Let me take you back to the fall of 2006. I was taking a class in creative writing as one of my electables during my last year of high school. In that class, I had a friend called Sandra, who had a blog and who suggested I should start one too. I was already keeping a semi-public journal in the Swedish, pre-Facebook internet community Helgon.net. But I thought, Naah. Why did I need to switch? Why would anyone else except my (online) friends want to read what I wrote anyway?
I’ve always liked to hang out in libraries. For me, it’s like they have a gravitational pull. Being close to one, it’s almost impossible to not enter. Browse through the shelves, pick up a copy at random. The magic, the endless possibilities of an unread book. One November afternoon in 2006, while I was still resisting starting a blog, I sauntered into the small, stuffed library at my heavy-with-traditions high school, and picked up a square-shaped book with golden covers. It was full of short texts with lots of empty space on the pages, and illustrated with often quite poorly taken color photographs of a garden and odd objects. The uncommon format and layout tickled my curiosity, and I checked it out. Little did I know that that book, in a sense, would change my life.
It was Bodil Malmsten’s Hör bara hur ditt hjärta bultar i mig (Just hear how your heart beats in me). The short texts and photographs consisted of posts from her blog, and covered subjects ranging from sharp commentaries of the idiocy of politicians, though essay-like pieces about literature, to simple reflections about gardening. Everything soaked in Malmsten’s dark, witty sense of humor.
I fell head over heels. Now, this was something I wanted to mimic. I started a blog, aiming for the same mixture of personal, poetic and political. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but at least she got me started and blogging has followed me through the years, travels and studies ever since. And I continued to read anything I could get my hands on by her, novels, essays, logbooks and poetry. To be fair, my fervor has weaned over the years, switching to other authors and now completely being swallowed by scientific literature. But she is still the author whom I’ve read the most books by: Fourteen (which is not at all her entire bibliography, by the way). The next on the list is Tove Jansson, with ten – so Malmsten is safe on the throne.
But almost two weeks ago, Malmsten died. She had been suffering from leukemia for a while, and on February 5th, she passed away. The other day, I happened upon an eulogy in a newspaper while drinking a cup of tea in the kitchen at work, and it touched me so much I started crying – because its writer described the exact same kind of connection that I had felt with Malmsten’s writing. Colleagues who walked by my table stared, not sure how to react to my behavior, but I didn’t care. The Swedish language has lost one of its truly great literary minds, and I have lost one of my few idols. She was not afraid to feel, strongly, so nor was I.
So. I would like to honor her one last time by quoting two of my favorite excerpts from her books (that I’ve already copied at least once to that first blog), inexpertly translated by me. One is a tribute to libraries, mirroring my faith in their near-sacredness:
What the individual forgets exists in the library.
The libraries are the heads to the Earth’s body.
Each individual is a world, a universe, each book is a testimony of that.
There are as many ways to look upon the world as there are people and of that literature is proof. Into another’s mind you can only enter through the books.
Only at the libraries can you find the evidence.
from “Det är fortfarande ingen ordning på mina papper”
And the other is about love, its strength and diversity should be exercised, a practice none of us should ever forget:
I exercise my love, and not hate.
My hate cannot be developed, it is simple and slim. Head-on and directed at a couple of representatives of the power.
My love however, it lies like a cloud-cover over the mid-Norrland* countryside, it falls like snow with the constancy of the crystal.
The more you shovel, the more it snows.
from “För att lämna röstmeddelande tryck stjärna”
* The northernmost region of Sweden, where Malmsten grew up
Katja Malmborg 