In praise of the Swedish tant

Ok, so I found this super charming book called "De sista tanterna - från husmor till modeikon" by Fatima Bremmer. (How do I translate? It would be something like = the last old ladies - from housewife to fashion icon.) The Swedish word "tant" is not easy to translate. My dictionary suggests "aunt" or "nice lady". It´s what married women were called by children when I grew up. We had two neighbours, both of them tant, but they were tant Ingrid - first name, but still a bit distant to us kids, and tant Lund - last name (noone would ever have thought of calling her tant Dagmar, that would have been unthinkable!) tant, but we were really close to her, she was a true play mate.

Not any more, though. Kids these days call everyone by their first name. Women of my mother´s age, who grew up as the first generation of teenagers, hate being tant-ish, like every generation hates being like their parents.

My grandmother was the quintessential tant, she cared not for fashion, she was thrifty, sensible, she baked, knit socks for all the grand-children, wore patterned polyester dresses, and she had that iconic tant hairdo, which is actually the kind of hair that movie-stars had in the 40´s. Not all old ladies are tant, my mother-in-law does not fall into that category at all, she is just too modern, too fashionable, too changeable. And I suppose some younger women are considered, if not tant then tant-ish, in the sense that they are a bit old-fashioned, conservative, and narrow-minded. Tant is often used that way, as a derogatory term.

I imagine this book would not have been written at all, if tant hadn´t also been rather hip among some young girls. I suppose they are more into the tant-esthetics than the tant-ethics. Personally, I feel a bit like I´m the opposite. I do a lot of things like my grandma would have done, I learned a lot from her, and tant Lund. And tant Kampmann. Great tants, all of them.

It makes me sad to think that in just a few years time women like this will be gone. I think we can learn a lot from them in terms of sensible economics and sustainability. And growing old with a sense of worth.

On the Art of Aging

This is Merete Mazzarella´s brand new book, "Det enda som egentligen händer oss - ett år i livet" (= the only thing that really happens to us - a year in a life). I have a weakness for books of this kind, a cross between the diary and the essay, where clever people reflect on their lives. Our lives. My life.

Mazzarella is a retired professor of literature at Helsinki University (I know I have heard her lecture IRL, I just can´t for the life of me remember when and where), and it´s not the first book of this kind she has written. In the book, she chronicles how she travels and talks about another book she recently published about how to become a pensioner. She feels like a professional pensioner, she writes, and this book also deals a lot with aging and how to remain active and hold on to some kind of vitality when one´s body starts to protest about simple tasks like getting out of cars. She fears dementia and so she writes about memory, she fears becoming dependent on other people and so she writes about people who say they like to "work with people", about giving service to others. She writes about the poverty that will face many pensioners in the future.

Mazzarella keeps returning to one thing, only partly revealed, throughout the book, and that is her guilt about leaving her aging husband for a new love. In the process she has also lost her best friend, which clearly hurts just as much. She is trying hard not to justify her actions, nor will she allow herself any display of flagellation or humiliation. No doubt the little she gives away is enough to hurt some feelings of those involved.

She reflects and reads about what others have to say about the nature of the self. Do we have an authentic core or are we just the sum of our relationships and the roles we play? What is identity? What does a carer do when a demented vegetarian wants meat? When the personality disintegrates, should the carers care for the personality, defend it against the body´s urges? Are we our personalities or are we what our bodies make us? A complex weave of neurons, changing, growing or falling apart?

The idea with a book like this is that what happens to Mazzarella, what is important to her, is important to us all. I would say that´s right, and it´s very much a book that is present tense. It should be read now, when it´s fresh and current. Reading her is like listening to a friend who is very clever, not wise perhaps, but vigorous, still very much alive and kicking and growing. If you worry at all about the future, if you are at that age when the grey hairs are starting to bother you, or are making the transition into retirement, I heartily recommend Mazzarella. She is easy to read without being easy (if that makes sense), full of interesting suggestions on how to see things from a different perspective. She often tries several, and does not make her mind up about which one is the right one. And I can´t think of a better way to stay young than to think.

Am thinking. Don´t disturb.

Swedish Championships of Yukigassen (snowball-fighting) and Fireworks 2012 at the Luleå University Campus

It was a clear, starry night. That´s Jupiter, Venus, and the new moon.

The Yukigassen battlefield.

How the audience kept warm. Or they popped into STUK for a pint.

The Vice Chancellor´s speach. The Yukigassen mascot.

Our team getting ready.

No 7 Berg and No 5 Ek, in good form.

No 6 Höglund being taken down just before the enemy seizes the flag.

Consolation prize: four great big fireworks!

Oh, and the winners of Yukigassen were the students of team I&Company. The best fireworks were by the Chalmer´s team from Gothenburg. We actually went home after the second firework display - it was minus 15 degrees Celsius and tea&semla in the sofa was a pretty good way to round things off!

