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Niklas Rådström’s new book is a near death text. It’s part of the rough ride when she fell ill with acute leukemia a few years ago, and part of her childhood memories in the 1950s and 1960s.
This is a personally written text on Smålandsposten. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
He’s had a rough few years near death, praised 1953-born author, playwright and poet Niklas Rådström. Also, member of the De Nio community and professor of creative writing at Linnaeus University. Rådström could also have held a professorship at the Swedish Academy for a few years, but he refused.
In autumn he published the collection of poems “So, when I was a poet”, and now at the turn of the year the autobiographical “What has not happened already.” It is the last book that this text deals with. It’s August 2017 and Niklas Rådström and his wife are enjoying Öland’s summer at the cottage when he suddenly has a painful gout attack. At Kalmar Hospital, blood values are found to be extremely low. Is seriously. Acute leukemia. After an ambulance flight to Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, chemotherapy treatment begins. Rådström speaks openly about his dire condition, about treatments, side effects, and hope. About death, to which he often returns, he writes, among other things: “Since I was a child, I always imagined that I belonged to the dead.”
This single son in a family that is falling apart, with a father who was increasingly absent. Missing on trips. It wasn’t there. The boy I was waiting for. It resulted in divorce, he remarried. The father dies when Niklas is ten years old. The mother with a career as a journalist in the weekly Folket i Bild. Babysitters Moving, new school, new friends.
On page 36 I have to rewind the tape. Look at the book. “Back home in Sweden, my parents traveled after a few days in Stockholm to Urshult in Småland, where they rented the upstairs to the Magnusson family.”
It must be, in all probability, with my relatives living in Rådströms, then in the 1950s. It cannot be other than my grandfather’s brother and his family. I get into a task. She replies that they rented an apartment on the top floor.
The world is small. When I call Niklas Rådström, he tells me that at that time it was common for doctors to recommend rural air, forest air, and he gave that recommendation to his mother. He spent several summers in Urshult and as a child he was with Niklas. He doesn’t know why it was Urshult.
Niklas Rådström’s childhood must have been different from that of most others. He comes to accompany his mother on reporting trips in Europe. The people of Bild would publish Anne Frank’s diary as a series and send her to Basel, among other places, to interview Anne Frank’s father Otto. After the interview, Otto Frank asks him what he should do with three-year-old Niklas when he writes the report. The answer is that you can do the best you want in the hotel room. Mr. Frank then takes Niklas to the Basel Zoo. Nikla’s mother interviews Eva Braun’s sister in Munich on another occasion.
“This means that it has been a single handshake of Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank,” writes Niklas Rådström. Sure, it’s dizzying.
