A fresh blanket of snow covers a hackneyed literary setting

The province of Norrland as you never imagined it

BY JONAS THENTE

There is a series of TV commercials which have been advertising the beer label Norrlands guld (‘Norrland gold’) to the Swedish public for a few years now. All the commercials are variations on the same theme, i.e. simplicity, naturalness and an authenticity bordering on the naive, all hallmarks of the Norrland of the advertising world and in themselves, these connotations are cunningly calculated to add to the attraction of the product. All the commercials are narrated by the same voice, too; a slow, steady Norrland accent telling the viewer about ‘notable local events’: a class reunion, a game of crazy golf, a picnic…
The setting of these commercials is so firmly established in the public imagination that they can even afford a light touch of irony – irony, after all, is only made possible by close familiarity with its object. This, then, is the Norrland we all know. And while the Norrland people who feature in the adverts may be a bit simple and their activities rather mundane, these are the very traits that make the commercials so suggestive. Nobody speaks unnecessarily, they just smile at each other instead and enjoy the tranquillity of sitting quietly in a stationary car drinking beer. A couple of the commercials also feature the necessary opposite of this concept: the stressed, pretentious city dweller, who is finally able to shed his mannerisms and posturing when in Norrland and be himself. The narrator encapsulates it all in his final sentence: “I sure don’t know why they all like Norrland so much, but I guess they just want to be themselves for a while.”
In his book about rural Sweden, Fucking Sverige (Ordfront, 2002), Göran Greider, writer and editor-in-chief of Dala-Demokraten, draws on Henry David Thoreau’s thoughts, particularly in Walden, in trying to capture the attraction of forests, fields and remote areas for modern man – this call of the wild which paradoxically coexists with scathing urban comments about ‘country bumpkins’ and ‘hillbillies’. “Countless people harbour utopian ideas of a life closer to nature which does not preclude an urban mindset”, Greider writes, admittedly with less than perfect clarity, returning now and then to the sense of freedom and lightness. “Only occasionally do other people pass by, under the open sky, not boxed in by rows of houses, pavement, billboards or crowds of people.”
Not boxed in, no. If Greider describes small towns in central Sweden as a fertile breeding ground for the more sincere and down-to-earth type of person, then surely people must be even more authentic standing under the white porcelain sky of Norrland, boxed in by nothing at all unless you count the jagged tree line on the remote horizon and the occasional outline of a faraway fell.
There is a mighty contemporary tradition of literature set in Norrland, mainly in Västerbotten. The Norrland of literature has been paced out and measured in meticulous detail, claims staked on bedrock and subject to consensual mythological sets of rules. Writers such as Sara Lidman, P O Enquist, Torgny Lindgren, Loka Enmark and Kerstin Ekman all describe a hard-working people living close to nature and their God, and as charmingly eccentric yet authentic as you could ever wish; these are the people of Norrland. Quite often, individual characters function as a part of a thematic collective which shares a cause, often a noble one.
But with the most recent generation of writers, we meet a new era and a new Norrland; perforce one which is in contrast and even revolt against the established version. The figures which plod through the snow across the vast wilderness look more like dots on a huge, white sheet of paper than anything else. Or like commas, perhaps. As in Anne-Marie Ljungberg’s first novel, Resan till Kautokeino (The trip to Kautokeino, 1998), where a series of images emerges of lost souls, alienated, wet and cold, who appear to bump into each other purely by chance as they travel along dark roads devoid of traffic, stopping now and then at that contemporary version of the roadside inn, the motorway café. In Ljungberg’s work there are no goals as such, no visions of a better tomorrow, none that anyone really believes in, anyway.
By contrast, Lotta Lotass actually creates a kind of collective in her first novel, Kallkällan (The cold spring, 2000) and Band II: Från Gabbro till Löväng (Volume II: Gabbro to Löväng, 2002), but it seems as if the Norrland of literary cliché works its own will with the characters, forcing them into submission before the Bible and the brutal wilderness. Lotass is writing in the P O Sundman tradition of loneliness, stubbornness and vain pursuit of nameless goals. She gives no exact geographical coordinates for her literary landscape. It could lie somewhere near the place where she grew up in western Dalarna, but she places it firmly in the Norrland of literature.
Ola F. Nilsson’s collection of short stories, Jätten (The Giant, 2002) is a colour chart of the entire compass of Norrland. They are all here, loners, eccentrics and he-men. Here, too, are the dualisms: tradition and modernity, collective and individual, authenticity and illusion, and, of course, scholarliness and machismo.
Elisabet Rynell’s novel Hohaj was praised, and rightly so, when it was published in 1997. Here, we meet a woman who, as a result of a crisis, heads out into a remote wilderness called Hohaj, a word that once had meaning, but whose context has since eroded. Out into this desolate, white Hohaj the woman goes, to lose herself and perhaps to rediscover herself. Here, there are deserted farms and sharp whiteness, and also a parallel narrative from an ancient past, a tale of cruelty and love. Rynell writes of Hohaj as if it were an entirely metaphorical landscape, reclaimed from man in order to become a virginal wilderness where men may go in order to become human again, and where the past is preserved in the form of relics and whispers only. The Norrland wilderness has the same function in Rynell’s Till Mervas (To Mervas, 2002); it is a place to run to in order to rediscover yourself.
Meanwhile, the pseudonym Nikanor Teratologen sees the Norrland of Sundman, Lindgren, Lidman and Ekman as a provocation. The entire region appears to have been so soundly and thoroughly claimed by previous writers and so densely crammed with wise eccentrics and glorified genuineness that the only strategy left is to drive this theme beyond the absurd. In his novels Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen (Care for the elderly in the Upper Kågedalen area, 1992) and Förensligandet av det egentliga Västerbotten (Solitary remoteness as a characteristic of Västerbotten proper, 1998) he stages a thorough-going occupation of the claims of previous writers, inverting every motive. Morality turns into immorality, love becomes harassment and barrenness, Christianity turns into Satanism, and the community breaks down as a consequence of the individual’s ruthless lust for power. The Swedish literary tradition of nature description shrivels under the onset of a brutal dog-eat-dog mentality, and at the centre of it all there stands the repulsive figure of ‘Grandad’, the gruesome result of millions of years of inbreeding – not necessarily within one family, but within the species as a whole.
These most recent novels emerge from a contemporary Norrland, the Norrland that has become a mute literary symbol. The younger generation of writers are letting the snow fall over it, creating a new, white field for their writing. Also, in 2002, one of the writers who originally created the Norrland of literature, Torgny Lindgren, published the novel Pölsan (Pölsa; a type of lung hash). In the novel, he literally constructs a fictitious Norrland alongside the real one, in the shape of a reporter on a local newspaper who invents scenes, places and people to write about until his deception is finally uncovered many years later by the editor of his paper. The striking thing is that Lindgren finally settles the fight between the fictitious and the real Norrland in favour of the fictitious.

Jonas Thente is a literary critic

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow