Stargate. En julberättelse

The same Swedish book club that picked Dead Souls, Stacken, Svälten, and Orbital this year opted for Ingvild H. Rishøi’s Stargate. En julberättelse (Eng: Brightly Shining) for June, at the suggestion of the newest member. Behind as I am in my annual reading quota, it was nice to have something short—even if reading a Christmas story in June feels a bit…odd.

It’s getting on to Christmas, and sisters Ronja and Melissa are trying to make do, since their alcoholic father is having another rough patch. He manages to get a job selling Christmas trees, but after a few good days he blows it and is back to his bad habits. Melissa steps up and offers to take over the job, working in the mornings and evenings after school but for less pay. One afternoon Ronja, desperate to be anywhere but home, turns up at the tree lot and Melissa’s coworker Tommy gets the idea to use Ronja to sell wreaths and other decorations. Shoppers can’t resist a cute kid, he reasons, and offers to split his commission from the wreath sales with the sisters. This goes well until it doesn’t—the owner of the business isn’t thrilled about child labor going on behind his back—and Ronja is left to her own devices. Things spin out pretty badly from there into an ambiguous ending that takes a sharp turn into fuzzy magical realism.

Putting aside the Christmas-in-June element, overall Stargate was an ambiguous reading experience for me. Up until the ending, I was torn between enjoying Rishøi’s writing (in the Swedish translation by Maria Lundquist) and resenting what I felt was emotional manipulation. Unearned sentimentality immediately sets off my alarm bells when it comes to books and movies, and at times it felt like Rishøi was laying it on with a trowel.

The ending, however, is a choice that deserves its own commentary. While Ronja is certainly a daydreamer, the rest of the book is almost hyperrealistic. The title of the book even comes from Star Gate, an actual dive bar in Oslo where the father drinks himself senseless. Abandoning that kind of stark realism in the home stretch for the total opposite gives the reader a bit of mood whiplash, and it also makes me wonder if Rishøi opted for that because she felt like she had written herself into a corner. Namely: if she’s going to end with Ronja’s death, how is she going to actually write it?

Whether Ronja dies is, I suppose, up for some debate. The fuzziness from the magical realism filter provides solid plausible deniability, after all. Maybe Ronja and Melissa are walking home! Maybe they’re really walking through the woods! Maybe it’s Ronja’s fever dream while Melissa is carrying her home! But given how closely Stargate resembles “The Little Match Girl,” I’m skeptical. My take on the ending is that Ronja dies. It’s a weird choice for a Christmas story, but then “The Little Match Girl” takes place on New Year’s Eve so there’s a parallel there.

I found a few reviews of the English translation (Shining Brightly), and more than one of them gave the book demerits for profanity, specifically for using the Lord’s name in vain. Did this get marketed in English as the kind of Christmas story that would appeal to devout Christians? Unclear to me.

Friendaholic

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic was mentioned somewhere in my social media relatively soon after its publication in 2024. Was it LitHub? Was it a podcast? I can’t quite remember. But it came into my life at a time when I was reflecting on my own (dysfunctional) friendships and relationship patterns, and a title like Friendaholic spoke to my preferred method of integrating into Swedish society. It ended up on my TBR, which is how it turned into an impulse purchase at The English Bookshop February last year, which means by the time I read it in May it had been in my library for over a year. In terms of my annual reading goals, it’s a grand slam.

Friendaholic is a squirrely little beast in terms of genre. It’s non-fiction, it’s self-help, it’s memoir. Day takes us through some of her own friendships, both successes and failures, with a dash of some light research and interviews. Whether or not there’s a confessional aspect to it for Day isn’t for me to say, but the main thrust of the book seems to be that by reflecting on her friendship patterns and what research suggests, she can help a reader in a similar situation or with similar hang-ups.

Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure if there was much in Friendaholic that was new to me in any meaningful way. The drawback of Day’s memoir approach is that if you don’t relate to her personal narrative, there’s really nothing of interest. I could have probably just as well skipped the chapter on infertility, for example, because that’s not a factor in my life.

By reader request, Day has shared the questions she used for the interviews sprinkled throughout the book. I don’t know if I have the nerve to sit my friends down and ask them about (our) friendship, but maybe you do?

 

Förvandlingen

I’m in a philosophy book and discussion club, which is responsible for a small chunk of the nonfiction I manage to get through during the year. Once in a while, however, the group votes for a novel instead of a strict philosophical treatise. That’s how I finally got around to reading Brave New World, for example. Fiction won again in the most recent poll and the book for June was Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, known in Swedish as Förvandlingen and in English as The Metamorphosis.

