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It has been more than 45 years since Klas Östergren was first checked at Dagens Nyheter.
It was February 28, 1975. Östergren had just turned 20 a week earlier. His debut novel “Atila” has now received a very short and masterful review in the lower right corner of an advertising page: “… you cannot articulate a lost unit by writing the lost one.” In return, the headline gave the lost young man a comforting pat on the shoulder: “Let’s go!”
And you have to say it did.
In one of Klas Östergren’s novels from the ’80s, “Plaster”, there is a man who literally gets nauseated by clichés and worn out phrases. If someone sighs “we’re all going to walk around”, they throw up on the floor. I guess “novel construction” is a word that would make it feel at least a little inappropriate.
It still needs to be said: “Renegater” is a strange and powerful novel building, a prose cathedral, whose builder masters every step of his craft and every dimension of his art, a masterpiece in more ways than one (also very specifically, we are talking here about a bastard book of almost 750 pages).
If “Renegades” is a cathedral, the novel is also a snow cave system with labyrinthine and treacherous connecting passages.
What is it about? My best answer so far I borrow from Tage Danielsson: Sweden is beautiful in winter, they say. How do you know that? Then it is covered in snow.
If “Renegades” is a cathedral, the novel is also a snow cave system with labyrinthine and treacherous connecting passages. But when the story begins, we are faced with a summer of scorching sun and biting smoke. It is May 2018 and “Klas Östergren” has stood at the gate to look at the area around his farm in Österlen. He sees a figure he recognizes. Henry Morgan comes wandering from “Gentlemen” and “Gangsters”, now he is no longer an elegant man in a tie tied in the wind but an aged and tired pilgrim in “janker”, a folk jacket from the Alpine regions.
“He didn’t seem like someone who could murder. He seemed like someone who could sing by singing,” says Östergren, cryptically but rightly.
Feast of nostalgia for those generations Who thinks the present is more than legally bleak compared to the good old days when Henry Morgan made a party out of life on Hornsgatan? Well, already in “Gangsters”, Östergren’s virtuous 2005 meta-novel, the story of the Morgan brothers was unmasked in a way that is too nostalgic for nostalgia. It was revealed that Henry and Leo were actually two sides of the same person, and this person was likely the narrator himself, “Klas Östergren”.
Read more. Klas Östergren: We were portrayed as idiots who knew about years of abuse
In “Renegates”, Henry Morgan’s role as a spinoff of Klas Östergren becomes even clearer, he is the force that makes the author sit in the asylum and write, a sort of Mephistopheles role, so to speak. Henry gets his old friend “Klasa” to write a report on the events of the last six months at the “Royal Secret Club”, that is, the Swedish Academy. And, here the strings are linked, behind Morgan is another old acquaintance, the “envoy,” the blue-eyed figure in the crown, the chief cleanser of corporate power.
The report on the tours of the academy occupies more than 150 pages of the novel and gives the impression of being written in a single sigh of relief. There is no shortage of news and entertainment. Members have been provided aliases taken from the prairie. Östergren himself is Mr. Svingel. When emphasizing during a meeting that the academy will be allowed to “chew stone” if it does not handle the criticism directed at it seriously and responsibly, member Mr. Styvrepe says, “I love chewing stone!”
Has Klas Östergren written this report to explain why you are no longer sitting in chair number 11? In part, probably. But above all, in the interiors of the collapsed academy he has found another manifestation of his great theme, the one carried by the trilogy on “Henry Morgan”, in fact all the authorship: Sweden covered in snow. The real Sweden hidden under a white blanket of silence.
In “Forsaken,” reality and fiction, the world and notions of the world, slide past each other, refined and smooth. Klas Östergren, the narrator, recalls that Henry was reluctant to go to the then bohemian restaurant Prinsen when they shared a flat in the late 1970s. He did not like the guests, including a Frenchman “who could enter through the curtain against the closet as if it was a curtain in an intimate theater, as if it were the owner of the place “.
It is this hidden and deliberately forgotten Sweden that Klas Östergren and his protagonists seek in novel after novel.
He is the man who 40 years later becomes known nationally as the “cultural profile.” The narrator makes a central reflection for the entire novel: “Henry Morgan’s aversion to ‘that figure of Rastignac’ may be due to the fact that they were children of the same spirit, because he recognized something unfavorable in himself in him”.
In parallel, one can think that Sweden’s zeal throughout modern history to be the voice of the righteous in the world has something to do with everything that has been hidden, repressed, hidden under the white blanket throughout history itself. It is this hidden and deliberately forgotten Sweden that Klas Östergren and his protagonists seek novel after novel. And like “Gentlemen” and “Gangsters”, “Renegater” is about Swedish arms deals.
With the so-called “South African investment” as background, Klas Östergren builds a suspenseful plot. It was in 1999 when the Swedish government invested heavily in a goodwillcampaign in South Africa. The campaign included a gala by Swedish artists at a giant stadium in Soweto. It was a legendary failure: Dr. Alban and The Real Group attracted just under half a dozen payers. On the other hand, the main objective of the investment had hardly been to sell Swedish popular culture. What was going to be sold was the Jas plan.
Östergren is close to reality in its history but let the PR agency that had to bear the dog’s head for failure to be replaced by a fictitious advertising agency, whose creative engine Torsten Ljung is obsessed with snow, or rather, images of snow.
As you know, just because you are paranoid does not mean that you are not being persecuted. The henchmen of power see you, even when you least expect it
This is how he comes into contact with the Klas Östergren of the novel. Torsten Ljung has a large collection of snow paintings. He wants Östergren to write a text about the collection, “the snow gallery”. It is through this mission that the narrator is drawn into the increasingly sweaty paranoid existence of Torsten and his longtime love Lollos.
And, as you know, being paranoid doesn’t have to mean that you’re not being persecuted. The minions of power see you, even when you least expect it.
On the other hand, you canKlas Östergren seems to mean, he also finds oases of warmth and human decency where you least expect it, gaps that open for “renegades”, apostates and deserters. Like when Torsten and his son under one bonding-trace in the paw fields of Dalsland is hit by a car accident in a smoky snowstorm and seeks protection in an old disused grocery store, now transformed into the less frequented strip club “Kit Cat”. There, in the sunken nest of sin, they find genuine help, they are offered a puddle and a family home evening in front of the video (“Doctor Zhivago”).
It’s a picture of a Sweden that could have existed too, a bit shabby and sunny, but basically decent. “Renegates” is more than that, it is one of the best novels of Klas Östergren and, at the same time, a long farewell, hopefully not from literature, but certainly from Henry Morgan and his world.
Read more texts by Per Svensson and more book reviews.
