Mia is looking after her grandfather who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.
All are living by the forests of Småland in Sweden.
The forests of this Småland are home to a growing population of wild boar that were once on the verge of extinction. Ritve is searching for them, but never seems to have any success in finding them. He sees their destructive nature and chases sightings, but to no avail. Why is something so plentiful continuously out of his reach, but seen by so many others?
Mia wants her grandfather to remember his past, but continually fails even though she has brought him back to his childhood home. Her love and devotion towards him are clear, but it makes no difference. Age has taken its toll and it can never be reversed.
Glenn is an ordinary man with simple ideas and tastes who just want to be happy. He has found his love and his true nature. But will it be enough? His job is only a means to an end. He does not relish it, but he does seem to welcome life and wants to get more from his surroundings and relationships.
Wild Boar is narrated by three very different characters who have come from afar to the isolated community of Småland.
Wild Boar is a poetic masterpiece about animals and people and their different places in a destructively changing ecosystem. The denouement of the book is tragic and compelling as we are shown than none of us can escape the world in which we live. It will take its toll.
Written beautifully, and translated with what we can only assume is infinite care, Wild Boar looks at our past and our future, the planet's past and future and, in the end, it doesn’t appear to hold out much hope for our future.
About the reviewer Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.
You can read more about Wild Boar by Hannah Lutz on Creative Writing at Leicester here.
Following in the footsteps of Swedish crime writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, we are invited into the world of a detective and, through them, discover what life is like in Sweden. There is so much more in the Irene Huss novels than a simple crime and discovery and that is how it should be. That is the true delight of the stories.
In brief, to introduce the main characters, Irene Huss is around forty years of age and is a police inspector working in Göteborg with the Violent Crimes Unit. She is happily married to a chef, Krister. She has twin girls Kristina and Jenny and a dog, Sammie. Many years ago she was European champion at jujitsu.
Work colleague Tommy Persson is her best and oldest friend. They have known each other since the police academy. Indeed, Irene feels the pull of family in the police force as she says: “We’re just like an old married couple … though she’d never said so out loud.”
Her boss, Commissioner Sven Andersson, is actually too old for his job and should retire, but he does not want to. He regularly has high blood pressure and worries Irene.
Jonny Blom is the most unsympathetic of her work colleagues, always on the edge with a spiteful selfish nature. He seems to represent the old fashioned machismo side of the police. Jonny Blom is a corrosive influence within the group. If this was real life, he would have been formally reprimanded for his misogynistic behaviour and I see his character as a weakness in the series. It is all well and good having a defective character, but it has to be true to life. He is an embarrassment and disciplinary proceedings would have been started against him. Blom may be married, but his womanising and drinking as well as his sexism and intolerance would not be acceptable in a modern police force. To say that his boss has old-fashioned values, so doesn’t really understand Blom’s faults, is a little naïve and he doesn’t confront him as he should. Blom is tolerated more as a dramatic device, but I feel in real life he would have been ostracised by his work colleagues, especially after his sexual assault on Birgitta, and sanctioned by his bosses for his intemperate and inappropriate behaviour.
Fredrik Stridh, Hannu Rauhala, Birgitta Moberg and Svante Malm are more sympathetic colleagues and we can warm to them all. The final main character is Professor Doctor Yvonne Stridner who is the forensics specialist. Brilliant at her job, she seems to intimidate everyone in the office, especially Andersson.
The Irene Huss series by Helen Tursten is unique in Scandinavian crime fiction in that as well as being a contemporary story about a Göteborg Detective who has made it to the top, the stories also show that she’s happily married with her two daughters and lives a normal family life as a contrast to the seedy, unpleasant, and often violent work she is involved in. It is the everyday ordinariness of Swedish life that is pivotal here and so the awful murders that do occur stand out in their savagery compared to the day-to-day actions at home.
If you start with Detective Inspector Huss, her first novel, you will be on a journey into Swedish crime and the metamorphosis of a character who should be more widely read.
About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 66. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.
You can read more about Utrecht Snow on Creative Writing at Leicester here.
Poet, musician, and teacher Darius Degher interviewed by Alexandros Plasatis
Darius Degher
Darius Degher is a poet, musician, and teacher. His poems have appeared in literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. His 2014 poetry book To See the Sound is a New Formalist collection that’s been praised by poets and scholars in both the US and UK. He teaches creative writing online in the English department of Malmö University, Sweden. He’s the founder and editor of the Shipwrights Review, an international literary magazine for second-language English authors. He has a BA in English from UCLA and an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University in England. Darius is also a singer-songwriter who has released six CDs and performed at iconic music venues around the USA. AP. What’s your story with the English language? Did you find it difficult to learn English?
