I have written historical novels that start in the early 1900s.
I have one that starts in 1904.
But Shymning 41 and Hegring 38 take place in Hegring 38 and 1938.
Shymning 41, 1940-41.
And depicting those epochs, those years, it gave itself in several different ways.
On the one hand, it is an incredibly dramatic time.
Since the 1930s.
Even though people in the present, in the past, may not have understood it, it is a loading for the Second World War.
It is a conflict-filled period above all.
Many historians believe that the First World War never actually ended, but that the whole period of the 1920s and 1930s is a kind of continuation, a conflict-filled continuation reminiscent of the Second World War.
So the conflicts, and in Finland's case, which I first of all write about my homeland, Finland, and its history.
We had a civil war, a civil war in 1918, which was also the war that freed us from Russia.
That's why some call it the war of freedom.
And then we had two wars against the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944.
So Finland's history is then very hard and turbulent.
But at the same time, this period is late 30s, early 40s, that is.
It is that period A lot started, which later became popular culture.
The TV was invented in the late 1930s.
The steel man, Clark Kent, was invented then.
The film was bigger than ever.
The golden age of the film.
The film stars were more admired. and endure it, than perhaps ever before or later.
So there is, at the same time as this, mill from the war.
From the war there is the whole of our modern world's embryo, or the beginning is there in the late 30s.
I have always been called a holist, that is, I am a person who thinks that everything is connected.
This is also noticed in writers, how different we are in this regard.
There are writers who like to choose a carefully defined theme, dive into it, move vertically in the theme.
It can be books that are very, in a sense, very short, sometimes almost claustrophobic, but they also become fantastic for this.
The concentration and focus on one subject is so strong.
My way of writing is.
For me, everything in the world is connected and private people's deaths, people's individuals' everyday desires and this big, often very problematic history with societal changes war, war threats, conflicts.
Everything affects this little life, the life that ordinary people try to live.
And I have always tried to write.
Almost all my novels have this one theme how the individual, the ordinary citizen, reacts to and relates to these huge changes in the world and society that we always have to relate to in one way or another.
I remember the first time I was in a book.
It wasn't my own book, it was a letter, a thought development book between younger wannabe writers and older educated writers.
I was one of the younger wannabe writers.
And then a critic wrote that already the first time I was in a book in 1986, when I was 25 years old, he wrote that I was a holist and thought that everything should stick together, and he looked down on it.
Because this was someone who thought scientifically and thought that you should isolate the problems and treat them one at a time.
So this is just how I see the world and how I, how my brain works and how my soul works.
It's reflected in my books.
It's wonderful.
There are always many themes in every novel, but I think that when I got older I got better at tighten up.
Now, when I read my earlier novels, I sometimes think, oh, that's too much.
I could have cut that anecdote.
But still, they are, to a certain extent, broad novels.
An interesting question is can you give a picture of a whole world that is as united and chaotic as ours?
There is a direction of thought and you sometimes see it in literature reviews when critics write about novels of the type I write where there is.
Take a novel like Tritonus, for example, which is my newest novel.
The main theme is music, music and art, but it's also about the fear of terrorism, climate change and the climate crisis.
There are thinkers who think that our world today is simply divided, that what they sometimes say is that it is worthless to try to merge the world into a whole again.
But I can't help it.
My brain is founded so that I want to see a connection that for me it would be very strange.
For example, there are fantastic books about the climate crisis, about our anthropocene and about our way of exploiting and destroying nature without consideration.
There are books that go into Let's say in one theme.
Right now in Finland, when I say this, we have a big scandal where a forest company has run over a creek, a river, where a very common pearl mussel lives.
And there is a writer who has written a novel where this pearl mussel has a central role.
But I'm not good enough in biology or zoology or anthropology to write in that way.
So in my books people live their everyday lives, but in the latest novels I notice clearly how the climate crisis especially when I write in the present I notice that the climate crisis exists there in people's consciousness and as a constantly bad conscience.
I just said that there are people who think that this holistic view of the novel, which once, when I was young, I read, a critic or a literary scholar called the novel a mega hamster that can eat everything.
But it's a truth with modification, because you also have to cut it off, you don't have to eat it.
