Nordic Council Literature Prize 2003 awarded to Eva Ström

The will to be present in reality

BY OSCAR HEMER

“Eva Ström is a singular voice in the landscape of Swedish poetry. She is a forerunner for a younger generation of poets and her work never stagnates. She tests the limits of the language and challenges the potential of the word. Revbensstäderna stands out because of her riveting
bravery, her intensity and physicality, as well as the clarity with which she depicts the human condition today,” the panel of adjudicators said.
Even if there were no obvious advance favourites, the fact that Eva Ström had won the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2003 must have come as a surprise to most people. She is, after all, not very well known in the other Nordic countries and even in her native Sweden — which has not won the prize since 1994 — most people probably had more faith in the other candidate, Stewe Claesson, simply because novelists tend to come out ahead of poets in these contexts.
No-one was more surprised than Eva Ström herself, however. She had promised her local newspaper that she would write an informed commentary on the winner, never suspecting that she herself would win. “Although,” she admits, “when we did a reading at the Parliament building in Stockholm the day before the jury’s decision I began to think that perhaps what I’d written wasn’t too bad. I felt very con. dent then.”
Our interview takes place in her home, an oil-heated 1950s one-family house in the centre of Kristianstad, about one hour’s journey from Malmö on the new Øresund trains. This is where she lives and works for half the week, spending the other half in Stockholm providing daycare for her first grandchild. Two weeks have passed since the jury’s decision was announced, but the interior of the house is still proof of the commotion that it caused. As we talk, two new . oral tributes arrive, one of them from Författarcentrum Syd, the association of writers in southern Sweden.
I have known Eva for about fifteen years, since the time when she began to write literary criticism for Sydsvenska Dagbladet, where I was the arts editor. Since then, she has been one of the paper’s leading critics. We have seen quite a lot of each other over the years, but this is the first time that I have interviewed her.
Eva Ström’s writing career covers a quarter of a century and comprises seven collections of poetry, one collection of short stories, two novels and several plays in addition to the prize-winning Revbensstäderna (The Rib Cities); but in talking about it, the inevitable starting point is her earlier career before becoming a writer. She worked as a doctor for fifteen years, and her experiences during that time have certainly left an impression on her writing.
“Yes, that is very true. After all, I entered that world at the age of eighteen. And I really dedicated myself to the task, it was almost like a calling. I was a specialist in infectious diseases, and I often worked in emergency care. As a result, I saw a lot of things, so many people, so many destinies, so many images that still come to mind. It gave me a wealth of experience and, what’s more, self-knowledge.”

Have you ever regretted that you left the medical profession?
“No. It was incredibly demanding. The responsibility, the fact that you always had to be alert, that you could never be in control of your own time, well, in the end, that becomes very exhausting.”

But for a long time, you combined working as a doctor with your writing…?
“Yes, I think that writing was a safety-valve for me to begin with. I had to somehow free myself of all the impressions that I accumulated. After a shift when the tension lets go, you enter a strange state of mind, almost like intoxication, or at least a different mental state. In that intoxicated state, I wrote my first collection of poetry, Den brinnande zeppelinaren (The Burning Zeppelin). I never actually intended to become a writer… Well, yes, I did. I wrote in my diary when I was twelve years old that I wanted to become a writer… Anyway, at the time, my ambition was to become a very good doctor. But when I read what I’d written, I thought it was good. In fact, I was overcome with hubris, I thought it was the best thing that had been written in Sweden at the time, and I sent it to Bonniers the publishers. And I told myself that if my manuscript was refused, I would probably never write anything else. But Bonniers did publish it, through their newly started ‘experimental’ publishers, Alba.”

It is evident that your background as a doctor has given you a wealth of experience to draw on. But has it also given you a special way of seeing the world — and people?
“I remember that we were taught to do something called ‘amoral listening’. If someone said that she was planning to kill her husband, you were not supposed to say ‘oh, how terrible’, but instead you were supposed to encourage her to keep talking, to open up further. I think amoral listening is a good concept. And in any case, as a doctor, you do acquire an objectifying approach, whether
you want to or not. You acquire the habit of watching and describing. My books are full of description.”

