would seem that from a literary point of view Finland is quite clearly a land of two languages - the Finland-Swedish contribution is at least equal to the Finnish one. But seen in contemporary social and general cultural terms, the situation appears to be different. Is it a case of one Finland for the Finns, and another for the rest of the world?

Karin Boye - a biographical profile - 8

(continued)

Among the German-Jewish emigré friends she made during the summer of 1937 time were several men. To one of these she became very closely attached, and it seemed that some kind of decision was imminent. But at the last moment the poet went away to Stockholm to see Margot Hanel for a few days, and when she came back she asked the man to forget everything that had passed between them. Something seemed to have changed in her relationship with Margot, and from that time onwards she ceased to talk of it and her in condescending tones. The epigram 'To You', written in July 1937, put the seal on this. Yet the problems within the relationship were not resolved: indeed, they seemed to intensify. In 1938 Karin tried to send Margot to Paris to live with a family there, but Margot returned within a month. Karin spoke of 'events that have made my life into chaos', and in a letter to the handwriting expert, Dr Blum she wrote, in German:

Nur tun mir Ihre Schlussworte über die notwendige Resignation ein bisschen weh. Ich stehe eben in einer Situation, wo eine absolute Selbstaufopferung - von Arbeitsfreude, Kameradschaft, künstlerischem Schaffen, Ruhe, Harmonie - verlangt wird, und ich habe so schwer ein solches Opfer zu bringen, jedenfalls kann es nicht mit Freude geschehen. Glauben Sie wirklich, dass Resignation der Sinn meines Lebens sein kann? {Eine zu persönliche Frage... Die Antwort kann nie von einem Anderen kommen.)

Only your words at the end about necessary resignation hurt me a little. For I am in just such a situation where an absolute self-sacrifice - of joy in my work, of friendship, of artistic creation, of peace, of harm ony - is demanded of me, and I find it so hard to make such a sacrifice - at any rate, it cannot happen with joy. Do you really believe that resignation can be the meaning of my life? (A too personal question... The answer can never come from someone else.)

In February 1938, Karin Boye visited the cathedral town of Linköping in order to give a reading of her poems. While staying there, she visited the cathedral and had a deep spiritual experience while standing before the altar-painting of Christ by the modern Norwegian artist Anna Sørensen, and the tapestries by Märta Afzelius. The result of the experience forms the subject of the long poem 'Linköping Cathedral', in The Seven Deadly Sins.

During the summer of the same year, the poet visited Greece on a travel scholarship from the Swedish Academy. On the way she visited Vienna, Prague and Istanbul. In Greece she travelled from Athens to Delos, where she wrote: 'the Aegean sea is brilliant blue, and on the other side of the water lie other rocky islands in a thick heat haze. The light is wonderful. It overwhelms one, takes one's breath away. It is apt here. After all, Apollo was the one "whose eyes had never seen the darkness".'

In the autumn of 1938, at her own request, Karin Boye took up full-time teaching at Viggbyholm, but the workload proved to be too much for her, and she suffered from overstrain and exhaustion. Her consciousness of the cruel and terrible events that were taking place in Europe at this time, the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and the persecution of the Jews, also contributed to her sense of confusion and breakdown. She was unable to write or work on her poetry, a condition which for her was tantamount to a complete paralysis of spirit, and she developed a severe and acutely painful inflammation of the nerves in one of her arms, which nothing would cure. Eventually she left Viggbyholm, and returned to Stockholm.

4. 1939 - SUMMER 1941

It was at around this time that the poet began to correspond again more frequently with Anita Nathorst, whom she had now known for almost twenty years. Anita had contracted a disastrous form of skin cancer, which was eating its way inwards into her body. Karin, who was still in love with Anita, travelled to Alingsås, near Göteborg, in order to be with her and look after her. While she was there, she wrote letters to Margot Hanel assuring the latter of her continued loyalty. In many ways, the poet seemed split in two - something noticed by her mother, who wanted to encourage her daughter's move away from Margot Hanel, but was concerned by her psychological state. This may not have been made any easier by the fact that Anita was by now the assistant of the psychoanalyst Iwan Bratt, who lived in Alingsås and whose house she frequented. Karin came into contact with many seriously disturbed patients, and Bratt himself seems to have been a somewhat controversial figure, with an approach to psychoanalysis that some called crude and oversimplified.

