OKTOBER I FATTIGSVERIGE – OCTOBER IN SWEDISH DEPRIVATION
By Susanna Alakoski
I’M RETRACING MY own steps for the first time. The biography is entering my life, even though it takes place far after the biography. The biography enters the steps, unblessed it pushes aside the repressed. It doesn’t make excuses. It doesn’t explain either. It’s true that I some days see the dead. We’re always in the same kitchen, the same living room, hallway, bath room. There’s always blood there. Or newly baked bread. Mum is bruised all over. Or she’s not. Dad is in one of his stages. We have a small kitchen table, four chairs and a stool. I’m the one sitting on the stool. We lived in big chops and changes. It was heaven or hell, it was the heaven in hell. Is it possible to write without hurting? Is it possible to remember without hurting someone else? The scars are mine as the pen, and the one who writes is the one who remembers, and the one who writes is also the one lifting words out of the story, directs the light, erases and saves. The others, the ones writing the scars, the ones who are subjects of the text, how can they answer or defend themselves? It’s barely doable, they’re strangers or dead or gone of other reasons.
IN HER OCTOBER journal Susanna Alakoski describes how she tries to approach her adolescence. She spends time in the town where she grew up, she travels through Sweden, and with the difficult work remembering and writing she sees a society where there’re still the same patterns: people live in poverty, homelessness and invisibility.
ABOUT THE BOOK
First published by Albert Bonnier, Sweden 2012
RIGHTS SOLD TO
Sweden, Albert Bonnier
REVIEWS
The book looks like a prayer book, complete with a ribbon marker – it’s perfectly apt. This is a secular catechism on human dignity.
– Sydsvenskan
Instead, October in Swedish Deprivation increasingly takes shape as a polemic. […] It’s good – at times brilliant. It’s entirely possible that this is one of the most important books I’ve read in a very long time. It’s been a long time since rage, the sense of class, could be embodied in this way. It hurts. It’s real. It’s harsh. It’s magnificent.
– Helsingborgs Dagblad
She writes – paradoxical as it may sound – both more loosely focused and more precise at the same time. Out of the unpolished, the not fully refined, the raw and the bare, something authentic and greater emerges. The text soon makes a qualitative leap. The mix is highly effective. The tone changes, becomes distinct and crystal clear, sharp. […] The diary is full of wounds, of pain and shame. The text bleeds.
– Kulturen
Like authors such as Åsa Linderborg, Johan Jönson, and Kristian Lundberg, she has a splinter of magic in her eye that forces her to constantly see society from below. Everywhere – in a defensive gesture, an averted gaze – she thinks she recognises the mute experiences of poor people. The smell of shame.
– Dagens Nyheter
BOOKS
Fiction
