Karlaplanspraktikan review

Wadensjö is fascinated by the investigation of place, having previously written books with the less affluent Stockholm suburbs of Vällingby and Solna as settings and protagonists. Karlaplan Internship really is a crash course in a very specific Stockholm neighbourhood. Karlaplan is not just any plaza – it’s an exclusive club for the wealthiest Stockholmers: old money, orderly and bourgeois. This is neatly exemplified by the champagne collector, depressed upon realising the impossibility of drinking all his bottles in his remaining lifespan.

However, this isn’t a gated community; we also meet the drunks on the benches and regular Joe shop owners, as well as military personnel and office workers. Some are mortgaged to the hilt to gain the Karlaplan lifestyle, with the estate agent knowing exactly how much debt that is. There is also a large 1970s housing development which splits opinion, described as Olof Palme’s revenge on Östermalm.

This is not a book to come to for driving plot. Following a nameless narrator, we dip in and out of people’s lives through short chapters subdivided into numbered sections, some just a paragraph in length. Like a genius loci, the narrator is tied to Karlaplan and unable to follow characters once they leave, for example describing people entering the metro station at the end of the working day:

‘Each of them taps their travel card at the barriers and disappears from this place. Where they go is beyond our field of vision – it can’t be known, as each evening the metro swallows up so many people it’s unfathomable how they all fit.’

Wadensjö’s prose is pleasing to read and the dialogues believable. The microscopic focus on what may appear to be mundane subjects has something of Knausgård’s Season’s Quartet, though without the autobiographical thread running through.

The book is almost meditative in its ability to focus deeply on a place in time and attempt to parse its secrets. The author has spent time working in a museum and that carries through into his writing, though the book wears its research lightly. If you’re interested in architecture or history, this will appeal. We get a vision of the farmland Östermalm was in the past and see how much things have changed. Now this place no longer produces goods for others but instead gladly takes and consumes what others have made.

The author builds up layers of meaning like watercolour washes – each life is sparingly depicted, but as a collective they create a convincing portrait of a place. Famous residents receive barely a passing mention as the focus remains on unknown people and their quiet stories taking place behind closed doors, the curious details of which are apt to stay with you.

Each sketched life is less like an anthropological study than an inscrutable modern folktale with no discernible moral at the end, enigmatic and beguiling. Several have elements of humour, such as the angry wife who flushes her ring down the toilet each time she argues with her husband, who diligently goes to recover it at the sewer works each time. Others verge on the bizarre, such as the man who falls into a fever when his wife leaves town and writes down the secret to life, only to see the papers float out the window on her return. There is a recurring theme of people grasping for things, people or aspirations and never quite reaching them, as well as the impossibility of language to communicate our true selves and thoughts.

The book celebrates the beauty of this neighbourhood but also aches with melancholy at its residents’ inability to find happiness, and the unbearable knowledge that one day this place will no longer exist. Wadensjö mythologises Karlaplan after having lived there for the past ten years, resulting in an interesting study for anyone hoping to understand Sweden’s capital city.