I’d read it in high school, but since forgotten most of it. Since Kafka was a prominent figure in 1913, it seemed like a good time for me to return to the text regardless. I opted for a Swedish translation, even though my memory of the English is obviously quite dim.

There is a strong tradition in Swedish of translated German literature, so unsurprisingly there are multiple Swedish translations of Förvandlingen. The first one I got ahold of was the older one by Caleb J. Anderson and Karl Vennberg, originally published by Forum but now in a new edition from Modernista. I also managed to dig up the newer one from Hans Blomqvist and Erik Ågren at Bakhåll, complete with an afterword. I’m in the process of polling Swedes in my life about which one they prefer and why, and so far I have to say that there’s no clear winner.

That’s probably the most interesting thing to say about The Metamoporphosis. We all know the story and the famous opening line, what more need be said?

Here’s one nugget from high school that has stayed with me ever since, maybe because it’s only become even more relevant to me as an adult: if you take away the magical event of the first sentence, The Metamorphosis becomes one of the most realistic books ever written, an unflinching portrayal of how families respond to disability or illness.

I don’t know which critic or which writer it was. If memory serves, and it was indeed my twelfth grade English teacher who relayed it to me, then it has to predate 2004. Otherwise, I cobbled together my actual English class and an actual, later quote into a false memory. Regardless of where I first heard it, that quote has been kicking around in my head for years and I finally got to put it to the test, as it were, by coming back to The Metamorphosis over twenty years later. Bang on, I would say.

Philadelphia: Holy Experiment

I rescued this battered old Maxwell Struthers Burt hardback from the collection of books that my dad seemed to have inherited from his own father. I suppose something about moving across an ocean makes you sentimental for the place of your birth, especially since I’m forever explaining to people that I’m from “north of Philly.”

I had a grand time reading it. The footnotes and commentary alone are pure entertainment, if not necessarily the strictest history. Published in 1945, the most important niche that Philadelphia: Holy Experiment fills is as a World War II era time capsule. How were Americans thinking about themselves and their history while they were fighting Nazis abroad? Also, it includes a recipe for Fish House Punch in the endnotes. Amazing.

Dead Souls

I first read Gogol’s Dead Souls in 2014, and I remember even then being mostly baffled by the story. Not only the ending, the legendary mid-sentence cliffhanger, but Chichikov’s entire plan. What was buying these dead souls doing for him, exactly? Then earlier this year it was floated as a suggestion for my Swedish language book club so I had the chance to revisit the story twelve years later to see if I was a better reader.

Short answer: no!

But this time around I went digging afterwards for reviews and commentary, which cleared up my biggest point of confusion—the dead souls, which he was presumably acquiring at a bargain, could function as collateral for a loan—even while Gogol’s satire didn’t entirely land. Individual moments of slapstick got a smile or a chuckle out of me, but I’m a reader who is too far removed in time and geography to appreciate the more subtle digs at Russian aristocracy. (Except all the jokes about them speaking French, I know enough history to understand that much about the Russian upper class of the time.) Russian drama and pathos? Fine, great, love it, lay it on me. Russian comedy? Absolute head-scratcher.

Mostly I want to take the time to complain about The Internet These Days. After I finished Dead Souls again, I did what I normally do these days after a real puzzler of a book: look for blog posts or podcasts that might fill in the gaps of my understanding. The vast majority of what I found for Dead Souls was AI-generated slop. Most of it was simple Cliff’s Notes study guides for the YouTube generation—artificial voiceovers explaining the story to you over janky (I’d go so far as to say Eurojanky) art, either still or animated depending budget. A similarly janky short turned out to be an ad for a series of self-published historical fiction prequels (for lack of a better word) to famous classics. A couple videos, notable for being slightly less janky, used Dead Souls to support, of all things, the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory, and lo and behold the channels associated with both of them are dedicated to proving, or propagandizing for, the mythical lost civilization.

Dead souls commenting on Dead Souls, if you will.

We’re drowning in useless bullshit that no one asked for, and that makes it impossible to find the useful stuff that we actually want. Of course, this is hardly news anymore and I’m not breaking any new ground with this claim. I just needed to vent my spleen for a minute. And since it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, here are the cool and useful tidbits I managed to find despite the tsunami of slop.

