Din vilja sitter i skogen review

At the heart of Timander’s debut novel is a longing to understand oneself, as well as being seen and understood by others. The narrator finds himself alone in a village outside Kiruna, in a cottage inherited from his parents, the circumstances of whose death are not explained. Instead, we watch the young narrator as he seeks out the company of others. 

In the village, people keep an eye on each other. There’s always coffee and buns for visitors, and doors are always left unlocked, just in case. The narrator finds it hard to relate to people his own age, being described as a precocious child, and prefers to keep company with the elder inhabitants of the village. But that watchfulness can also be oppressive; there are feuds here that go back generations, and gossip is important currency.

The narrator takes an interest in genealogy, but history doesn’t seem to give him the answers he’s seeking. Discovering, quite by accident, a stack of novels that must have been his mother’s, the narrator sets about reading with the intensity of a convert. Timander describes vividly the experience of being captivated by a book for the first time. He is overtaken by an overwhelming need to read and connect with the words of authors whose lives are far removed from his own. He also cultivates an image of himself as a literary person, letting a paperback stick out of his pocket and signal him as an outsider.

Seemingly unplanned, the narrator packs up his cottage and moves down to Stockholm. He reads voraciously and starts to write, meeting and becoming infatuated with the pompous and bossy pseudo-intellectual Vera Brandt. Despite the city being noisy and busy, it is possible to be more alone here than in an Arctic village, with unwritten rules of life which are just as impenetrable to the outsider. The narrator’s days and nights blur in a hedonistic tumult of drug-taking, drinking, sleeping and, above all, reading. The days become meaningless, the narrator stops eating and shows typical signs of depression. 

In the third section of the book, the narrator returns north to his village as abruptly as he left it. His cottage has been maintained in his absence by the old village inhabitants. Nothing has changed, and yet everything is different; one friend is dead and another is dying. The funeral brings a feeling of closure and perhaps a new beginning. The narrator seems to have made some kind of decision about himself as he turns his energy to chopping wood before using a book as kindling for the cottage stove. 

The narrator enters Sweden’s literary cultural life in a way that broadly resembles Timander’s own experiences. This earnest and thoughtful bildungsroman is also about youthful obsessions taken to unhealthy extremes – too much reading, sleeping, book-collecting and wood-chopping. This book portrays loneliness, but also tender care and connection to people and nature. The ending is left open to interpretation as to whether the narrator has found his place in the world, though his discovery that running away from your roots is no shortcut to happiness is surely a step away from youthful naivety and towards adulthood. Timander has described himself as being personally torn between Kiruna and Stockholm, always missing one whilst living in the other.

Despite his youth, Timander has already made a name for himself as a champion of literature from Northern Sweden and a familiar voice on the radio. Part of what anchors this book so tightly to place is the fact that it is written in a musical Norrbotten dialect, as well as its sharp observations of both countryside and city life. Timander is part of a growing group of strong narrative voices from Northern Sweden, joining the likes of Mikael Niemi and Ella-Maria Nutti, and we are sure to see more from him in the years to come.