Per Olov Enquist (1934–2020)

This novel present a weird mix of fact and fiction. First the facts: Blanche Wittman (1859-1913), famous hysteria patient of Professor Charcot at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris is in a later fase of her life the assistent of Marie Curie. She dies from radiation poison. Fiction: Blanche writes of her experiences in 3 books. This is the basis of the novel. I did not like the novel, because of too much use of different styles and too much fantasizing. However I found the information about Blanche Wittman very interesting and it reminded me of the study which I read. Lisa Appignanesi. Mad, Bad and Sad. A history of women and mind doctors from 1800 to the present. Virago, 2009.… (more)

I picked this in my summer reading challenge as a book based on true events. Here events I knew nothing of, King Christian VII of Denmark and the people around him, esp. Dr. Struensee. It was meant to be historical fiction but the style was odd and took some time to turn towards a more novel setting, there was alot more that was just history. It was informative since I didn't know this history but it was not presented in a way that made me think this was what actually happened. The story is fairly disjointed and I started to loose track of which advisors to the King were which. Overall, and I did read up on this part, is that King Christian was, by the standards of the day, quite mad. Certainly he was very sensitive and prone to very emotional outbreaks and also just a pawn in about everyone else's game. I'm not sure who he would be treated today but keeping him under control was the focus in his time. Thus, the Royal Physican, Struensee. No one really comes off well but he seems the most kind to poor Christian but then the story took several odd turns (once again, I think historically accurate) and Christian, his young English Queen, and Streunsee all suffer the consequences, It was not a really enjoyable read and I am not totally sure why it was a best seller but I did learn some history from it. Overall, I think I would prefer a real history and not this style.… (more)

A third-person autobiography by the distinguished Swedish novelist and playwright. He talks about his literary career and the forces shaping his life, in particular his northern childhood and his struggle with alcoholism in the 1980s.

Enquist grew up with his widowed schoolteacher mother in a green-painted house in the remote village of Hjoggböle, near Bureå, about 1000km north of Stockholm. The village has produced a surprising number of celebrated writers: he puts this down to the effects of inbreeding, a practice that was sadly disappearing by his time, thanks to the introduction of the bicycle (a quip he frankly admits to having used in far too many interviews). The Enquist family belonged to a strict revivalist evangelical sect, and Per Olov was enrolled in the Swedish version of the Band of Hope as a small boy. He talks about the effect of growing up in the shadow of an elder brother, also Per Olov, who had died in infancy, and of his father, who died when Per Olov was six months old, leaving a last message exhorting the boy to grow up to be a Christian and a preacher. And of the frustration of not being allowed to go to the football matches that took place in the ungodly half of the village on Sundays.

And, of course, he went on to join in the radical left-wing student life of Uppsala around 1960, as well as becoming an athlete, a drama critic, a satirist and, later, a drinker. None of which would have gone down very well in Hjoggböle.

It reads like a frank and very open account of his life, full of self-criticism that varies in tone from amused to completely humiliated, but there is a lot of art about this as well: it's fairly obvious that there is a lot that he isn't choosing to tell us, and also that he makes quite sure we know all about his great successes as well. He tells us several times that he had only ever seen four plays before his paper made him a dramatic critic, but he also tells us that the play he cobbled together in a moment of inspiration after spending a term teaching American undergraduates about Strindberg was an overnight success. While he is telling us about his fiasco on Broadway, we also learn "by the way" about his close friendship with Ingmar Bergman. And so on.

The middle section of the book has a lot of detail and name-dropping about Swedish politics which is a bit dry for outsiders, but the childhood section and the last few chapters about his alcohol problems are very interesting reading for anyone, and there's also a lot along the way that lifts the curtain at least slightly on what it's like to be a writer who constantly faces the challenge to produce something new and meaningful out of his own inspiration. Very interesting.… (more)