The Bowie Book Club podcast is a great idea for a podcast. Even if I’m not a David Bowie fan myself, I’m glad people are out there doing something fun and creative like this. They did an episode on Dead Souls back in 2024.

While I can’t comment on the rest of his content, Mike Tyulpakov is at least a human standing there talking to you about Gogol. I’m willing to overlook uncritical appreciation of Jordan Peterson elsewhere in his videos in exchange for an interesting alternative interpretation/model of Dead Souls as a Russian language Odyssey rather than Russian language Divine Comedy. Admittedly it’s not an entirely new reading, but it’s always nice to get a hot take on Russian literature from an actual Russian.

For all my complaining about AI slop, the top hit in YouTube for me was still a human podcast with human faces. Unfortunately, it seems like to get to the top the two hosts have to lean into Manic Internet Hype Machine Podcast Energy, which I hate.

I also found a podcast episode from Vollrath Publishing, a one-man (or possibly husband-and-wife) publishing and podcasting venture. So far the one book they’ve released is a new edition of Frankenstein with new original artwork for the cover and the host’s own footnotes to the text. Could possibly be a publisher to watch? I might pick up their Frankenstein to see what exactly they’re doing.

And finally, the crowning jewel of all of this human work is StandardEbooks.org. They take public domain texts from online sources like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg and clean them up into polished, attractive, and eminently readable ebooks. Nice fonts, comfortable margins and line spacing, properly linked footnotes, no OCR madness. This time around I read their HTML version in my phone’s browser window, but they offer a variety of formats, including for Kindle and Kobo. They don’t know me, I’m not getting any kickback or commission, I’m just hyping them up because I appreciate what they’re doing.

När Hitler stal den skära kaninen

In the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I asked my Jewish friends which Holocaust novels and movies they would recommend. The topic has a tendency to get mined for sentimentality and melodrama by lazy hacks, after all. One of the books that came up was Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a title that I recognized from elementary school reading lists but that I had never read myself.

A few years later, I noticed a Swedish translation (När Hitler stal den skära kaninen) by Ingegerd Leczinsky on the book swap shelf at the local arts center and decided this was my moment. It took another year or so, and then in my year of reading history I decided I should finally make good on my previous inquiries.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an award-winning classic of children’s literature so any review in 2026 is redundant. Given the state of things in the world—in the US, mainly—it’s probably worth revisiting these classics. It’s also worth understanding the ripple effects of the camps: what it was like for the families who left as refugees, people who would have otherwise never had a reason to leave the only country they’d ever known, people who had to get by with intermittent updates about the friends and family who had stayed behind, people who had to live with the uncertainty of whether it would ever be possible to return or if they would ever want to.

My only gripe is specific to this particular hardback edition from Berghs: Kerr also provided her own illustrations for the book, and her art often (though not always) appears on the covers. But my edition (pictured above) has an extremely grimdark and dramatic oil painting aesthetic that doesn’t at all match Kerr’s simpler, lighter pen-and-ink illustrations inside. Other publishers are also guilty of this choice, though, so it’s hardly controversial. But it’s certainly a choice to feature Anna, Judith’s stand-in, holding the pink rabbit that never left Germany with her.

Djinns

Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns was another selection for my international WhatsApp book club. We have a lot of Turkish and German (and expats in Turkey and Germany) representation, so a German novel about a Turkish family in Germany was a logical choice.

Djinns is a quasi-multigenerational story, where each member of a Turkish nuclear family living in Germany stars in their own sections. The book starts with the father, Hüseyin, who has finally retired and moved to Istanbul, to the new apartment he’s managed to purchase through years of hard work and meticulous savings and where he imagines his family’s future happiness. From there we spend a section with each of the children (Umit, Peri, Hakan, and Sevda) and end with the mother (Emine). That’s a very dry description of a very involved, serious, sensitive book, but any more details than that and I would spoil the whole thing. It’s a masterpiece, and the English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi is very thoughtfully done, with a foreword on various racialized terms and slang as well as a glossary of untranslated Turkish (and possibly also Kurdish?) terms in the back.

The Turkish-Kurdish owner and bartender at my local watering hole is probably around the same age as Hüseyin. He’s hospitable and very chatty, and if you show up with any regularity, you get to know him pretty quickly. His wife and kids are a recurring topic, and they must be about the same age as their counterparts in Djinns. They’re also a recurring topic between myself and my Njals saga book buddy and fellow patron: what’s it like to grow up as a secular Swede with a father like Ali, we wonder. What’s it like to be married to be married to him?