Being in love, in love of Being

I had come almost half way into my last read, "Immortality" by Milan Kundera, when it occurred to me that this really is the book he should have called "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". And guess what, about 50 or so pages later, he says it too (being a character himself in this novel)! The theme is really image. Can we separate our own being from our image, that is the question? Again, he returns to explore the kitsch mensch, calling her Homo Sentimentalis this time. She is the person who lives through her own image, who is constantly on stage with at least one faithful in the audience - herself. And trying to catch the attention of others, striving for that kind of immortality that consists of memory replayed again and again in peoples minds, in some cases with literature as a vehicle.

I always feel, when reading Kundera, that he lives in exactly the same world as I do. I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" when I was about twenty, and it was the first novel that I underlined whole paragraphs in and wrote in the margin of. I then gave my copy to a man that meant something to me, but I have a fresh copy on my shelf that I have been meaning to re-read anytime now. Soon. "Slowness" is another of his books that made a big impression on me. I haven´t read them all, I tend to want to save some of the good stuff for later.

As always, I find that the books I´m reading at the moment all have something in common that is somehow connected to what I´m struggling with at the moment. Being would be a good word for it. I´m really trying to get out of the idea that I´m somehow always performing in one way or another, that I´m always part of a narrative. Even when I´m alone. A friend once said that it was as if what happened to her didn´t count unless she had first told all her sisters about it. I know what she meant, for me it was all about writing it in my diary.

The goal is to reach a new level of comfort, I suppose, and get to a place where I can forget myself and just get on with doing. I really want to do more.

I think everyone should read Kundera. He really is a man with a message, someone who has a mission. I think he wants to free us from our own illusions about ourselves, and that must be a good thing. Only he who has nothing to loose is really free, I suppose. He also writes wonderful stories, excellent prose, the reader is never bored. Or at least not this reader. Perhaps I´m wrong, maybe he is not for everyone. I don´t know. I just know I love him. Really love him.

Imagine being an oak tree. How unbearable is that?

Skeletons and Scandals

I have not been reading much lately. If you live in Europe, you know it´s damn cold everywhere, and our barometer is nearly through the roof. The atmospheric pressure has gone from 976 to 1055 (1070 on our meter) this last month and I have been experiencing headaces of a most stubborn sort. It´s like someone is sitting on my sinuses.

However, last night I took a pill and went to bed with Somerset Maugham´s "Cakes and ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard".  I have been recommended to read his "Of human bondage" but never really felt inspired to do so. But when I saw this one, the title intrigued me. It sounds like a farce, one of those where there are lots of running through doors and hiding in cupboards and under beds. And to some extent, it is. It´s a very funny book. Maugham is a sharp satirist when it comes to the quirks of English snobbery and class awareness. And while that is a good enough reason to read any sort of book, it´s far from all that this novel is.

According to Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge, haha) it´s considered to be a roman à clef about Thomas Hardy/Edward Driffield and his first marriage, and Hugh Walpole/Alroy Kear trying to write a biography about him. The narrator of the story, William Ashenden, is clearly Maugham himself. I don´t know enough about either of them to say whether there is anything in it or not. Maugham himself denies it in his introduction, and really, it doesn´t matter. This novel is, not unlike Kerstin Ekman´s latest, a story about literature. On the one hand, what it takes to write a great novel. On the other hand, what it takes to become a great novelist. It´s the introvert versus the extrovert. The content man versus the social climber. The absorbed artist versus the manipulating ass-licker.

It´s also a story about great tragedy, and great love. And about every person being a bit of an island, a mystery even to those closest to them. The narrator sympathises with both Kear and Driffield, and I imagine Maugham could have identified with both. A huge role in this drama is played by Driffield´s first wife, Rosie, also his muse. What is it that inspires an artist to do his best? Rosie doesn´t really do anything, she just is. Totally mindful, to use a modern concept. She is loving and inspires love in others. Even when she behaves badly (according to the moral of the times) she is wonderful. And when Driffield looses her, he has his best work behind him.

And anyway: what kind of cake goes with ale?

I read somewhere that "Cakes and ale" was Maugham´s favourite work. I can see why. There are so many layers to this story, and it´s a bit of a declaration of what he wants his art to be about, what he aspires to. You could say that it´s a writer´s skeletons in the cupboard that becomes his cake and ale. It´s the shady parts of his experience that he can turn into literary gold if he can look at them straight, with an empathic eye, and tell it like he sees it without the opportunistic judgement that may please his critics but makes literature obsolete within a generation.

I love love love this book. It´s complex and serious and funny. Great stuff. I suppose I have to read "Of human bondage" next.

