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Karlskoga's gun
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Lars Anderson captures in his novels the tremendous changes sweeping Sweden
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Lars Andersson: `People suddenly realised Sweden is like any other country; there is nothing exclusively Swedish. Everyday life changed significantly — media, music, street culture.' — Photo: Murali Kumar K.
LARS ANDERSSON is enchanted by India one moment but reflective the next. "I've talked people in rural India. I find the poor carry dignity. I could see some resounds of the Swedish village, the connection to nature, folk, sacredness... I could recognise in India what Sweden looked like in those days." But did the Swedish writer notice structures of power and violence: caste, landlordism, class, religion, the minorities? And surely, the Swedish agrarian village would be relatively richer, greener, quieter, less populated and resource rich?
Lars' India connection first happened through a delegation of Swedish writers which came here in 1996. "But," he says, "I am not a Swedish pilgrim here. I have been involved with India for private and literary reasons. India has a lot of energy. But yes, what do I know when I hear myself talking? The more I think, I understand my ignorance about India. I think I am being somewhat oriental, romantic even... I don't think I should say too much."
Lars has 10 novels to his credit, three of them on India. He comes from Varmland, in north-western Sweden. He was studying medicine at Uppsala when he took to writing. He completed his first novel, Brandlyra, a psychological thriller, in 1974. It received a decent response. The fourth novel, Snoljus (Snow Light) in 1979, helped him make the decision to turn full-time writer.
In 1982, he wrote an important novel, Bikungslupan that captured the experience of a vicar's son moving from small-town Varmland to Uppsala. The travel is a signifier of the rapid industrialisation of Sweden from the 1880s. Then came Vattenorgeln (1993) articulating the response to industrialisation among artistes, writers and painters.
Looking at India
From 2000, he began looking at India. Kavita (2001) looks at India's philosophical texts, Berget (The Mountain, 2002) captures a carpenter's travel in India and the Bofors affair, and the latest, Vagen till Gondwana (The Road to Gondwana, 2004) looks into the Swedish writer Harry Martinson's visit to India's interiors in the early '20s.
Lars moved back to the Varmland countryside where he lived a "provincial, small-village life". Varmland's sky oversees his work broadly. "It is difficult to classify my novels. They are set in different historical circumstances. But a lot of Swedish literature is not big city, capital or urban. Not Stockholm. It is provincial, working class, resounds in dialectic, provincial life."
But Swedish writing is torn between modernist and provincial strains. Industrialisation, for this agrarian, rural, poverty-stricken nation, was rapid. One fourth of the Swedish population migrated to the U.S. then. The cultural impact and mentality of industrialisation has been the subject of the Swedish narrative since then. Art, culture, folk, he says, went down the drain and the journey of this disappearing world has been a subject for writers in recent times.
"My latest novel set in India, The Road to Gondwana maps changes in India. The book is also about hasty changes in Sweden... " According to Lars, a generation older than him is entirely provincial; the next is entirely modern. He straddles between the provincial and modern. "I have novels that are set in contemporary Sweden, but that carry historical, folk and small-town strains. But the younger generation will have to come out of their hang-ups. Everyone has to address basic issues at some point."
Disappearing culture
Swedish society, he says, saw a second crisis in the '80s when its self-esteem was high. Bofors and Prime Minister Olof Palme's assassination changed all that"People suddenly realised Sweden is like any other country, there is nothing exclusively Swedish. Everyday life changed significantly — media, music, street culture." This was also the time when immigrants came into Sweden from Iraq, Iran, Bosnia, and Africa. Wouldn't literature have to look at these changes too? Lars points out that even community-wise, Sweden is changing: it's predominantly Protestant now, Islam next, followed by Catholics.
His novel Berget is on the Bofors factory and his hometown of Karlskoga. "The country's Left is shattered. There is an undercurrent of the Right in the form of Neo-Liberalism. But there is social democracy. This is the paradox of Karlskoga: Bofors is the foundation for its prosperity. We sell weapons for peace elsewhere. Can you blame the guns? Swedish culture has to respond to this paradox of prosperity."
PRASHANTH G.N.
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