\nJust as I was about to give up on modern Swedish fiction (and read only foreign books and Selma Lagerl\u00f6f in the future) I found a book really worth reading. Given my abysmal hit rate thus far, I expect I will find another readable one some time next summer.\n<\/p>\n
\nM\u00e4nniskohamn<\/i> (“Human harbour”) begins on a beautiful, crisp winter day. On a small island in Stockholm’s archipelago, Anders, Cecilia and their six-year-old daughter Maja decide to take a walk over the ice, out to the lighthouse. But once they’re there, Maja disappears, even though there’s nowhere to go. Her tracks stop in the middle of the snow.\n<\/p>\n
\nTwo years later, Anders returns to the island, alone and alcoholized, and still obsessed with Maja’s disappearance. Out in their cabin, he sees things that seem to tell him that somehow Maja is still around.\n<\/p>\n
\nHere the story starts to grow and spread, both backwards and forwards in time, and pulls in more people. At various points the main story thread pauses for a digression into the past, which then wraps up and smoothly directs us back into the main story. It turns into a family saga and a local history. (There’s an old Swedish tradition of sk\u00e4rg\u00e5rdsroman<\/i>, “archipelago novels”, dating back to Strindberg in the 1800s.)\n<\/p>\n
\nIt appears that Maja is far from the first person to disappear like that, and that some of them may indeed still be present even though they’re gone. And some of them are not entirely benevolent towards the living.\n<\/p>\n