Per Anders Fogelström

[Eric]

I have not read anything this writer, but judging by the interesting overview of his suite of five books by critic Mats Gellerfelt in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) a couple of days ago, he looks like a writer who writes sincerely about the city he was brought up in.

Per Anders Fogelström (1917-1998) was someone whose parents fled the chaos in Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution, though I cannot find out much about them. So I don't even know whether they were Russians or Swedes working in Russia. Whether Fogelström was his father's surname I also do not know. As Fogelström's father ran away to America some years later, he was brought up by his mother in even more straitened circumstances than he was born in.

His main claim to fame is the suite of five novels, The City Suite, about Stockholm, that he wrote between 1960 and 1968:

Mina drömmars stad (City of My Dreams; 1960; covering the years 1860-1880)
Barn av sin stad (Child of His City; 1962; covering 1880-1900)
Minns du den stad (Do You Remember the City; 1964; covering 1900-1925)
I en förvandlad stad (In a Changed City; 1966; covering 1925-1945)
Stad i världen (City in the World; 1968; covering 1945-1968)

The first two of these novels have appeared in English and were translated by Jennifer Brown Bäverstam, but I know no further details.

The books evidently cover the lives of people living is the less well-off parts of Stockholm and portray the growth of Stockholm up to the 1960s when the town planners swept away the Klara disrict, known for its pubs and brothels and replaced it with the sterile moon landscape around Sergels torg which is still there today.

Fogelström also wrote a trilogy, The Children Trilogy, that is set in Stockholm and another suite of novels called the Comrades Suite. Politically, Fogelström was a pacifist and against atomic weapons and a ceaseless campaigner. But it is said that Stockholm was his real passion.

His style is evidently straightforward and the City Suite has been reissued recently in Sweden in paperback.

Fogelström also wrote the novel on which the Ingmar Bergman film "Summer With Monika" was based.

 

[Liam]

Ah, I simply love this sentence!

At one time the city had lain tightly curled like a hedgehog in a crevice in a hill.

I'm glad that this series is becoming available in English. The cover (of the first volume) looks very appealing as well:

 

[Eric]

Re: Per Anders Fogelstr?m

A curled hedgehog. A nice image.

I tried to get the first volume of this pentalogy out of the library yesterday, but all the Volumes I were out. Instead, I found an account of Fogelstr?m's parents' adventures when young - Arthur and Na?mi. Evidently they were Swedes by birth, then went to work in Helsinki during the Russian Empire, then Petrograd, then cosmopolitan Viborg, after it had become part of Finland proper after the Russian Revolution and Finnish independence. Viborg had initially been part of the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire, and is nowadays, from what I gather, a Russian backwater with no Finns, Jews, Finland-Swedes, Germans, or similar, left. Maybe the Nord Stream pipeline will liven the town up a bit. Fogelstr?m's father was working for the engineering company ASEA (much later in the 20th century this became ASEA-Atom, the manufacturer of nuclear power stations).

Anyway, Fogelstr?m's parents then moved to Sweden. and their lives continued to be eventful. The book in question is called Hem, till sist (Home At Last) and starts with dad coming back from America and a chapter about how bitter it was for the children to receive so few letters from their faraway father. As Fogelstr?m is a storyteller, he doesn't write the book in neat chronological order, but tells the tale backwards inasmuch as that is narratorially possible.

*

Stockholm is growing on me. When I visited it in the 1980s I found it grey, except for the attractive sweep of the bay between the main part and the island of S?dermalm. Now I take every opportunity to walk around the city which, in my subjective opinion, is much improved and is full of life and pavement caf?s in the warmer months. But even walking around in icy December I began to like the city (except for the hideous concrete jungle around Sergels torg). There are shopping malls too, one of which housing the English Shop, where you can buy mince pies even in May.

So I will read Fogelstr?m's books with interest, as they illuminate the past of this largish city. For instance, where there is now a pleasant little park, Bj?rns tradg?rd, with a caf? where you can eat omelettes and watch the students, they had riots in the late 1940s with the Swedish equivalent of teddy boys or Mods and Rockers, if I have understood correctly (G?tgatskravallarna - The Riots of G?tgatan).

One of the best smallish bookshops in Stockholm, S?derbokhandeln, is just round the corner. This is all on the island of S?dermalm which has gone very much up-market. In Fogelstr?m's time S?dermalm (called simply S?der by the locals) was the working class district of Stockholm. It is now rather chic and the yuppies have moved in. G?tgatan itself is an over-trafficked thoroughfare, but a few blocks away you can find havens of peace and tranquility. And pubs selling Irish, Scottish, and English beer. I even bought a bottle of beer there from the same brewery as brewed the bitter I used to drink at university in Norwich many years ago: Adnams. And also Swedish beers have become vastly better over the last few years, with lots of real ale-type of drinks.

 

[Liam]

So I've finished the first volume of this historically expansive, bursting-with-ideas quintet. Lyrically written, with a kind of detached yet intimate authorial presence, City of My Dreams follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the young Henning Nilsson, recently arrived from the countryside in Stockholm, in 1860. The book then proceeds to narrate the next twenty years of his life in meticulous detail, but the point of view often switches to give us an intimate insight into the psyches of even the most transitory of characters.

The style of the novel is thoroughly social-realist in execution, yet with a deep and lyrical beauty of its own. Describing the lives of the poor, Fogelström does not shy away from either the filth or the brutality of their existence. Although nothing is "graphically" described, the story is full of violence, directed in particular against women and children (rapes, beatings, endless domestic abuse) and can, thus, be thoroughly disturbing. Eleven-year-old prostitutes are abused by recently arrived farmers; a sixteen-year-old girl looking for "extra" income is gang-raped by a group of drunken sailors, her still-alive body dumped outside the boat. A dirt-poor baker's hand, unable to procure a wife or scrape together enough money to visit a brothel requests to have a young boy apprentice as his bedfellow. Etc.

Perhaps, because the novel was originally published in 1960, Fogelström deliberately chose to remain rather reticent on some issues, but to me it seemed that what remained unsaid, un-described, was much more disturbing than what was directly and openly alluded to.

But it would be wrong, therefore, to conclude that the entire novel is filled with brutality and nothing but brutality: many moments of beauty and grace abound, especially centered on Henning and his family. I won't reveal what happens at the end of the book, but the concluding two chapters are devastating.

Highly recommended to all those interested in historical fiction (or good and well-written literature in general), as well as the many Scandinavian aficionados who frequent this forum, .