PO Enquist: ‘An upbringing like mine marks you like a branding iron’

Swedish author Per Olov Enquist talks about his pious childhood near the Arctic Circle and his latest novel, shaped by his early life

Andrew Brown
Saturday 30 July 2016

here have been a number of books in recent years in which old men look back from literary eminence to the sexual excitements of their youth – Gabriel García Márquez with Memories of my Melancholy Whores, Philip Roth with just about everything – but the 81-year old Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist’s most recent novel The Parable Book, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner, is about love rather than sex, and death rather than regret. It is also in passages blindingly funny.

Enquist is seen as one of Sweden’s greatest living authors: he has won the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize, among others, and his work has been tranlsated into more than 20 languages. He has lived in Germany, Denmark and the US, but has since returned to Stockholm, where we meet at his publisher’s office, a glorious stone building in the old town. He still reads four Swedish newspapers a day, the London and New York Reviews of books, British and German papers on the web and watches CNN. He has been greatly concerned about the EU referendum. “Sweden has always been Anglophile. There is a very strong feeling of bonds with England. Our welfare states are built up on the same lines even if they differ in execution. That’s not sentimentality: there is a very strong sense of interconnection with you.”

Hermes watches over the Gulf of Bothnia from the cliffs of Kokar in Aland, Finland. Photograph: Berit Berg/AP

None the less, his two most recent books deal with an upbringing very remote indeed from English concerns. In part this is a matter of geography. He was born and brought up in a scattered settlement near the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, a couple of hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. The piss bucket in the hallway froze to a solid lump of ice on winter nights, and his mother, a teacher, would ski the 3km to her school every day. His father, a lumberjack, had died when he was six months old so he was raised in fervent piety and profound isolation from anything that might be ungodly.

“The Bible is a very strange and repellent text when you read it as an adult. Then you have to find the passages which point inwards, not forwards. But if you have had an upbringing like mine you never get away from it. You get to be 80 and read the Bible again. It’s an upbringing that marks you like a branding iron, but I wouldn’t want to change it if I could. The children who were raised in secular families could go to the theatre or the cinema. I couldn’t.”

Enquist has an extraordinarily direct and persistent gaze of the kind you never meet in cities, even Swedish ones, where anyone who looked at you that long would be suspected of some predatory act. He did not, he says, even know what a cinema was until he was 16; the books he read were almost all religious: his mother removed Rudyard Kipling’s Kim from the bookshelf once she had established that it had a Buddhist as a hero. Yet she loved him deeply and he loved her and writes about her with great respect. It was, he says, a very fine upbringing if you were going to become a writer, because it saved you from distractions and taught close attention to the world. In fact one of the village children he knew grew up to become the father of Stieg Larsson, who wrote the Millennium trilogy, so perhaps there is something in the water of Hjoggböle lake.

Some of the family stories read like Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm – when one of his relatives wanted to kill himself in winter he had to spend hours whacking the ice of the lake with a crowbar in the dark until he had made a hole big enough to admit him along with the rucksack full of potatoes he’d strapped on to weigh himself down.

But there is also a current of humour in Enquist’s books that is part of the northern character. “Martin Luther was a great comic,” he says. “Rude, funny and crude. There’s lots of that still in the evangelical revival movement. It’s effective, and very practical, but never entirely serious.”

Although many of his works have been fictional, or at least reworkings of known history, such as The Book About Blanche and Marie and The Visit of the Royal Physician, the two most recent are reworkings of his own life. The spine of his latest, The Parable Book, is the story of his encounter, at 15, with a 51-year-old woman visiting from a suburb of Stockholm, identified for the most part simply as “the woman on the smooth pine floor”. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, perfectly paced and anatomically precise without being embarrassing or pornographic. When it is over, she says they must never meet again, but this is not to heighten the mystery. It is simply that in her life in the south she is a virtuous woman, active in her parish council. It would disrupt her life to continue.

