The book I bought on a cold autumn night is a collection of Stig Dagerman's best short stories. The book is translated by Steven Hartman. While reading these stories for the second time, I had a better chance to step back and look for commonalities, patterns, themes, and, in general, to better understand the author's philosophy. To address this, I'd look at stand-out stories as an independent entity. These stories are written at various time points; therefore, it is reasonable to represent the concerns of the author:
To Kill a Child:
The inconspicuous nature of the tragedy unfolding before our eyes. The accident is the scene of sacrifice. The victimhood of innocence before the ignorant eyes of the static machinery of the mundane.
In Grandmother's House:
An immaculate encounter with Death. The absence of a loved one. A beautiful line is from the grandmother, heaing the voice of the grandfather in the foram of a grunt and whisper coming from the beneath the gravel:
"He says to go inside. He says he's not sleeping, he's just resting. He'll move on in a minute."
The Surprise:
This one deserves its spot as the first of the series. It is truly heartbreaking. A plot slowly progressing to a dim climax in a setting as harsh as a Swedish winter. The notion of poverty, loss, and bereavement, and a crude patriarchy exercising cruelty on a widow and the child. All the sadness gets worse when you, as the reader, see the brutal experience from the innocent POV of a child.
Men of Character:
Chauvenistic view in this story. A series of mistrust, betrayal, adultery, abrasive manners and men and women so engaged with their self-interest. But as the story evolves layers of pathological chauventic undertow unfold. This is story of guilt and sin and an emotional fracture. But mostly it pictures coarse masculine hubris. As the author put it fabulously this story depicts "men pregnent with their own honor."
The Stockholm Car:
Again, the rural vs urban, the city vs village, the rich and the poor, come together in an unsavory manner. The subtly hidden in each manner and movement of the gentleman from Stockholm. It is one image that is among the most violent pictures in modern literature, without uttering a word, without raising a hand, and with no gun. The simple neglectful behavior is what hurts the kids (and me as the audience) the most.
Where’s My Icelandic Sweater?
Alcoholism and manipulation are the main themes. The storytelling follows a pattern that was later categorized as a stream of consciousness. Herein, however, we are dealing more with unconsciousness than consciousness. Curiously, the protagonist stirrs a variety of emotions in me: from anger to pity, and even sometimes I felt sympathy as the man is afflicted with PTSD of his wife's betrayal. This story is as dark as it gets, and curiously, it is the last in this series.
In my mind, Dagerman is a genius and these short stories are oeuvres of a writer/journalist whose lens captured the agony of the twentieth century mankind. There is plenty of literary assets that he denied us beyond his published works. The repeated themes are human's regret, the entraped existance sentenced to lose gradually while poorly equipped to cope, and financial destitude:
1. Existential Burden:
"Time does not heal the wounds of a dead child, and it heals very poorly the pain of a mother who forgot to buy sugar and who sent her child across the road to borrow some. And it heals just as poorly the anguish of a once cheerful man who has killed a child."
2. Fragile Foundation of Being:
Again the story To Kill a Child is the prime picture of this notion which is paplapble in Dagerman's works.
3. Nordic Despair and Cold Family Ties:
Parts of the stories resemble the existential dread in Ingmar Bergman's movies. The nordic existenstial depsair in the Winter Light movie. The conflict of belief and the utter solitude we endure throughout existence. For example in the story The Surprise, a family function and a milieu which traditionally evoke warmth and bond, we read a most heartbreaking and harsh steely heirarchy:
"His grandfather looked up from the paper and his aunt let the ladle slip from her hand.
"If it ain't the widow," said Hakan's grandfather. "What you got in the bag? Not a present, I'll bet.""
4. Misogyny:
Prime example as mentioned above is the brilliant "Men of Honor". Rarely a story is better titled!
5. Poverty and Social Injustice:
And of course poverty has a ubiquitous presence in the stories, sometime married to the children's innocent behaviors in a heart-wrenching fashion:
"Like all chilren with poor mothers he was ashamed at first and pretended that he didn't know her. He crossed the street with his friends, parted company, and then timidly made his way back. His Mother sensed his anxiety and she did not take his hand until they were completely alone on the street."
In conclusion, reading Dagerman leaves one with no surprise why he has been labeled as a Swedish Camus. The writings reek of existential philosophy.
Pedram
10/20/2025
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