Also, when you write broad novels, you have to think about the scarcity and the economy in storytelling.
So it's not as uncomplicated as the fact that the novel can swallow everything.
I wouldn't say that.
But I think that, just because so many people today, I feel a desperate need to understand how the world can be so chaotic, to find a point, to find something to take in.
I think that a broad grip on the novel can still serve a purpose.
You can, for example, tell about the anxiety people feel when they don't get a grip on the world.
So I also want to believe in my way of writing.
Because one thing I learned as a young person was that you can write in several ways as a single writer.
You can find new pages in yourself.
But one must always write in a way that is faithful to one's innermost being.
I had an early experience.
I started as a poet.
I wrote lyrics.
I was quite influenced by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg or Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
I was also influenced by pop poets like Bob Dylan or David Bowie.
So I wrote in the middle of the eighties a poetry that was more Eastern in the sixties and seventies than the post-structuralist poetry that then began to be a la mode, or something like that.
And I got pretty bad reviews.
They wrote that this young man is old-fashioned.
And when I was young, I wanted to get by, I wanted to have a career, I wanted to be read.
So then I remember I had studied philosophy and sociology and such subjects both at university and privately.
So during one year I tried to write poems that would take up Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva's thoughts.
No, it was wrong.
Because it's not me, it's not my way of writing gender literature.
It could fit someone else, but it didn't fit me.
And my poems.
Although I knew Christophers and Baudrillard's and Foucault's thoughts or something, my poems were dead.
So you can't, you have to write as you are in some sense, he says.
When I think about my own role and how I have probably looked from the outside as a writer at different ages, like 25 years old, 35 years old, 45 years old and so on.
Now I'm 63.
And also when I think about how I have felt myself, how I have felt inside.
There are many paradoxes.
If I now look at my life as a writer, I realize that objectively it has gone very, very well for me.
I have many readers in several countries.
I have received nice awards, such as the Nordic Council's Literature Award and many others.
But the strange thing is that I came to literature in the mid-80s, from pop culture, you could say.
I studied a bit of literature at university, but with a bit of emphasis on words.
I came from popular culture and wrote this, quite to be honest, sentimental and popular poetry at one time.
Then the dominating stream became more and more cerebral intellectual, experimental.
So already from that time I felt like a man out of time when I started writing.
And I've never really left that.
When I went on to write prose, I first wrote novels.
In Swedish literature, there was a period that you could later call the iceberg period.
You had to write very short novels where everything was under the surface, a bit like Raymond Carver.
I wrote quite differently.
My novels were 80 pages long, almost small novels.
As a novel author, I wrote in a rather classic, realistic, psychological realistic style.
Det har inte funnits ett enda ögonblick under min nu nästan 40 år långa författarkarriär då jag har känt mig jag använder engelska igen in tune with the times liksom aldrig.
Jag har ibland tyckt att det har känts tufft, för jag känner mig också.
Idag är det ju naturligt att jag känner mig främmande för den debate that young writers have on the cultural side of big newspapers.
I mean they're 25, they're 30, they're supposed to live in a completely different world than me and they do.
But it might have hurt more when I was young and felt that I didn't fit into my time.
But at the same time, I'm very sceptical about group pressure in general.
I can't do group work at all.
I've been involved in politics in Finland for a long time.
I said I couldn't do it because I wouldn't be able to follow the group discipline if I got elected.
That's how I feel and that means that I've never felt like a part of my past or of a group.
That has also strengthened me, because several times there have been situations where I've had a big novel project in my head and at the same time felt how wrong I was in the past.
And then you have to realize that I'm alone when I do this.
Jag är den enda.
Jag har inte stöd av en grupp.
Jag har inte en kompisgräns.
Jag kan gå och berätta.
Nu håller jag på med det här.
Vill ni läsa?
Vad säger ni?
The ability to stand alone is something that I think that as a writer you need.
You are basically alone with what you write.
To be a writer is a very existential profession.
But I myself have never written an autobiographical novel.
If I had written autobiographical, it would have been in essays that it has been completely open and that this is about my life.
Although I myself have never written self-fiction, I want to emphasize that I am not antagonistic in this matter.
