Bloody Awful in Different Ways by Andrev Walden (transl. Ian Giles): Seven dads in seven years

Andrev Walden’s Bloody Awful in Different Ways was a huge bestseller in Sweden, winning the country’s prestigious August Prize in 2023. It’s pitched at readers who loved Frederik Bachman’s A Man Called Ove which didn’t appeal to me but I liked the sound of this slice of autofiction which begins with young Andrev, aged seven in 1983, living with the first of his seven dads.

It’s enough for me to get angry or scared. I can get nosebleeds from feeling too much – a pointless superpower that I developed in the summer of 1983.

The Plant Magician has managed to finagle a certificate which assures him lifelong state benefits, allowing him to pursue an alternative lifestyle. He’s a know-it-all who likes to teach Andrev life lessons, clipping him round the ear when they don’t sink in, a habit he also practices on Andrev’s mother. Finally, she leaves taking Andrev, his brother and sister with her to live with Little Cloud, another mum who’s had enough of ‘bloody men’, the sister of Andrev’s second dad but he doesn’t last long. Several moves later, the Thief fills the dad vacancy, leaving it empty when he lands himself in prison. Andrev thinks it might be filled by a man he calls the Priest, a brief presence followed by the Murderer, a controlling, jealous man wound into a tightly coiled spring by Andrev’s mother’s poor punctuality. When she can take no more, they’re on the move again soon to be taken in by the Canoeist who seems incapable of understanding children despite being about to father one himself. Andrev’s last dad is the Indian, his biological father who’s arranged to meet his son in Stockholm for the first time.

A few dads ago, that would have puzzled me, but now it’s beginning to dawn on me that dads are like the weather and growing pains. You don’t choose when they start or end. Not even mums have any immediate influence over their presence – they just come along and you have to dress right or grit your teeth. They always pass.

The structure of Walden’s autofiction might seem a little too contrived but the vividness of its narrative voice makes it work. We view these men, who live up to the book’s title, through the eyes of a child who sees and hears things he really shouldn’t and tries to make sense of them. He’s a funny, thoughtful little boy, somehow convinced his father’s an Indian, who grows into an adolescent with all the awkwardness and angst that accompanies it, learning to navigate a world in which violence against women is horrifyingly common. What seems to save him is his friend’s family, solid and generous, welcoming him on summer holidays and so many sleepovers it’s as if he and the boy he calls Cyclops share a room. Walden’s journalism has been described as making his readers ‘laugh and see the world, the family and ourselves in a new and slightly wiser light’, which could also be applied to his book. It’s a tribute to the way in which he’s managed to emerge from such rackety childhood, unscathed, or at least I hope so.

Fig Tree: London 9780241720288 288 pages Hardback