The Question of Sweden

Author of 13 novels, two short-story collections, as well as a number of plays and scripts, Klas Östergren is hailed as one of Sweden’s most important living writers. Swedish critics have compared his writing to that of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose influences are clearly felt in Mr. Östergren’s fourth novel, “Gentlemen” (MacAdam/Cage, 375 pages, $25), an elegantly written work of metafiction. Having sold over 300,000 copies in Sweden since its 1980 publication, it has been published for the first time in English this year.The novel’s narrator, a fictive Klas Östergren, befriends and lives with the bohemian artists Henry and Leo Morgan in their grand Stockholm apartment, and “Gentlemen” is his homage to them and to a time lost. Klas’s picaresque account of the brothers’ lives between 1948 and 1978 forms the novel’s core. In a style that brilliantly fuses light-hearted humor with the darkness and paranoia of imminent apocalypse, Klas examines the brothers’ ultimately futile struggles to exist as unfettered iconoclasts in the real world.Henry, a boxer, jazz pianist, and hopeless idealist, enlists in the military to take his mind off a fruitless love affair, only to escape during the night in a canoe. His peripatetic European adventures include a dalliance with a Quaker woman in Copenhagen, brief meetings with Sartre and Dali in Paris, and an abortive attempt to deliver fake passports to people moving from East to West Berlin. Later he returns to Stockholm to his late grandfather’s apartment, under which he digs for buried treasure.Leo, a successful yet tortured poet and philosopher with a social conscience, is comically lugubrious. He becomes involved in Sweden’s ProVie movement, agitating against everything from political oppressors and nuclear warfare to environmental destruction. Vacillating inconsistently between fanaticism and indifference, hope and nihilism, he performs at the Gardet festival — Sweden’s answer to Woodstock — but prefers to disassociate himself from any ideological group.It is not until three-fifths through the novel that the brothers’ ideals collide with reality, and the book, hitherto an episodic, plotless account, is plunged into its most sustained and gripping action. For about 50 pages, “Gentlemen” becomes a political thriller as Leo unravels a dark secret in Sweden’s history involving the Third Reich. Although he endeavors to bring the story to light, the powers that be stymie him, driving him first to a mental institution, and then to the bottle.These powers that be are embodied in the shadowy figure of Wilhelm Sterner, who thwarts the brothers at turns throughout the novel. We are told Wilhelm is a corporate magnate responsible for all Swedish business who becomes affiliated with right-wing political forces.Indeed, one of the book’s unifying themes is the struggle of the artist against the conformity of bourgeois standards. This capitalist critique, however, is never developed convincingly by any of the characters. Similarly, allusions to politics, history, literature, and popular culture pervade the novel like a drumbeat, reminding the reader of events happening in postwar Sweden and around the world, but as soon as the events are introduced, they are dismissed. The characters also interact with politics and history superficially. When Prime Minister Churchill dies, Klas reports that “[Henry] had always liked Churchill. He didn’t know why, since his knowledge of history regarding Churchill was quite limited. It was more likely a question of style and sentimentality.” This lack of engagement contributes to the novel’s universally ironic worldview in which nothing really matters, and anything goes.“Gentlemen” concludes on an abrupt note with Henry and Leo’s unexplained disappearance, the details of which Klas, who has been beaten up and sustains a concussion, can’t seem to piece together. Klas confesses, “I hadn’t learned a thing … during those 25 dramatic years between the Cold War of the 50s and the Iranian Revolution of the 70s. I still felt ignorant and inexperienced.” Readers will have to wait until Mr. Östergren’s “Gangsters” appears next year to learn if the lingering mystery of Henry and Leo is answered there.Ms. Marino is a graduate student of history at Stanford University.

The Question of Sweden

The Question of Sweden

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