My taste when it comes to literature is kind of diverse. I love contrast, I want diversity. I like deep psychological probings as well as pulp horror with tentacles. Here I’d like to introduce three of my absolute favorite books too you. They are of the more serious kind and all happen to be written by some of the Swedish literary giants 50-60 years ago. All three have in common that they were written very fast in a creative frenzy claimed to come from outside the authors. All still valid, today more than ever.
Aniara | Harry Martinson, 1956
Might be my all time favorite and a life changing read for me. A science fiction poem/novel about the spaceship Aniara that has an accident at launch and hurls lost towards the big nothingness. Big questions and small, about humanity and humans. You should all really really read this!
Kallocain | Karin Boye, 1940
A dystopic sci-fi novel about a totalitarian state, written ten years before Orwell’s 1984. Boye is mostly known as a poet (and writer of early queer identity prose) but wrote this out of nowhere after seeing the brooding darkness growing with the Nazis in Germany.
Island of the Doomed | Stig Dagerman, 1946
Dagerman only wrote four novels and all of them would be on my list of recommended books. In each of them he explores the dark and painful aspects of being human. A Burnt Child is the most straight forward of them and might be a good starting point, but my favorite is probably the anxiety nightmare of Island of the Doomed.