So I wonder if the secrets and relationships in Djinns are something Ali and his family would recognize. From my perspective, Aydemir captures how the tension between two cultures exacerbates the normal stresses and conflicts that arise in any family. No-No Boy is a comparison that comes to mind. But without that lived experience, of course, it’s hard for me to say for sure.

Jag heter inte Miriam

“The story is fiction, but it is true.” YuanTsung Chen’s remark in her introduction to The Dragon’s Village is also a perfect description of Majgull Axelsson’s Jag heter inte Miriam.

Looking back at my year of reading at the age of 39, there was great deal of history, especially World War II. Using the strictest possible definition of history or historical fiction, the list is:

*Still only currently reading, so I might not finish before I turn 40, or even at all.

Some of it was intentional, some of it (for example, book club picks or recommendations from friends) was pure happenstance. A year of reflection.

Jag heter inte Miriam is a kind of bildungsroman, following the titular Miriam (née Malika) from her childhood in Germany through the Holocaust and finally to land in Sweden. The name change arises when Malika takes on the uniform and identity of a dead Jewish girl, Miriam Goldberg, during her transport from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück. Malika is Romani and has already experienced life at the bottom rung of the prisoners’ self-determined hierarchy. The Nazis might have the most animosity for the Jews, but most of Miriam’s day is spent among prisoners, not Nazis. There was more foresight in this decision than Miriam could have realized, as she ends up on one of the white buses out of the camps and into Sweden—whose immigration policy at the time denied entry to Romani people. As a result, Miriam spends more of her life passing as Jewish than being authentically Romani.

Her entire life story is presented across 450 pages, through the narrative framing device of celebrating her 85th birthday with her stepson and his family: wife, daughter, grandson. The gift of a silver bracelet, engraved with her name and of what looks to be Romani craftsmanship, prompts her to remark “Jag heter inte Miriam” (“My name is not Miriam”), which naturally sends the family into a small uproar. Is this dementia? Alzheimer’s? A strange joke?

Granddaughter Camilla is the one to ask Miriam about it directly, and about her experience in the camps, which sets up the framing device for the rest of the story. In between long episodes of Miriam’s past, we come back to the present day setting and her lakeside walk with her granddaughter, where Camilla tries to come to grips with this history lesson.

There’s obviously a lot in here, and Axelsson includes a long list of references and books for further reading at the end, as well as a lengthy thank-you to fact checkers, historians, and interviewees. (I recognized Hans Caldaras‘ name among them, whose biography continues to live rent-free in my head even though I read it six years ago.) However, even if many of the events of the book actually happened—including the “tattarkravallerna” in Jönköping in 1948 or the Roma uprising in Auschwitz in May 1944—the character of Miriam Goldberg is still just that: a fictional character. There’s advantages and disadvantages to this approach to presenting history, and I don’t think there will ever be a conclusive answer to the question “Historical fiction: good or bad?”. It’s just something to be aware of.

Jag heter inte Miriam was another one for my annual reading goals, one that I’ve owned for more than a year. It took a painfully long time to read, not only because it’s 450 pages but also because it’s a goddamn Holocaust novel. Still, I’m glad I read it. By all accounts it seems like Axelsson tried to be as respectful and thoughtful as possible, and like she genuinely wanted to tackle history through the lens of fiction rather than crank out some tragedy porn.

It doesn’t seem like the book is out in English, but the fantastic Asymptote has an excerpt available, an excellent translation by Kathy Saranpa.

1913: Århundradets sommar

Sometimes I wonder if specific book friends should get their own tag, for my own ease of reference if nothing else. So much of my reading can be traced back to recommendations and influences from people I like!

1913: Århundradets sommar, originally published in German as 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts and known in English as 1913: The Year Before the Storm, is simply the account of a single year in Europe from the perspective of numerous writers and artists (as well as a couple notable politicians). The same book friend for whose sake I made a third and final attempt to read To the Lighthouse and to whom I had gifted The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, who lives next door to the author of Årsboken and who had also recommended Njals Saga, pressed a slightly beat-up paperback copy of 1913 into my hands back in January or February. I started immediately, stopped when I realized I simply had too much else going on at the time (trying to get through Svälten and Kusinerna for assorted book clubs on top of Peak Work Season), and picked it up again on a long weekend in London.