That talent is obviously an advantage. But could it be a burden, too? Is there an innocence that is irrevocably lost at your first autopsy?
“No,” she answers hesitantly. “I can remember my first autopsy very clearly. It was an incredibly forceful experience. It was at the department of forensic medicine in Uppsala. One of the bodies being autopsied was an eighteen-year-old girl who had killed herself. I was eighteen years old myself at the time and I remember thinking: ‘that could have been me’. She still had mascara on her eyelashes. She was so healthy, so fit to live, so beautiful… And they cut open her womb, perhaps to check if she was pregnant. That felt almost like an act of abuse. Even if it was done with dignity, respect… By now, perhaps it would suggest other connotations. After all, the ‘forensic pathologist’ has become almost a cliché.”

On the whole, doctors tend to be something of an ambiguous stock character in contemporary culture. The evil of Dr Mengele is more shocking than that of Hitler.
“Because he is supposed to represent healing and to protect life, yes.”
The association of ideas here is not random. The first article that Eva Ström wrote for Sydsvenska Dagbladet was about Claude Lanzmann’s . lm Shoa. The Holocaust resonates darkly through her writing, even when it is not stated outright, as in Revbensstäderna. And I seem to detect an ambivalence in the face of the good which encompasses evil.
“There was a period when I read everything available about the concentration camps. And the eerie thing was that I could somehow identify with the executioners. I could understand their dehumanized, objectifying way of viewing their victims. Morals are a thin varnish indeed, and they hinge on a structured existence, on getting enough sleep, getting enough to eat. A mere twentyfour hours without sleep or food will begin to loosen those structures. I sometimes experienced that during my shifts. As a doctor, even when you uttered those compassionate phrases, you did it without real feeling, because you had to maintain an objectifying distance.
The self-knowledge which emerged from that experience also tended to reveal the less appealing aspects of your own character. Yes, perhaps you could talk about lost innocence. But when I left the medical profession I got at least some of it back.”

How do you look at Revbensstäderna in relation to your other work?
“I actually think it is much like my other books. The same themes keep coming up. The relationship to religion, on the one hand, and to the sciences on the other. One of the consistent characteristics of everything I’ve written is a kind of striving to be present in the world. In 1980s poetry, there was a great deal of discussion about the self, about whether the self even existed. Then the war in the Balkans came and pushed all those philosophical niceties into the background. I wrote Brandenburg in an attempt, as it were, to declare that ‘yes, the self exists’.
That will to be present in reality is something that I also think is characteristic of Revbensstäderna.”

Versatility is another striking feature of your writing. You are a poet, novelist, dramatist and, last but not least, a critic. Do you perceive any con. ict between the role of writer and critic?
“Yes, because for a start working as a critic takes away time from my ‘own’ writing. But when I decided to become a writer, which was a major step, it was the income from my work as a critic that made it possible. Because you cannot actually make a living from my kind of writing career. Naturally it is a dilemma that one is writing about one’s colleagues. But it is also very liberating to
be able to take an interest in other people’s writing. I still become exhilarated by a really good book and it gives me the urge to write about it.”

As a critic, you have written mainly about Swedish . ction, but also about Danish fiction…
“Yes, here in Skåne we have a natural affinity with Denmark and I have tried to keep up with the poetry above all. There are so many wonderful Danish poets, take for instance Pia Tafdrup. Or this year’s candidate, Morten Søndergaard, whom I like a great deal. And Inger Christensen, who I think ought to win the Nobel Prize.”

Do you feel that it is jusified to talk about a Nordic literary tradition?
“Yes, I think so. The landscape, the climate and the character of the people are similar to an extent that allows us to understand each other fairly effortlessly. There is a seriousness in the Nordic countries which is also evident in the visual arts, for instance in the work of Munch and
Lena Cronqvist, or in the work of contemporary filmmakers, von Trier and Moodysson.”

Are there any writers that you feel a particular affinity with?
“Pan by Knut Hamsun is one of the books which has meant a lot to me. And Karen Blixen, although it is difficult to feel affinity with someone so magnificent and unique. Inger Christensen, as I already mentioned… Edith Södergran of course, and the Finland-Swedish Modernist writers. Among Finnish poets, there’s Sirkka Turkka, whose work I have read in Swedish translation by Bo Carpelan. Carpelan himself is excellent too. When it comes to literature from Iceland and the Faeroes, I have to admit that I’m not very familiar with it.”

Finally: What are you going to do next? Are you worried that the prize will hold you back?
“The jinx of the Nobel Prize,” she smiles. “No, for me personally, the prize means renewed energy. I will not become more cautious, quite the contrary. I am well aware that what I am writing is not what is ‘in’ right now. The wind is blowing in another direction entirely. But why should I care. I can experiment as much as I want. The prize has given me even more inspiration to write.”

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow