The fourth title in Cabinet’s ”24-Hour Book” series considers a project initiated by Sweden’s National Archive in the early 1980s designed to fully record the life of a typical citizen. The archive’s subject was a randomly selected government worker, at the time an employee of Stockholm’s municipal bus service, who agreed to begin donating his personal papers to the collection. The man, however, turned out to be a very different figure than what the archive had hoped for. Adrift in a society undergoing fundamental transformations, the ”average Swede” slowly descended over the years into bitter derangement, overwhelming the institution with masses of indiscriminate materials that the archivists were desperately trying to refuse.

Archive of the Average Swede was published in 2017 by Cabinet Books. Also published in Swedish by Faethon as Medelsvenskens arkiv (2017).

A man suffering from insomnia finds himself locked up in a mental hospital. He is not crazy. But he is watched round the clock by nurses and mysterious Dr. Rotter, who conspire against his mental health. In letters written to “gentlemen directors”, presumably the hospital board or maybe some higher powers, the man pledges for his release. Exercising logic and rationality, he tries to prove his sanity by explaining the world. Modern science, theology, cosmology and anthropology are woven together into a universe in which the narrator is the absolute centre. As it turns out, God has been entangled in his nerves and is now trying to break free, aided by little people and intricate machines, the sun and the stars. In God’s absence, the universe has turned into a dark and chaotic place. Astral wars between demigods and demiurgs, doctors and devils, rage on the starry sky. The world is going under in cataclysms, the earth piling up with corpses. Only the narrator can save human kind, by turning into a woman and becoming ”God’s dirty whore”. By enduring a grand, cosmical rape he will give birth to a new human race.

The Layman was published in Swedish 2013 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, one of the oldest and most respected publishing houses in Sweden. The novel was met with critical acclaim and featured on several “best books of the year” lists.

From the very first line, a curiously resonant “It is not wholly inconceivable that at some point in our lives we may get to spend some time at the Hotel Abulafia”, we are introduced to the notion that the individual may not be quite as particular or indeed unique as we might like to think. Perhaps human life is little more than a palimpsest over other lives past and present? Hotel Abufalia is a “magnet for lost souls…” Yet, as the narrator puts it, there is nothing objective about his experience of being alive: “All the time I feel I have someone else’s existence, I have someone else’s feelings and their thoughts. And I sense I have been someone else… as if my personality had slowly become an imaginary meeting point for the impersonal, a refuse tip for anonymous bric-a-brac.”

The narrator dreams continuously of Oneirine – his true love – and the whole meaning of his life seems encapsulated in her even though at times it is unclear whether he has even met her. If so, was it in this life or another?

(From Swedish Book Review)