Swedish Authors, part 1 (3)

This time it's going to be all about Swedish books, or more accurately three Swedish authors. Who will be graced with one blogpost each. *What an honour*

First out is one very insightful novelist who adeptly reads the human nature, and all its deviants, and translates that into stirring, compassionate, endearing, sad, harrowingly novels. About the little grey, odd, prosaic ones that exist all around - and sometimes inside - us. He is also one of Sweden's gay *icons* and by many loved comedian.

This was the eighth book by him, Jonas Gardell, I read. And in all its briefness, a mere 175 pages long, it was absolutely heartbreaking, chilling, skinless and impressively tensely written. Not a single word not carefully thought through.

The book, Jenny, is the third book in a series about the life of a boy, his friends and the school hazers around them, growing up in a Stockholm suburb in the 70ies. But this time the book concentrates on what happened to Jenny, the boy's friend back then, the last day in junior high school. The terrible, almost ungraspable, event that took place when all the wrong choices were made and noone took responsibility for their atrocious actions, or non-actions. And yet there is hope, a relentless will to live.

A mandatory book for everyone. And not only some, too many, parents that seemingly in a casual way frantically reproduce without any long-term planning of retransmitting ethics and moral concept to the offsprings. A book for all those rotten ones who do reprehensible things and then aren't even man/woman enough to admit to and take responsibility for them.

A novel to cry bitter tears over. A novel to get flipping mad over. A novel that makes you adamantly wanting go out and fight the good fight for all the little grey ones that barely make it through the day. A novel to read.