DD. Well, I’m a native Californian, so I didn’t have to work especially hard learning it.
AP. Oh, pardon… I thought you were Swedish. How about Swedish then? Was that difficult?
DD. Yeah, Swedish took some work, and although I’m fluent, I guess I’ve never become an especially good speaker of Swedish. This is because Swedes are such excellent speakers of English that it bred laziness in me. But yes, although I’m a native English speaker, I find beauty in the English language. More importantly, I find bizarre idiosyncrasy, and this is what makes English so rich and vibrant, it seems to me.
AP. You coined the term “decentred English”. Tell me about it. And what's the difference with the term “exophonic writer”? DD. Decentered English is a term that describes the condition of English for the majority of English speakers in the world today. Since the combined number of Second- and Foreign-language English speakers now triples that of native English speakers (1.2 billion to 375 million respectively), native speakers are in the distinct minority.
I coined the term as I pondered this, thinking about how the language will, inevitably, be changing in the future and what constitutes “correctness” in the face of the above numbers. But it’s important to remember that I am not a linguist but a poet. So, the term came from a place more poetic than linguistic. Nevertheless, when my colleague Jean Hudson, who is a linguist, heard the term, she thought it aptly described the situation and encouraged me to use it.
Writers who come from the world of decentered English are usually exophonic writers.
AP. Any advice for decentred English writers?
DD. Yes, submit your work to Shipwrights. More seriously though, decentered English writers face the same challenges of craft mastery that native language writers face. But they face additional challenges related to understanding the idiomatic aspects of English, not to mention dialect and other issues. Imagine the challenges of writing accurate and believable dialogue in a foreign language.
I’m continually amazed at some my students’ ability to do this the way they do. Sometimes I’ll read a text and wonder whether the writer is, in fact, even an exophonic writer because of its remarkably high quality. Then I’ll have a Skype meeting with that same student and hear a definite accent in the spoken English. This surprises and fascinates me.
AP. And the story of Shipwrights?
DD. I founded Shipwrights some eight years ago. It began as a forum for the students in the writing courses at Malmö University in Sweden, but I hoped it would grow beyond simply that. And it has. We now get submissions from, and publish, writers from various countries. The Internet is a natural home for decentered English, and Shipwrights is open to any exophonic writer on the planet. (It’s also open to the submissions of native English writers who live in Scandinavia, because I felt it would be odd to forbid native English writers living in Sweden. So, they are the exception.)
Shipwrights, however, is still growing – and I hope to increase its reach in the coming years.
Every second year we award our Conrad-Nabokov Award to the most promising exophonic writer we’ve published in that period. The award is judged by an outside judge. Once it was judged by Janet Burroway, perhaps the world’s best-selling author of creative writing textbooks. She was surprised by the quality of the writing.
AP. How’s the Creative Writing course at Malmö University going? DD. The Creative Writing courses at Malmö University are about ten years old. There are three levels. I’ve been told that the introductory course is one of the most applied-for courses at the university. Last term there were more than 1000 applicants for the course, which accepts about 70. Sweden doesn’t have a tradition of creative writing at universities, so it was not an easy sell initially. Now that its popularity is proven, and it generates money that supports other courses, it’s been accepted. Our program of three levels is the only thing like it in Sweden, I believe.
The courses also serve another interesting function: they allow expatriate Swedes living all over the world to be part of the Creative Writing community we’ve started.
AP. Do you have mainly Swedish students?
DD. Yes, the majority of students are Swedish, but there are many who are not, including perhaps 5-10% native English speakers. That these writers blend in perfectly well with the Swedes is a testament to the English language skills of the Swedes.
In a way it makes perfect sense for Sweden to be a host of the decentered English community, because Swedes are pretty remarkable foreign-language English speakers.
AP. Why do Swedes want to study Creative Writing in English?
DD. Why Swedes (and others) want to write in English is a fascinating topic. Of course, many of my students are there for purely proficiency-related reasons; but the ones who are more serious as writers have interesting reasons indeed for doing it in English. One reason is the same one that inspires Swedish pop artists to record in English: the market is so much bigger. When you come from a language of only 9 million speakers, there is certainly sometimes a temptation to want to reach more people than that. More interestingly, however, I have students every term who claim they feel more comfortable and more inspired writing in English than they do in Swedish. This is really interesting to me. And this population of decentered English writers is not limited to Sweden, although Swedes may be the most proficient. I’m also getting increasing numbers of students each year from places like Russia and Greece who also want to write in English.
AP. Thanks for this, Darius. Can we listen to one of your songs now?
About the interviewer Alexandros Plasatis lives in Leicester and had short stories published in Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (2012), Unthology 6 (2015), and Crystal Voices: Ten Years of Crystal Clear Creators (2015).
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