Ett år av apokalyptiskt tänkande
(A Year of Apocalyptic Thinking)
by Linda Spåman
reviewed by B.J. Woodstein
Ett år av apokalyptiskt tänkande (A Year of Apocalyptic Thinking) is the comics artist Linda Spåman’s eighth book and arguably the most personal. It is hard to imagine how both challenging and traumatic it must have been to write and illustrate this work.
Spåman’s father Walter, who seems to have been a surly and belligerent person who managed to push away nearly all friends and relatives and caregivers except for Linda, gets diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease with no cure. All Walter has to look forward to is getting worse and dying before long, so he decides that he’d rather take matters into his own hands rather than allow himself to become, as he puts it, a vegetable. As he has no one else in his life, Linda is the only person who stays with him and supports him through this. She does this partially from choice but also in part due to pressure from her father and the way he is overly dependent on her. She may want to be with him on his final journey in life anyhow, but he also demands it.
This leaves her with a confusing mix of feelings, including guilt, sorrow and worry, and she ends up putting her life on hold and spending most of her time and energy on her father. He does not seem to be a pleasant person or a particularly caring man, and yet Walter and Linda have a deep and loving relationship and are able to cement their bonds over the period of his illness. When Linda takes Walter out to the beach and feeds him a prawn sandwich, he has one of the best days of his life, even though, or perhaps because, his disease is terminal and he knows the end is near; Linda brings him some joy, and this reminds readers of how little it truly takes to make others happy.
I saw a reference to this book that called it a ‘feel-bad’ graphic memoir, but I would suggest that it is neither ‘feel-bad’ nor ‘feel-good’ per se. Rather, it is a deep, honest exploration of a difficult relationship and an extremely tough situation; neither person is perfect, of course, but they are human, and their depiction is humane and thought-provoking. The illustration style is what some people sometimes refer to as a sort of naïve and almost ugly artistry, without filters or improvements to people’s expressions or appearances. If they are unshaven, dirty, chubby, unhappy, grimacing, or anything else, that is what is shown. Truth is not plastered over with beauty, which means that in actual fact the truth becomes beautiful in its own moving way.
A Year of Apocalyptic Thinking, with its frame narrative of Linda and Death in the boat, rowing Walter’s body on the Styx, encourages us to consider what makes both a good life and a good death.
Ett år av apokalyptiskt tänkande
Galago, 2025, 248 pages
Foreign rights: contact the publisher
Linda Spåman is an artist, graphic novelist and fortune teller. She has made tarot decks and also published a number of books. She also contributed to the tongue-in-cheek collection Kvinnor ritar bara serier om mens (Women only draw comics about menstruation). Ett år av apokalyptiskt tänkande was nominated for the August Prize in 2025.