I myself write novels that some even call old-fashioned.
That is, they have discovered protagonists.
But my basic view is that a good book is a good book is a good book, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.
So if you write well, that's what's important.
If you write so that the reader feels both food for thought, new thoughts and great feelings, that's the most important thing.
But what I have perhaps reacted to in the last 10-15 years and I saw an example of this just a few days ago, before I came here to Louisiana in a big newspaper in Finland is that critics sometimes start writing about novels that they read and see as completely fictional.
They can write that this is well done and properly written, but when I'm so used to the bleeding heart of autofiction, I don't feel these discovered characters as they should.
I haven't seen a lot of such reviews, but I've seen them.
Not just one, but several.
And I think this is worrying.
It's clear that you can say that you don't have the.
The author of the fictional novel didn't do enough or put enough of his own soul into it.
But I think there is a fundamental, another problem behind it.
When it has become so common and when there is such a great curiosity, with the reader.
It's more about the truth, if it really happened.
But I write in my latest novel, Kymning 41, that it's as if the strong advance of autofiction would have renegotiated the contract between the novel author and her reader.
And sometimes it feels like that.
Because this question I mean, I have placed my stories in a realistically written Helsingfors.
So already before the advance of autofiction, when I had only written a few novels already.
Then I got the question all writers have probably at all times gotten the question is this true?
Has this happened?
Is this based on real events?
So that question has always existed, but now it is put in a larger, what shall I say?
A phase, but more impulsive than ever before.
I feel it very clearly as a novelist.
I sometimes think that when I say that Leksper, Molle and Henry in Kymling 41 are really educated figures, I haven't had any role models whose letters I've changed or biographies I've followed.
So it's almost like people don't believe me.
At the same time, it's a compliment if people say that the novel design feels so real that you must have had a role model.
And I know that I have not had a role model.
Then it is a compliment to me as a novelist.
I have succeeded with something.
But that something has happened in the literature, something very big a negotiation in the last 10-20 years, is obvious to me.
Our time often asks for authenticity, perhaps precisely because authenticity in many ways is a defect.
The world has always been a mirror room, also a mirror room with distorted mirrors.
Lewis Carroll and many others already knew that. or artists, but it has become more so.
And you can see in front of you a picture of literature, which for me is the most important thing, or art in general, also music.
What makes the book, the song, is just a small part.
And then there are these huge games around, which are very much about Both old and new media, but mostly social media.
That's something I've seen grow.
When Facebook started, I was already 45.
I am a person who is easily disturbed in my rhythm.
I always have to isolate myself to be able to hear my own thoughts.
I understood early that I had to choose that.
Why did I have to choose that?
Because my novels have a lot of power.
Because I have learned quite a few languages and I want to continue to know them, read and keep them intact.
Because I love playing music and I play in four different bands as an amateur.
I don't have time for all of this.
There's a lot of fuss and ruckus about reactions.
It's so much about emotions.
I'm a strange mix.
You see in my novels that I'm an emotional person.
It's also about emotions.
But I also have a cerebral and analytical side.
All this quick reaction with thumbs up and thumbs down.
I'm also super critical of the fact that art is more and more judged by stars and castings.
Why do you have to put a number on everything?
Someone does something and it's either two, three or five something.
Apples or oranges or stars or castings.
Of course it suits a lot of people that the world is like this, but I understood early on that it didn't suit me.
And if I'm going to be able to handle it, if I'm going to have the mental strength to do the things I want to do, I have to turn it off.
Here it also plays into the fact that I have a family heritage, that is, my mother was psychologically so fragile that she did not hold herself together.
So I have always known that I also carry such a psychological heritage that I have to be careful.
So for me, I have a co-writer who writes fantastic novels.
At the same time, they shout on Facebook and Instagram and all sorts of political and aesthetic issues.
I admire them, but for me it's an impossibility.
I would break down and then I wouldn't get my book written and then I would be very sad between what a writer does as a main job.
In my case, I sit alone for such long periods that I can have periods of several weeks when I write a novel where I don't meet anyone.
I probably send messages to my wife and my sons, but I don't go anywhere.
I'm at my home or at a residence and just write.
