“February” by Johan Lindvall – Reviews and recommendations

The family is very free. When writers choose to write about it, it is both understandable and uninventive. Could it still be a good book? The short novel “February” by debutant Johan Lindvall is centered around a self. His name is Johan, he writes, and he remembers things from growing up and a few years back. The key points are the mother’s death from cancer and the father’s infidelity just before, told in a structure that offers as fleeting and pregnant blips as the real instances of memories. Memories arise because they encapsulate something important, and are replayed in the present for the same reason. But what is important to you is rarely as important to others. Short, refined and funny To read this novel is to read scenes conjured up by a remembering self. Johan is a young man and moved to Oslo from just outside Gothenburg in Sweden. His family is small: his father is kind but distant, his grandmother is old and demented, and his mother died many years ago. Johan enters the memories and is there, in the historical present, with few comments and interpretations. He doesn’t drill into them, he doesn’t try to structure them. He lets the memories come as the blips they are. There are short, short paragraphs. The scenes are nicely evoked, and I suspect it’s a craft you don’t notice until you realize how little the text actually bothers you, how well-oiled it all is. Given the circumstances and the narrator’s situation, the moment of remembrance could quickly become tear-dropping, heart-wrenching, “I want to kill myself”, heartfelt, but fortunately it is not. Much of it is funny, partly because slightly bizarre things happen and because the text has personality, but also because Lindvall manages to balance the tone and the details. The language is not particularly distinctive, but it is refined. SWEDISH DEBUTANT: Johan Lindvall grew up in Kungsbacka, and lives in Oslo. He is active as a pianist and composer, and is educated at the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Academy of Writing in Hordaland. “February” is his first novel. Photo: Ann Eli Nøsen / news Writing forth a drive The intensity of memory is always personal, which makes it difficult to include others in memory work. Being a good narrator, on the other hand, can draw the reader in. Because Lindvall has a drive. It’s half fingertip feeling, half technique. Many of the chapters end with a long sentence made up of many clauses that open with “and”, so that everything follows each other: “You can’t work black, she says, and he replies that it will be all right, and I realize later that he doesn’t work overtime, that he’s with someone else, another woman, and I’m walking down Bogstadveien that summer when mom calls and screams that he’s unfaithful, the damn ass is unfaithful, and I hear dad’s shouts in the background, and she on, and I keep walking around Uranienborg, and it’s July, and the sun is shining, and I don’t remember what I’m doing or what I’m thinking, I just remember that dad tries to call several times, but that I don’t pick up the phone, and in the evening mom sends a message and writes sorry, it has nothing to do with you, she shouldn’t have said anything to me, and it’s fine now, she writes, they have calmed down noẘ, she writes, dad and she sitting at Burger King and eating, and she writes that dad has said that it was nothing, that it wasn’t a relationship, that he just needs someone to talk to, and that she can understand that, and she writes that we can talk tomorrow if you want.” The chapters jump in time and space and therefore often open with descriptions such as “I’m at St. Hanshaugen. It is winter”. The jumps themselves are not that confusing, but it doesn’t do wonders for the language, which here becomes somewhat stiff – functional and repetitive. Lindvall describes a drive which, just as it has started, is interrupted by the end of the memory. Then we start again. It creates rhythm in the book, but makes the reading experience a little slow. The ring becomes small Earlier this autumn, I read another Norwegian debut novel with memory recall as a narrative structure, “Dykkerklokken” by Marthe Bleu. It also presented the memorial work as important and worth writing about. Because when Lindvall is not poking and prying in Johan’s memories, when he is only in the memories, why does he write about them? To write “his story”? To keep the memories from being forgotten? Although “February” is a different book to “Dykkerklokken”, it suffers from the same problem that can arise when a writer writes from himself (the first-person narrator in both Bleu and Lindvall mentions that they write): The ring becomes small. It is the I-narrator’s personal (and therefore inaccessible) sense of necessity that accounts for the book’s progression. Well, infidelity and cancer death are sexy in the sense of the drama. It is difficult not to be carried away by the greatest tragedies, by the betrayal and sudden breakdown that lies in both of them. Lindvall’s desperation If I miss the point of the self-centredness, and focus on the narrative itself, then “February” is a good read. Lindvall is a good storyteller. The main character can easily be ridiculed as a typical “HF boy”: a young and aspiring man of culture with a flair for canonized literature (Proust), aesthetic addiction to masturbation and fantasies about suicide and mania. It’s typical, but not too bad. So I’m not kidding. And even if the book’s memory structure has some unfortunate consequences, there is just as much drive here that is good to read. A desperation that refrains from spilling over into the sentimental. Just the right amount of desperation, a crash. It is an invaluable quality. It’s a breed I believe in. A refined breed. news reviewer Photo: Kolon Title: “February” Author: Johan Lindvall Genre: Novel Publisher: Kolon Number of pages: 142 Date: 10 November 2023



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