SWEDEN’S DARK SOUL

THE UNRAVELLING OF A UTOPIA

KAJSA NORMAN

Hurst, 240pp, £20

Kajsa Norman is an expatriate Swedish journalist who has published books about Cuba, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and Venezuela. She was challenged to look at her own country by an Afrikaaner who disliked her depiction of his. Her investigation into Sweden’s ‘dark soul’ kicks off with an account of a youth festival outside Stockholm in 2015, when 90 boys and men of mainly Afghan descent were detained in police tents after being pointed out by tearful girls in their early teens, who complained of being systematically surrounded and touched up. The press ignored the story. Norman goes on to examine

two dark strains in Sweden’s history – wartime help given to Nazi Germany under cover of neutrality and the sterilisation of misfits which was still going on in the early 1970s. She also tells the story of two outsiders – a Bergman-obsessed Armenian who offers a memorable picture of Swedes pretending to discuss something when really ‘they just sit with unlistening eyes, waiting for their turn to talk’, and a PolishJewish immigrant who is demonised for when, sometime after the event, he published an account of the youth festival detentions on his website.

Edward Lucas in the Times described Norman’s book ‘subtler and more gripping than any thriller’. PD Smith in the Guardian sat on the fence: the book was ‘hard-hitting’ yet ‘the complexity of the issues she raises cries out for a more nuanced discussion’. In the Literary Review Bernard Porter argued that the ‘unimind’ – Norman’s term for censorious conformism – was a phenomenon not peculiar to Sweden. Still he hailed Norman’s portrait of her homeland as both ‘richly informative’ and ‘troubling’.