A Layercake of Fiction

The other day I started seeing a film called "Sleuth" with Michael Caine and Jude Law. I thought the premise (two men meet in the older man´s grand home, and it´s about a woman, of course) reminded me a lot of a novel I read years ago, when we were in Budapest, "Embers" by Sándor Márai. And, in one of the first minutes, the older man asks the younger if his name is Hungarian, by any chance. No, says the younger man, it´s not. Really? says the older, I could have sworn it was Hungarian. Or something like that. I think they mentioned Hungarian three times, so one would not miss it. A wink to Mr Márai, I imagine, or anyone who is aquainted with him, more like. It made me feel very clever. I didn´t watch "Sleuth" to the end. Where Márai´s novel was subtle, spooky and understated, this film was violent and kind of screamy. I didn´t much care for it.

I have heard somewhere that there really are only about seven ideas for stories, and the rest are variations on them. I can well believe it. I think most novels are written by someone thinking "I can tell that story better" or "I know something more about this". In that sense I think literature is a slow conversation between writers, who are, in essence, readers who wish to respond.

I´m not sure why this leads up to the latest of my reads. I was recommended Håkan Nesser´s "Himmel över London" (= sky over London). He is not someone I would read, as I have not liked his crime novels about van Veeteren (these are translated to English) much. Or at all. However, I started it, and really, I find the story fascinating.

The sky over London.

 Nesser invents an author who is a bit like himself, an author who is beginning to believe that his creation exists in reality, that the people he has invented are real people. He convinces himself this is true. It takes a while to understand which parts of the novel are "real" (relatively speaking) and which ones are the novel (within the novel). And when that is clear, Nesser pokes another hole in his fiction/reality construct and pushes his author into another layer of fiction, under a new layer of (fictional) reality. It´s like a play with mirror images in mirror images.

It reminded me of a funny film I saw, "Stranger than fiction" where Emma Thompson plays a depressed writer trying to find a good way to kill her main character. He finds out what she is doing and tries to stop her. What is real? What is not? I think most serious readers would find this interesting.

I also can´t help thinking what another writer than Nesser could have done with this idea. I know it´s unfair to compare every novelist to Tunström, Coetzee or Kundera, but I can´t help myself. There is something about the way Nesser writes that makes me feel that he is too much in a hurry, that he does not take the time to really, really write well. Not as well as he should, with his experience, anyway. But perhaps it´s just a matter of taste. Bottom line: I heartily recommend it.

Memories & Memoirs

I proudly present a new author: Anna Bergh. My mother-in-law. This is her long awaited, by the nearest and dearest anyway, memoir, that she has been working on since the late 90´s. She calls it "Som jag minns det" (= as I remember it). It´s all about the way she grew up in the middle of Swedish Lapland in the 20´s and 30´s, how she started a family and moved south in the 40´s, came to Luleå in the 60´s and all about what she has done, people she has known, things that have stuck in her mind for different reasons.

Anna has lived a very long life, at 92 she is still in possession of all her wits (more than enough of it!) even though her strength isn´t what it once was. She has makular degeneration, and because of her inability to write, she has used a tape recorder and I have transcribed all her texts (being an old secretary and rather fast at the keyboard, it has not been too hard work). After ten years of turning out one story after another, we finally sat down and read through it all and did some editing. And it´s a real book, all right. Almost 300 pages of it. There are also some great pictures, since her much older brother owned a camera and he took photos not only of his family standing in front of the house in their Sunday best, but there are images of horses plowing fields, snow shoveling, picking berries in the forrest, Anna´s father making a boat, and things like that.

The family harvesting turnips, circa 1932.

I really like the idea of making sure the stories survive for the next generations. She has 11 great-grandchildren (so far) that will never truly get to know her, and this way they can still get a sense of who she is and where the family comes from. The thing about using tape recorders is that the voice of the writer really stays intact, the text really comes alive. And she has, in a way, lived the life of two generations of women. First, she had kids in the 40´s, was (more or less) a stay-at-home-mom, as women were back then. Then she had a new baby in the 60´s (my husband), got an education, burned her bra (no, just kidding), started working as a teacher and was all into politics in the 70´s. She has always been, and is still, interested in what is going on at all levels of society and uses what influence she has, whenever she feels it appropriate. This is really a woman with a voice of her own.

As you can tell, she is a great influence on me, a great inspiration, and we have always got along swimmingly. Not least, being a fully trained seamstress, who once had her own studio, she has influenced whatever style I have. She really is the perfect companion on a shopping trip.

I think all retirees with too much time on their hands and memories and reflections of the past, should write something about their lives. It´s not difficult, it doesn´t have to be perfect. And it doesn´t have to be a "real" book either. Just save your text to a pdf-file and anyone can read it on their computer, on their e-book reader or surf pad or smartphone or whatever. It´s the easiest way to publish, a pdf on a blog, I bet you can post it on Facebook or mail it to friends and family. Just do it, it is more valued than you think. And will become more and more of a treasure when you are not there anymore, even though we don´t like to think too much about that, no no.