2018:2
Fiction by Johanna Nilsson and Jenny Jägerfeld.
Biography of Ingmar Bergman.
Editor: Deborah Bragan-Turner
(Image: Ingmar Bergman. © Bengt Wanselius)
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It has been hard to avoid Ingmar Bergman in 2018, the centenary of his birth. The ‘legend’, the ‘icon’, the man who has his own Google doodle has been celebrated in a range of retrospectives, books, theatre productions and – yes – films, all testifying to the richness of his work. Much of Bergman’s output is regarded as literature in its own right, and it is on the literary aspect of his words that we focus in this issue, with an illuminating article on his unrealised screenplays and in translated extracts from Jan Holmberg’s The Author Ingmar Bergman and Bergman’s Work Diaries.
The Greener Abyss by Johanna Nilsson is a literary fantasy inspired by, and intended as a sequel to, Karin Boye’s classic dystopian novel Kallocain, the novel for which Boye is probably best known. Read on for a translated extract from Nilsson’s novel, published in 2015, and one from another of Boye’s works, Astarte, published in 1931. Every so often a book written for younger readers comes along and captures the imagination and hearts of adults. Jenny Jägerfeld’s new novel Comedy Queen, a moving story about a child coping with tragedy, is likely to touch all who read it. Östen Sjöstrand was a Swedish poet and translator who is remembered here in a poem by his own translator, Scottish-born poet Robin Fulton Macpherson.
There is one other significant anniversary to observe this year: it is thirty-five years since Swedish Book Review began under the editorship of Laurie Thompson in Aberystwyth. Thanks to the continued financial support and encouragement of the Swedish Arts Council and the indefatigable energy and goodwill of all our contributors and reviewers, SBR is read and enjoyed worldwide, promoting Swedish literature and Swedish writers through the medium of English into many other language areas.
Whilst the magazine evolves in step with the ever-changing world of books, we pause for just a moment to look back at the careers of two of our early contributors, translators Joan Tate and Patricia Crampton.
Translations
TRANSLATED EXTRACT
from The Writer Ingmar Bergman by Jan Holmberg
Although numerous books have been written about the director, writer and producer Ingmar Bergman, Jan Holmberg’s is the first to focus on Bergman as a literary author. Translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner
Translated Extract
from Comedy Queen by Jenny Jägerfeld
Comedy Queen tackles a dramatic and painful situation with the bold energy and humour for which Jägerfeld has become renowned. It deals with one of the most devastating events to affect a child – a mother’s suicide – and is the story of twelve-year-old Sasha’s survival technique. Translated by Susan Beard
Translated Extract
from The Greener Abyss by Johanna Nilsson
Prizewinning novelist Johanna Nilsson rises to the challenge of devising a sequel to Karin Boye’s dystopian classic Kallocain, published in Sweden in 1940. Translated by Sarah Death
Reviews
compiled and edited by Fiona Graham
REVIEW
Författaren Ingmar Bergman
The reader is struck by the sheer volume of Bergman’s arbetsböcker or workbooks, the A5 spiral blocks in which he wrote drafts: some sixty of them dating from 1938 to 2001 are preserved.
REVIEW
Hon, han och hjärnan
Markus Heilig, a psychiatrist turned neuroscientist, has set himself an ambitious project: to explain sex differences in brain structure and function and to show what happens in brains – not just the human one – at different stages of development.
REVIEW
Condorcets misstag - Hoten mot staten och demokratin
Nicolas de Condorcet, mathematician, philosopher and a member of the first government formed during the French Revolution, championed the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual and religious liberty, rationality, and increased economic freedom.
REVIEW
De tystade rösterna
‘Even during lunch the women and men sit in different sections of the restaurant, with screens between them. It is considered ugly for a woman to open her mouth in public. And that is not only to eat, but also to speak.’
REVIEW
Händelsehorisonten
With her feminist dystopia, Karam joins acclaimed authors such as Johannes Anyuru and Jonas Hassen Khemiri in carving out space for a new speculative fiction emanating from Sweden – one that renews the genre by foregrounding questions of diversity and race in a place so often idealised as a social utopia.
REVIEW
Mellan floderna
Duraid Al-Khamisi tells the powerful account of Middle Eastern current affairs in the language of an oriental storyteller.
REVIEW
Det var vi
In a powerful story of loss, Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde asks the difficult questions.
REVIEW
Historiegeneratorn
A collection of six interconnected short stories by Danny Wattin. Sharp and entertaining.
REVIEW
Jag går och lever
‘If I could say what my body has in for it today what they do with it. I have no words for it the hands are just there and the pokes thumps pinches every day they’re there.’
REVIEW
Ingen jämfört med dig
Just how much is likely to have changed between two people who have had no contact with each other for twenty years? Why would one of them suddenly arrive on the other’s doorstep after such an absence anyway?
REVIEW
Skäl
It rings true on so many levels, and women especially will relate very personally to this intimate story of the painful transition from girlhood to womanhood.
REVIEW
Förlåten
A simmering portrait of a soured sibling relationship, and a richly layered contemplation of memory and the imprints left by childhood trauma.
REVIEW
Mördarens mamma
The boy is not her son, and she calls him ‘my boy’ because ‘she took him’ and ‘because he was in my power’.
REVIEW
Den fjärde pakten
Kristina Appelqvist has been described as the queen of a type of whodunnit in which the various pieces of the puzzle are carefully crafted and assembled as the novel progresses.
REVIEW
Aldrig mer
Far from being a typical whodunnit, the novel explores the buying of sex – illegal in Sweden – from three very different angles.
REVIEW
Hemmet
In Hemmet, a horror novel set in a care home, Mats Strandberg sidesteps clichés to produce a haunting tale of dementia and the greatest fear of all; losing control of ourselves.