Take it as it is

Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award

Lotta Lotass
skymning/gryning (dusk/dawn)
Bonnier S

By Tapani Ritamäki

Since her debut in 2000 with Kallkällan (The Cold Spring), Lotta Lotass has been seen as one of the spearheads of Swedish literature. All of her books (five so far) have received glowing reviews and she certainly hasn't been short of nominations and prizes either.

skymning/gryning (dusk/dawn), which forms the third part of a trilogy - the others being Kallkällan and Band II Från Gabbro till Löväng (Volume II: Gabbro to Löväng) - was nominated for both the August Prize and the Nordic Council's.

Certainly, Lotta Lotass is an ambitious author who knows one end of a pen from the other, and there is breadth to her works. She knows space just as well as earth. But - and this is just a hypothesis - could a part of the Swedish enthusiasm be something to do with the fact that Lotass is seen as a counterbalance to a trend-conscious existence in the present (visible both in literature and Swedish society in general - visible particularly when viewed from a little further east)? In most of her works, her language and settings have links to an older generation of authors such as Sara Lidman and Torgny Lindgren. At last, a young person who knows something about the countryside, dialects, poverty and nature, and who moreover can combine that knowledge with a sophisticated literary consciousness.

In skymning/gryning Lotass's writing is not everyday-realistic but visionary, or to be more precise: strip away some of the language and it could be included in "everyday realism", but the whole expresses something quite different, perhaps even sci-fi or fantasy. That in itself is skilful.

It is impossible to determine the period in which skymning/gryning is set: it could just as easily be describing the future or pre-history. The idea here is presumably to depict an exposedness that is existential - always equally present. A group of wandering people, nameless existences on their way to who knows where. Has some horrific global catastrophe occurred that has destroyed the safety-net of a secure pension, the latest model of Volvo, unemployment benefit and a cup of latte (the future version), or is this how things looked long ago (the pre-historic version)?

Lotass's highly-crafted use of language has been much praised. It's there, but to such a degree that it risks becoming an end in itself. The techniques become too noticeable, and once one has started to notice how it's constructed it starts to become disturbing. It's usually called poetic language, but too much poetry in a novel can lead to overload. I quickly become allergic to the word repetitions that Lotass uses with abandon (both within sentences and as rhythmic connections between passages).

An example: "Walk along river-banks where stiff arms of harbours dissolve and collapse in compact breakers. Walk along hardened quaysides and round bulwarks built of breaking prisms. Walk along chiselled rows of dams shining like ice, ice-scoured tarns as solid as ice, so like ice in their tranquility but more silent than any ice has been. Walk over wide blue-shimmering, white-edged snow fields, blue-veined snow sheets of captured, assembled greyness."

It's often cold in Lotass's books, and that applies to skymning/gryning too. The climate is tough and inhospitable, on top of which it is hard to find anything to drink (sometimes they find ice that can be thawed). The various groups of people/voices that are in motion here all go on foot (no-one drives a car). There are mountains and there are valleys, and there are seasons. One should take it as it is, but the indeterminable (in both space and time), in conjunction with the poetic language, hinders my identification with it. The unsettling is transformed into tedium, empathy into lack of interest. Interest to irritation. One should take it as it is, but that's not what happens.

Translated by Roy Hodson