Nonetheless, all this time Karin Boye continued to work at her writing with great application and an almost demonic intensity. Not only did she produce a large body of poetry - she also wrote and completed her prose masterpiece, the novel Kallocain, which bears an epigraph from T.S. Eliot:

The awful daring of a moment's surrender,
which an age of prudence could never retract,
by this, and this only, we have existed...


Biographical Profile - 1
Biographical Profile - 2
Biographical Profile - 3
Biographical Profile - 4
Biographical Profile - 5
Biographical Profile - 6
Biographical Profile - 7

(to be continued)

A War Story - 3

III


It was evening and the mother and the daughter were home, but the boy was in bed. He had been in bed ever since his return from the exhibition, facing the wall.

“How is he?” The grandfather asked in a low voice. He was getting ready to go to work.

As his wife was about to reply, the phone rang. She cupped the receiver with her hand and said to her husband with both respect and a touch of alarm in her voice, “it's the city doctor.”

The man took the phone. The doctor needed a taxi for the whole of the evening and the entire night. His regular driver had been taken ill. The man took a pen and wrote down the doctor's address. “You haven´t seen my glasses?” the old man asked his wife as he took the piece of paper, folded it and put it in his pocket.

“No,” said his wife, “and we gave the whole apartment a thorough cleaning yesterday.”

On his way to the doctor two enormous aircraft came flying in low over the city to land. They were B-17s. He was able to identify them from an illustrated article he had read in the newspaper. It was obvious that some sort of airlift was under way. It was getting dusk.

He knew the doctor slightly, had driven him on former occasions. The doctor was a rather short-tempered man. Influenza was ravaging Reykjavík. They drove from house to house. “Will you come with me into the next one and phone the hospital and write down the patients’ addresses?” the doctor asked. “It´s all I can manage to deal with these kids and those crazy grandmothers. The grandmothers are the worst, they make more trouble than the children do,” he added stroking his large bald head.

The man had thought of mentioning his grandson's strange malady, but now thought better of it.

“I´m sorry,” he said. “I can't see well enough to write. I lost my glasses last week and can´t find them anywhere.”

The doctor muttered something and went into a house. Yet another B-17 came sailing over the town.

It was well after midnight until the doctor got a break from his house visits. The driver mentioned the big aircraft to the doctor, who was suddenly filled with an urge to see them. They drove towards the airport.

A few MPs were guarding the great planes that were larger still in the darkness. Under their wings the soldiers looked tiny.

One of the MPs, holding a gun, came over to the car. The doctor rolled down his window. He had been educated in America and explained their business. He and the soldier had a short pleasant conversation. The doctor had been in Idaho and the soldier happened to come from the same state.

Suddenly the soldier pointed to the sky. Yet another flying fortress was coming in. They could see the warbird growing bigger all the time, and the lights on the wing tips blinking.

Then without warning the soldier ran away from the car. It was obvious that something was very wrong. The plane was coming in over the city lake at much too low an altitude. “My God, it's going to crash-land!” the doctor said.

And like a black goose that had been shot down, the enormous plane crash-landed on the gravel airfield. Soldiers were running towards it. The doctor and the driver were out of the car. The soldier who had been talking to the doctor was beckoning to them. The doctor returned to the car to get his bag and then ran towards the soldier. The driver followed. The broken plane seemed to hiss with anger at its own destruction. Then suddenly fire broke out in the cockpit. The driver could see the trapped crew. It was obvious from the men’s terror that they had no chance of getting out. The fire grew more intense with each swiftly passing second. Then, in less than an instant, a fireball engulfed the B-17. Only the tip of the cockpit protruded from the flames.

“Those men are trapped,” the driver said out loud. “Those men are trapped!” he repeated.

They heard strange crackling sounds, like someone letting off fireworks. “My God!” the doctor exclaimed, “they’re shooting the crew.”