The two of them, however ill matched, manage to recognise one another’s dignity despite being drawn together only by lust. Of course, this leads them both to long for more. Eventually he does see her again, once, on a platform at the station in her home town. By this time he has moved south himself, to study at university. He was the first boy in the village to do that, and indeed the first to continue school after the age of 15. She tells him they can’t meet again. She quotes to him a fragment of the poem “Autumn Song” by Tove Jansson:

Now the storm is blowing out there and shuts the summer’s door;
It’s too late to wander and to search. Perhaps I love you less than I did before,
But more than you will ever know.

Many years later, he is sent, through his publisher, a notice of her funeral. Sixteen people attend in a Stockholm graveyard. A teenage girl sings a cappella the whole of the Jansson poem the dead woman had quoted at him, a song in which transience and longing thicken together to something that bites the throat like smoke.

Afterwards the girl approaches him: “I recognised you from the TV,” she says. She is the woman’s niece. She is 15 herself now, as he had been when he met her aunt. The woman on the smooth pine floor had had two requests for her funeral: to ask Enquist to attend and that her neice should sing the song she had quoted to him. She had also, says the niece, kept a number of his books.

Remembering this scene now, he says with sudden heat that if the woman had liked his books, “she could have bloody well said so earlier”.

This is authorial vanity, of course, but it is also a pressing sense of all that is lost with a death. The Parable Book is told in parable partly because death can only be approached through parable and simile. It can’t be grasped. In this book and its immediate predecessor, published in English as The Wandering Pine and also translated by Bragan-Turner, Enquist turns his own life into a parable – a story whose moral eludes us, even while it is obviously there.

His literary success in Sweden came fairly early and overwhelmed him. He had plays produced in numerous European countries and even, briefly, on Broadway. His account of the progress of a Broadway flop is a deadly funny section of The Wandering Pine. By the mid-70s he was a colossus of Swedish literature, a friend of Ingmar Bergman and of the Social Democratic leadership, whose party had run the country for 40 years of peace and increasing prosperity.

But since everything in Sweden was settled, it was necessary to have opinions about south-east Asia if you wanted arguments. It was obligatory for Swedish intellectuals to be on the side of the Viet Cong and opposed to American power if they wanted to be regarded as morally serious, a process that reached its culmination when the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and drove out all the inhabitants they did not kill. Enquist wrote a column defending their actions. At the time he had never even heard the name Pol Pot, but in the context of Swedish debate that was a mere detail. What mattered was to be righteous rather than factually right.

Enquist left his first wife and family for a Danish theatre director, and when he got a job as a cultural ambassador in Paris, lived with her in a seven-room flat on the Champs-Élysées. There he wrote just one play, after, he says, a conversation with his cat.

“The cat said to me, ‘You have to start writing now,’ but I couldn’t. So the cat finally said to me, ‘What was your first telephone number?’ And I wrote my first phone number: Sjön 3, Hjoggböle. And then I went on and wrote the play. That was the real beginning. I have written a lot about my upbringing since.”

Otherwise he did almost nothing in Paris except try to drink himself to death. He very nearly succeeded. He brings to his account in The Wandering Pine of the humiliations of alcoholism the same precision of observation and of language that he deploys in the account of his first love. In both cases, he is striving for redemption without understanding what it is or even why.

He writes he says, quite freely: not without a plan, but allowing the text to develop as he types, confident that he can always throw it away in the morning. “No one can read it, and that’s a good feeling.” So one morning he found in the previous day’s pages the sentence, “When he wrote he was never afraid, but only when he wrote.” This was all he kept from those pages, but he couldn’t explain why. “I understood that I had written it, but I didn’t understand it.”

He describes his wandering technique of writing as being like entering a forest. “For the first month you don’t know where the paths go, but after three months you realise that you can’t get lost. That’s the feeling: that the forest has many alternatives, but you can’t take the wrong path.”

At least he is still writing, he says. “I spend half my life bouncing around between hospitals or measuring the decay within me. I had a little problem last spring: the tips of my fingers grew too big. I hit two keys at once. It took me about a month to get over it. There was nothing wrong with the words I wrote, but I was terrified.” Otherwise, he says, he’s in pretty good shape. “Considering my health problems, I feel young. I have retired from all cares, you might say.”

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