Review of Henrik Bromander’s « The closest »

Who does Henrik Bromander write for?

In the last ten to fifteen years he has become something of his own genre. With his masculinity trilogy (« Tear all temples » about bodybuilding, « Friend of order » about online war and « just a hug » about a supposedly feminist media man), he called modern masculinity in all his poor complexity. « High voltage » is an electrical allergist’s confession, the subsequent « twilight » a voltage study of a right-wing extremist underground cell in the welfare Sweden seventies. It is both straight and complex stories, simple but carefully written, about people like society in different ways turned their backs. Or vice versa.

He himself would well answer that he writes for everyone.

But I am Afraid that « everyone » no longer exists, that it was a long time since there was a reading population of the kind previously read, type, Per Gunnar Evander or Kerstin Ekman. So there are not many authors left of that kind, especially not in the younger generations.

In 2018, Henrik Bromander himself wrote a Text in DN Where he just called for the kind of writer, who was looking outside his own lives, away from the desk, in reality. Who did research and met people and wanted to understand something about contemporary political, social and mental climate.

For now, he seems to be able to do it himself.

« The closest » puts Somewhere in the middle of the thrill novel and the family epic, it is an almost 600 pages and almost 50 years long story told from the perspective of four family members. When the book begins, the year 2025 is and Rebecka Andersson is in prison. The reader then moves back to 1979 and Rebecka’s mother Inger. She meets Lars, they get Rebecka, they get Rickard.

The tricky Rebecka engages in the area’s autonomous left movement and abuses local Nazis, while her entrepreneur to FAR makes a career in the newly privatized care

Then the years go in the hometown of Jönköping. The tricky Rebecka engages in the area’s autonomous left movement and abuses local Nazis, while her entrepreneur to FAR makes a career in the newly privatized care. Rickard enters the military to take at least internal revenge on his high school bumps. Inger drinks and loses herself in memories of her youth.

Henrik Bromander has made his habit and literary ideology faithful. His transparency in everything from women’s prisoners to the end psychiatry of the eighties to military service in Afghanistan – not to mention the Swedish left -handed environment at the zero number – is astonishing. Not least because it is so unusual in contemporary Swedish novel art. (Unusual are also the many and elaborate sex scenes, which, among other things, depict teenage sonani with panties stolen from the dirt wash, a deeply unpleasant BDSM relationship two seventy-year-old men between and dementia). Sometimes the richness of detail becomes overwhelming, purely exhausting, but usually it is so naturally incorporated into the story that the feeling is simply that you read about reality.

The glowy novel characters are somehow both unique and clichéd, perhaps because people tend to be clichéd

Yes, real is The word for what « the closest » is. Henrik Bromander does not write beautifully or poetic. Everything is realistic and everyday, people piss and eat caviar. When they do not build fire bombs, that is. The extreme goes hand in hand with the everyday life. The glowy novel characters are somehow both unique and clichéd, perhaps because people tend to be clichéd. Sometimes it is Cringeyet it is true.

Slowly approaching a disaster, but once it comes, it is the least interesting with the book. « The closest » is no poet, that the threads are tied together does not result in any satisfactory feeling of redemption. Like the rest of the book, the whole is most awful. Feelbath For everyone. If only the Swedish people could start reading again.

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