On the edge of the light cast over the airfield by the fire the driver watched as a group of riflemen, resembling an execution squad, fired at the cockpit which was now completely swallowed by the flames. He didn't know if the sound they could hear was the shots or the windows cracking from the heat. An officer was pointing to the driver and the doctor and shouting something in an angry voice.

“Let´s get the hell out of here now,” the doctor said and both men ran to the car. When they drove away the driver saw in the mirror that they were not being followed. Nothing was visible of the plane now but flames. They met two cars heading towards the airfield, obviously out of curiosity. A few men were also running in that direction. “They’ll be turned away,” the doctor said.

“We were lucky they didn´t shoot us,” the driver said.

“Well, they know who we are. Who I am. I won’t be surprised if we’re called in tomorrow by the police for an investigation of some sorts. They’ll want to keep the shooting from getting into the papers.”

"They couldn’t have done anything else,” the driver said.

The doctor nodded. “Just take me home. I have to rest a bit. Then I'll phone the hospital and go in my own car in the morning and attend to any patients who may phone during the night. You go home now and have yourself a rest, old pal.” He patted the driver on the knee in a brotherly fashion. “This is quite enough for one night.”

They parted, and the man drove home. The shock of seeing the men being shot in this way to save them suffering had not yet sunk in.

He parked his car and opened the door of the apartment block where he lived. He entered his apartment, took off his clothes in the living room, and looked up into the dark sky where the boy had seen the angel or whatever it was, but there was nothing to see except the moon which stood out large and cold-looking. On the sofa the boy was peacefully asleep in his usual way, with his face turned away from the wall.

The man opened the door to his bedroom, slipped under the sheets and lay there in perfect stillness. He decided not to wake his wife. No matter how hard he tried, he could not get to sleep. Grey light began to show in the window. It would soon be daybreak. He must have slept. He woke up. He had had a strange dream, or was it a vision? He had seen his glasses. They lay by a fence in front of a house by the city lake and they were covered by grass. A few days earlier he had stood there before picking up a resident who had ordered a taxi. “Damn it,” he said. He tried to lie still but knew he would not be able to go back to sleep without making sure that the vision was true. He slipped out of bed.

“Are you going somewhere?” his wife said in a sleepy voice.

“Yes,” the man said. “I have to check something.”

“Will you be long?”

“No, I´ll be home in time for coffee.”

He quickly put on his clothes, went outside and started his car. He drove downtown. There was the fence he had seen in his dream. And the tree at the street corner. He stopped the car and got out. He moved the grass near the fence pole with his shoe. There were his glasses. He picked them up and put them on. They were definitely his.

When he got home, his coffee was ready. As his wife poured him some coffee she said: “Oh yes, the boy´s teacher phoned last night. He was rather upset. He said he just wanted to let us know why he hadn’t included our grandson’s work in the school exhibition. He said that the drawing had been totally unacceptable by any standards, so he'd destroyed it to prevent it causing any more offence. What’s wrong with the lad? What did he do?”

“Produced a masterpiece, most likely,” the man said.


THE END

A War Story - 1
A War Story - 2

A War Story - 2

II


The man woke up at noon. There was stillness in the house. He had been out on the job until the early hours of the morning but nothing much had happened, no drunken soldiers, no desperate girls craving for the company of their army boyfriends who were confined to barracks.

The man lay still for a moment and checked for sounds in the house. There was total stillness. Just the occasional rumbling of an engine when a car drove past. He called out for his wife in the dark tone of command that usually brought her into the room. It was her custom to give him his morning coffee in bed, but there was no reply, she must have gone out on some errand.

Suddenly the door opened and his grandson came in. The boy just stood there staring at him as if he had come across a stranger in his grandfather’s bed. “Yes,” the man said at last.”So what do you want?” The boy had a way of looking at him that sometimes made him shudder.

"Grandmother said you should take me downtown to school,” the boy said.

“She said what?” the man exclaimed. He had never before in his life entered that establishment.

“To see the exhibition,” the boy replied.

"What are you trying to tell me?" the man asked. He assumed at once that there must be some serious misunderstanding.

“Grandmother had to go away,” the boy said. “Her friend was taken ill all of a sudden. You have to take me downtown, for the exhibition. It’s today.”

