Given how much of my viewing time has been spent there thanks to Walter Presents, you’d think I’d have read more Scandinavian fiction but perhaps it’s because so much of the translated variety is crime related. Below are five striking Swedish novels I’ve read, all with links to my reviews, beginning with an award-winning piece of crime 
fiction which brought to mind one of those Walter Presents series I’ve spent all that time glued to.
Set in the far north of Sweden, Mikael Niemi’s To Cook a Bear explores the life of Læstadius, the nineteenth-century founder of an evangelical Revivalist movement still popular today, through a series of brutal murders committed in his village. The pastor is convinced a violent criminal is on the loose but the sheriff will have none of it setting the scene for a clash that will further deepen the divisions in the parish. Assisted by Jussi, the young Sami boy he’s rescued from destitution, the pastor sets about his investigations, convinced he’s engaged in a battle against evil. Niemi maintains his story’s suspense well but for me it was its setting and cultural exploration that made this novel such an interesting read.
Håkan Nesser is well-known as a crime writer which explains why A Summer with Kim Novak came billed as ‘combining 
coming-of-age and crime’. In 1962, fourteen-year-old Erik’s mother is dying. His father decides that he should go to the family summer house with his older brother and a colleague’s son also coping with a sick mother. Erik’s summer term had been brightened by the arrival of Ewa – the spitting image of glamorous film star Kim Novak – who rides her smart red Puch around town, charming all. Over the summer Erik and Edmund bond over their ailing mothers and their burgeoning lust for Ewa until the night of The Terrible Thing. Nesser captures the awkwardness of adolescence beautifully. Erik and Edmund take solace from each other, living a life free of adult restraint, rowing on the lake, fantasising about Ewa, forging a friendship which in the normal turn of events would last for life.
Alex Schulman’s The Survivors is also about a summer that changed a family’s life. Benjamin looks back to that year as he and his two brothers prepare for a day which will end in a fight. Their father loved to encourage competition between his boys, sending them on a swimming race that took them dangerously far out onto the lake, then apparently forgetting about them. Fascinated by electricity, Benjamin enters a tiny substation close by, heedless of his brothers’ remonstrations, with devastating results. Two days after his mother’s death, he sets out on another swim with no endpoint in sight. Once rescued, he’s led by his therapist through his story which may not be quite the one he’s been telling himself for years. By no means a thriller in the traditional sense, Schulman’s novel is quietly gripping, so cleverly constructed that it left me quite taken aback.
It was its structure that attracted me to Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s prize-winning Everything I Don’t Remember. It’s the story of a
young man who dies one April afternoon in Stockholm, his car wrecked in a crash which some speculate may have been suicide, others are sure was an accident. Khemiri tells Samuel’s story through a series of interviews with those who knew him – some fleetingly, others intimately – conducted by an author planning to write a book about him. Given the novel is a made up of interwoven fragments it’s remarkably cohesive, not to mention addictive. Each of the many interviewees unwittingly lets slip small details about themselves, colouring their version of events. As the writer tightens his focus on the two who were closest to Samuel, each conveys a very different view both of the other and the events of the past year.
I already had Lena Andersson’s Wilful Disregard in my sights before Charlotte Collins, translator of the excellent A Whole Life, praised it to the skies calling it ‘the cleverest dissection of misguided obsession that I’ve ever read’, a spot-on assessment, I’d say. An intensely cerebral writer, Ester Nilsson is commissioned to give a lecture on the artist Hugo Rash. She spends a week researching her subject, becoming captivated by him even before they meet and is seized by a passion the like of which she’s never known, throwing over her poor partner and embarking on a tenuous relationship which she sees as leading to an inevitable conclusion: a full-blown affair. Andersson’s novella is both bitingly funny and excruciating discomfiting as Ester becomes ever more obsessed with Hugo despite his indifference.
Any Swedish novels you’d like to add to my list?
If you’d like to explore more posts like this, I’ve listed them here.
Each of these reviews whetted my appetite: they all have something extra to add to the standard (is there a standard?) crime novel by the sound of them. Anyway, I’ve ordered To Cook a Bear from the library, because the premise interested me, and for the slightly less interesting reason that it’s the only one of these titles our library system holds!
I found To Cook a Bear fascinating. A good choice, even if by default!
I’ve not read any of these and they’re all very tempting! They all sound like real page-turners, in very different ways.
They are, indeed. To Cook a Bear was the one that most surprised me.
The Survivors has me once again thinking about that film Ordinary People. All the novels sound highly interesting, and for some reason, copies of Nesser tend to turn up secondhand around here.
I remember being quite shaken by Ordinary People. Quietly devastating. Isn’t that odd? I know most of his novels are crime. Perhaps readers think of them as more disposable.
This is such perfect timing. Trying to find a book for my husband for Christmas and he loves Swedish novels in translation. So I’ve just ordered him The Survivors.
Delighted to hear that, Claire. I know from your books of the year tweets he’s a discerning reader. Hope he likes it!
These are all new to me! I’m leaning toward Wilful Disregard…
Wickedly funny, Naomi.
You mentioning Walter Presents made me smile, I am horribly addicted to World dramas, especially Scandi. I have just subscribed to Viaplay a Scandi streaming service. So it’s odd I haven’t read more Swedish literature. I have read the two Elderly Lady compilations this year, and have previously read some Tove Jansson who wrote in Swedish. I also really enjoyed Astrid Lindgren’s WW2 diaries. I particularly love the sound of The Summer of Kim Novak.
Viaplay sounds very tempting! I’d forgotten that Tove Jansson wrote in Swedish. More accessible than Finnish, I imagine. I think you’d enjoy the Nesser. Very evocative.
These all sound interesting! The only one I’ve read is To Cook a Bear, which was one of my books of the year. I knew nothing about the Sami people prior to reading it, and I thought found all the stuff about the boy learning to read beautifully done.
I found it both fascinating and sensitively handled. It made Walter Presents’ All the Sins all the more interesting as it’s set in one of the sect’s settlements,
I already had To Cook a Bear on my list from your review and now you’re about to make me add all the others too. They all sound equally intriguing.
Delighted to hear that, Mallika! Hope you enjoy them when you get to them.
I don’t think I’ve come across any of these before, but they all seem to have something to offer. The awkwardness of adolescence / loss of innocence is one of my favourite themes in literature, so I’ll keep the Nesser in mind.
I hope you enjoy it if you get to it. Definitely more coming-of-age than crime!
It seems that none of these is available in New Zealand.
Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.