An aside about the weekend jaunt to London: I scheduled a dinner at a Korean restaurant in London, the irresistibly named Koba, as a reward for surviving the first part of Kammarkollegiet’s authorization test for translators. (I passed that part, by the way!) I also have a friend in London who lets me stay at his place when I turn up there, the same friend who recommended Miljosvennar and who gifted me a few of his science fiction favorites (including Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco) after he cleaned out his bookshelf, who is one of the few people in my life to get a birthday present from me every year without fail only because I have a strong sense of Books He Should Read. It seems to be a fairly unerring sense as well, since he actually reads them and during one visit to Stockholm even remarked that I always manage to find interesting books he would have never known about or picked for himself. The same friend was also knocked the heck out from a gnarly viral infection, so his natural urge to play host and show off Hackney Wick was severely dampened by the sad state of his physical constitution. After a solo morning museum visit and walk through the park, I spent the entire afternoon of my last day there in bed reading while my host picked away at a programming task.

“I’m sorry you’re cooped up in here,” he said after an hour or two of companionable silence.

“No! No. This is exactly the kind of vacation I wanted. It’s fine.”

That is how I managed to read the bulk of 1913 over a single weekend. That’s exactly the kind of attention it deserves, because it’s full of names and events that keep recurring or developing; you don’t want to take a two week break and come to find you lost track of what Franz Kafka or Carl Schmidt was up to. Illies turns what could have been dry reportage into insightful, dare I say sensitive narrative. Presumably some poetic license is taken (did so-and-so really see so-and-so walking down the street as he gazed out his window?) but Illies has pages and pages of personal diaries and letters to draw from, so he can get quite close to his subjects. His background as an art historian probably means much of the subject matter was stuff he already had at hand, so to speak. Fair play also to Illies for giving as much consideration as possible to the notable women of the era, including their own perspectives and diary entries instead of just offhanded mentions about muses or mistresses or so on. Much like Svälten, Illies turns history into a narrative and the whole thing becomes deeply enjoyable reading despite the whirlwind of names and places.

The Swedish translation was done by Karin Andrae, who does not seem to have her own web presence anywhere that I can find. Here’s one selection from her translation catalogue over at Världslitteratur.se. She’s not listed at ÖversättareCentrum.se. There’s an article (and interview?) by Emilia Söelujnd behind the paywall of at least three regional newspaper clones: Tranås Tidning, Falköpings Tidning, Vetlanda-Posten, and probably more.

Imagine having such a reputation in translation that you don’t need to be worried about marketing yourself or having A Presence. The dream…

Svälten: Hungeråren som formade Sverige

Magnus Västerbro’s Svälten (Eng: The Famine) was another Swedish book club pick, but life conspired to keep me from actually attending the meeting so I don’t know what anyone else thought about it.

This was a rare foray into nonfiction for the club. Västerbro’s absolute brick of a tome dives into the three years of famine and food scarcity that plagued Sweden in the mid 1800s, bringing to bear not only a wealth of primary sources but deep research into famines and hunger as a whole and drawing connections to more recent events. It would be easy for this kind of book to become overwhelming, but Västerbo keeps the reader from getting lost by anchoring events to specific memorable characters. Each chapter also takes a very granular focus: one on the physiological effects of hunger, for example, or another on crime rates during famine.

For someone like me, who has at best only a fuzzy, broad-strokes understanding of Swedish history, this was a fantastic resource for filling in at least some of those gaps. As an American, it’s also interesting to read about the factors behind this or that wave of immigration from the inverse perspective, so to speak. Our textbooks never get too deep into this kind of national trauma, often distilling things into a few phrases or concepts: poverty, religious freedom, Irish potato famine, etc. In Svälten the historical tragedy takes center stage for its own sake instead of being the mere setup to the Great Experiment of American Democracy. My only complaint is that the concluding remarks feel tacked-on, with much less actual research and much more The Moral Concerns of the Zeitgeist—by which I mean some facile commentary that could be summarized as “oh ho ho, isn’t it ironic now that our biggest health problem is obesity instead of starvation???”. Granted, that’s always going to be a sore spot for me, but there is much less research here (measured in footnotes and bibliography references) than in the rest of the book. It doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except to be an obvious, if uninteresting, way to tie things up.

Even though Svälten originally came out in 2018, it doesn’t seem like there’s been an English translation yet. More’s the pity, because I think it would be of immense interest outside of Sweden.