The man felt himself getting irritated. “What exhibition are you talking about? What’s happening? Where is your mother?”

“The exhibition of the best drawings and paintings by the pupils this year opens today. My drawing is the very best of them all,” the boy said with no obvious pride, as though he took his superiority for granted. Then he looked at his watch. “It opens at one o’clock, he said. “And we mustn’t be late.

His grandfather felt uneasy. He was not used to dealing with things like this. He drove a taxi, and by doing so provided for the family, but all this business of teachers, authority and too much education made him unsure of himself. He only felt at home in his taxi: there he was in total control of his surroundings.

The boy looked at him with a flat expression.

“And where is your mother?” the man asked again.

“She went out last night with her friend and hasn’t come home yet,” the boy said.

The man got out of bed. He felt that he shouldn’t inquire into these matters any further, at least for the present. He got into his trousers and put on the suspenders. He found his slippers with his feet and made his way to the kitchen. He would have to do without coffee this morning. He had no clue as how to go about making himself a cup.

The clock on the wall showed twenty minutes to one and the boy was looking downcast and nervous.

“And did your grandmother say when she’d be back?” the man asked. The boy shook his head and his grandfather gave up all hope of escape. “Well, get dressed then,” he said. “We’d best get this over with.”

He found his shirt, jacket and a tie and put on his shoes. The boy was waiting for him out on the veranda. He looked unusually pale and distracted. “So what are you so uptight about?” his grandfather asked.

“It’s my drawing. I’ve never taken part in an exhibition before, so naturally I'm nervous about showing my work in public for the first time.”

His grandfather suddenly felt an urge to laugh. How strange his grandson was. He was almost like a grownup locked into the body of a child. “Well don’t you worry about it,” he said. “I'm sure the other kids are not as handy with the crayons as you”.

“Oh, they aren't,” the boy said looking at him. His face broke into an enormous smile. “I know I'm by far the best.”

“Now how do you know that?” his grandfather asked, feeling his mood change from amusement to sudden irritation.

“I just do,” the boy said.

When the school came into view the man saw that flags were snapping in the wind high on top of the pools to both sides of the entrance. The stairs to the doorway were broad and wide and reminded him of the entrance to some official building in Germany he had recently seen in a picture in a newspaper. He felt his old sense of discomfort become more intense. Pupils were streaming through the gate with their parents or other relatives, brothers or sisters. The boy and his grandfather walked up the steps.

Slowly they walked along the corridor and then made a tour of all the rooms. The walls were covered with the kind of drawings that children do. There were houses and people and animals, horses and dogs and cats and chickens in drawing after drawing with an eternal sun shining over most of the scenery and the people and the animals and the occasional flower. When they had made the rounds the grandfather said: “Well?”

“Mine isn’t here. They haven’t hung it up.”

“So much for your lady in the sky,” his grandfather remarked. “Never pay any attention to dreams, for the most part they’re nonsense.”

He knew the words were harsh, but he was hoping the whole thing would teach the boy a lesson.

Suddenly the boy looked over to a handsome young man with jet-black hair and square jaws. “That’s my teacher,” he said in a low voice. He tugged at his grandfather's sleeve. “Let’s go and talk to him.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea? If they didn’t see fit to exhibit your picture, and they sure didn’t, you had better accept it,” the old man said.

But the boy was insistent. He tore himself free from his grandfather and went up to his teacher. Suddenly he seemed even more firm and more independent than usual. The teacher was talking to an elderly couple, apparently trying to hide the fact that he was a little annoyed at the intrusion, but the boy kept on talking. The grandfather felt it his duty to go closer in case his grandson needed any help.

The teacher looked in his direction and said, “We only hung the pictures we thought were good enough to exhibit.”

“Come on,” the grandfather said. “I’ll treat you to a soda pop on the way home.”

He glanced down at the child. The boy had a stunned expression, as though for the first time in his life he had had a glimpse of reality.

It was a good lesson, his grandfather thought. But he felt annoyed that the child’s drawing had not been considered good enough to be included in the exhibition.

(to be continued)

A War Story - I