It's a very lonely job where you have to manage to be alone with yourself.
You often ask a writer the question, what is the most important thing?
What do you have to be able to do to become a writer?
When I was young, I often gave the answer that is a bit of a cliché.
You have to have good sitting muscles because you have to sit still so much.
But I have stopped giving the answer.
It may be true too, but now I say that you have to dare and be able to be alone with yourself and your own thoughts.
And then we have, in our time, the other side of literature.
That in a completely different way than when I started.
You have to remember that I have a perspective of almost 40 years on this.
And in a completely different way than when I started.
It is assumed that the author should be an estradeur, should also be able to verbally perhaps not explain their works, but present their thoughts and deepen them and simply be good and intense deep humorous, whatever on stage.
And here the change that has happened since 1986 when I debuted as a poet is enormous.
I know that there are still many writers who have a resistance here, and there are those who really dislike it.
But more writers than when I was young are also good at it good at talking about their books, good at meeting an audience.
Many of the older poets that I admired when I started writing poetry in Sweden Werner Aspenström, Thomas Strandström, Gunnar Ekerlöf although he was dead was a poet that I admired.
I have seen old video recordings of many of these poets.
And to imagine them in today's world, where the author is supposed to be an extradite and post things on Instagram and TikTok.
They wouldn't have liked it.
So it's a huge change.
And for me personally, there's a huge paradox here.
As a child, and even as a young man, I was so weak that when I held lectures at school, I would shiver.
I didn't go to school that day because I couldn't stand in front of my classmates.
My legs would shake, my voice would quiver.
Even when I was young and was on my way into both literature and music, I remember that the first gigs I had in a band as a guitarist, I would rather sit on a stick with my back to the audience as if I were Miles Davis.
And I was really no one, I was a useless musician.
Maybe that's why I wanted to sit with my back to the audience.
So I've had a very long way to go.
I didn't like being a poet, because as a poet you're supposed to do a performance act, you're supposed to come in as an actor and be dramatic.
That didn't suit me.
On the other hand, I was saved by the fact that, at some point, when I had started writing novels, I realized that I liked meeting an audience.
I liked a dialogue.
And as a novel writer, you get to make contact with the audience, you get to tell about the scenes in your book, about what you thought when you wrote it.
You can even tell about how the books are connected to who you are and what you have been through.
And then the audience can respond and tell.
Afterwards people often come and tell about their lives and ask questions, and then you can compare a little.
And here I found something.
Plus that I found this simple technique, I remember when I was maybe 35.
Until then, I had quit talking on stage.
I really didn't like it.
But then I discovered that the stage is mine when I'm sitting there or standing there.
Earlier, when I got nervous, I had to speak faster.
And when you start to get faster and faster, you stop breathing.
And then you get worse.
And you think worse.
But when you realize that I have the right to be here people have invited me here to sit on stage I get to take a break and breathe.
And when I learned that it is possible to dominate that situation, then I started to like it better.
On the other hand, as a writer, I work with social media.
It's probably a generational issue.
I have an official Facebook page, but the last time I wrote an entry was in August 2020.
The classic fiction novel can on the surface seem to be about deep personal, private trauma.
Robbery, or a dysfunctional family, or a tragedy of some kind.
The classic novel is often about more collective traumas, national or societal.
Big lines that are common to many people.
The idea that we are all connected to something bigger and that it affects us.
At the same time, in this classic novel it is often about collective traumas.
Just like my novels, my historical novels are quite much about Finland's very tumultuous and also violent history of the 1900s, with civil war and war against external enemies.
In these large collective lines, there are also all the individual traumas and individual sorrows.
And that's what the novel can do to illustrate how all these large environments affect the individual person, the ordinary citizen.
But here you also have to give the autofiction.
If the novel can make this movement from the great wholeness into the individual trauma, then of course the autofiction can do the same thing, but the other way around.
To lift the gaze or use this individual personal trauma to lift something that is actually.
It can be found in many families or among many people.
It can also be a collective grief or trauma.
As I said earlier, I don't want to be antagonistic.
You can write well in many ways.
I have been drawn to writing where I feel I can use my strengths as a human being.
