You can read Lena Andersson’s Son of Svea as either a straight novel of Ragnar Johansson, a twentieth-century Swede, or you can read it as an allegory and commentary on twentieth-century Sweden. Or both.
The book is subtitled “A Tale of the People’s Home.” The translator’s single footnote helpfully glosses, “
Folkhemmet, literally ‘the peoples home,’ is a Swedish term for what is otherwise designated as the Swedish welfare state.”
Ragnar was born in 1932, the year the Swedish Social Democratic Party won for the first time and changed the country forever. As the book says, Ragnar is a “man without cracks, but with a great split running through him, and in this he entirely resembled the society he populated and shaped.”
Lena Andersson is a columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning paper. Considered one of the country’s sharpest contemporary analysts, she writes about politics, society, culture, religion, and other topics. Her fifth novel and English-language debut, Willful Disregard, was awarded the 2013 August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor. Her other novel translated into English is Acts of Fidelity. These two book expose “the cruelty and comedy of romantic obsession,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker.
In a sense so does Son of Svea. Rather than the cruelty of and romantic obsession with another person, however, Ragnar’s infatuation is with modernity. “The modern age, to his way of thinking, was the epoch in which the human race attained the perfection that has been lying there waiting for it.”
Ragnar’s mother, Svea, never saw or heard from her father after age seven. He left for America and the grandmother with whom Svea and her siblings lived intercepted all of his letters. Svea was able to marry a man who operated a small trucking company, but hers is a life of cooking, cleaning, laundry. When Ragnar “thought about Mother Svea’s childhood he began worshipping the state. He based this on its self-evident superiority to human beings. In the state there was no room for passion or apathy.”
As a young man, Ragnar goes to Spain on vacation, his one trip overseas. It gives him the experience of a foreign society, which reinforces his belief in Sweden’s superiority. In vocational school becomes a skilled woodworker at government expense and lands a job as a woodshop school teacher, rejecting his father’s trucking business.
His passion for the modern continues unslaked. “The chemists had experimented their way to every conceivable kind of tasty and nourishing food. The powder would be the servant of mankind and the liberator of women. . . Now, even those who could not make potato pancakes, savory cream sauce, or crema catalana could enjoy them on an everyday basis. Its powdered form also made it possible to produce perfect nutritional value.”
He is able to marry and he and his wife have two children, Eric and Elsa. The Johanssons join the government waitlist to move into the newly-built suburbs being erected all over the country changing the character of city life, and they eventually move into their new townhouse, which looks exactly like everyone else’s.
They throw themselves into youth sports—or Ragnar throws the children into them, bicycle racing for Eric; cross-country ski racing for Elsa. They eat family dinners and visit their grandparents. Life is good, certainly for Ragnar when one of the children wins another trophy.
Ragnar, who from birth has been a devoted Democratic Socialist, believes a person must contribute to the society in which he lives, but also that it is prudent to earn the ordinary comfortable life the government offers rather than attempt innovation or greatness or even social advancement. He rejects an offer to become director of studies at the school where he teaches.
He believes after all there is only so much room at the top, and most who try to get there will fail by design. Ragnar sees his mother Svea as a relic of the past, rejecting modern conveniences and constantly cooking, cleaning, and canning. His daughter Elsa represents hope for the future even as she gives up competitive cross-country skiing, a sport she never loved. Ragnar realizes that the world is changing from the paradise of his youth, and it’s getting harder to keep up.
Son of Svea is the story of an ordinary family (assuming such a thing exists) adapting to a constantly evolving world. As Andersson writes, “The country had sped like a javelin through the sixties, and by the seventies it was near the top of every list of national comparisons. It had the most day care places, the lowest income disparity, the greatest film director, the foremost children’s writer, the best slalom skier, tennis player and pop group, the most impressive gender equality, the highest taxes—all of them sources of real pride.” What could go wrong?
Lena Andersson does not argue (in Sarah Death’s expressive translation) that anything has gone wrong exactly. Rather she probes into and occasionally shatters notions of social class, family roles, and what it means to be ordinary in a world that is changing under our feet. Son of Svea is not an ordinary book.
