Assisted Living, with its surplus of violence and obscenity, is, of course, not unique in literary history. Forerunners can be found in works by Rabelais, Lautréamont, de Sade, Apollinaire, Céline, Bataille, and Burroughs, to name just a few. Nonetheless, I believe that the novel has something truly original, especially in the way it combines the fairy tale with the surreal and the learned with the poetic, which in turn are mixed with a gruff, biting, and in many ways typical Nordic “rural realism.” The most striking thing about the novel is how complex it is, and how all-encompassing. In a mass of seemingly incompatible vegetation, it blooms explosively, evading most attempts to categorize it. Its a rough-cut and vulgar trash comedy. It’s a classic epic, with roots going back to the Middle Ages and Antiquity. Its a poetic hymn with some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in Scandinavian postwar prose. Its an exhaustive study in perversion and taboo-breaking. And it’s a radically experimental novel, which in a crossfire of wordplay, allusions, and quotations, converses with (and makes sport of) the entirety of world literature. As such, Assisted Living is a book that contradicts itself at just about every turn. And it’s in this odd polysubstance abuse, in this wellspring of self-contradiction, that Teratologen has developed his distinct voice.
The fairy-tale tone, the grotesque exaggerations, the over-the-top fantasies, which, on the one hand, make it easy to distance oneself — my God, this is too wild! — are, at the same time, that unpredictable force in the text which puts us in direct contact with the harsh living conditions from which it (the text) springs. When Grandpa and the boy creep into Paul Holm’s cow barn and are ambushed by a monster with greedy cunts all over its body, or when stuffed authors and hydrocephalic skulls appear among the trophies in the rightwing Maoist’s [sic] rumpus room, its clear that, realistically speaking, plausibility has been discarded long ago and that the perfidious details are, therefore, not to be taken seriously. At the same time, it’s precisely because it’s all been laid on so thick, precisely because the details so thoroughly exceed the boundaries of probability and plausibility (and because they do so throughout the entire novel) — it’s precisely by virtue of these lunatic premises that the novel creates a version of re; ity that demands credibility. Obviously, the moment that the light from the seven-branch candelabra makes the rumpus room come to life “like a blood-clot,” it’s no longer a real space that we’re entering, but rather an all the more clearly defined space of possibility. In this way, a door is opened into the mental and emotional depths in us all. This is actually conceivable, it’s possible to imagine it, and, therefore, the possibility exists — in the individual, in us, in everyone.
One could say, using Kunderas words on Kafka, that the Upper Kåge Valley—övre Kågedalen—is “an extreme and unrealized possibility” (The Art of the Novel). It’s the world according to the boy, and either we accept it or we don’t. Nonetheless, Grandpas relentless boasting and the first-person narrator’s tendency to distort anything and everything can be read as the last, desperate (read: literary) attempt of two degenerate and outcast souls to overcome their unbearable loneliness. The “dear friend’s” introductory comments regarding the appendix (“Memories of Grandpa”) supports this reading. And yes, perhaps it really is just the two of themmaking it all up …? Perhaps the enchanted, devilish landscape is, in reality, nothing more than a gloomy, northern, deindustrialized, remote sort of place where nothing much happens …? Perhaps the beastly murders and gory violence really are simply the quixotic daydreams of an old man and a boy the world forgot …? It’s at this point that the endless transgressions and boundary-crossings of Teratologens tall tale takes on a tragic dimension, despite whatever wild and unbelievable hyperbolic heights the novel may reach. This idea invites a “realistic” interpretation of the novel, in which every character seems to have an aura of insane wishful thinking about them, an aura that, in the boys story, materializes in the form of real characteristics, real features, real artifacts in an obscene white-trash theater of dreams.
In Downfall (Nedstörtad angel; literally, “Fallen Angel”), Per Olov Enquist writes of the monsters in the first Satanic church in California that “They found themselves on humanity’s outermost edge: there, on the edge, they set up camp.” And: “They were themselves touchstones: deformed human beings showing on whose side one stood: perfect God’s, or imperfect man’s.” {My translation. — kap} I believe that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to give this perspective renewed validity in the case of Grandpa and the boy. It’s for this reason that the relationship between these two moral freaks makes such a strong impression, despite all conceivable forms of depravity and degradation. They’re isolated in their outcast state, they seek out isolation and cultivate it, they — or at least Grandpa, to the extent we can take him at his word — finds in being cast-out and isolatedfrom the general community a last dormant possibility to truly exist in the midst of a corrupted, late-capitalistic, affluent society.
Grandpa and the boy’s political stance is, therefore, more ambiguous than that which might derive from their alienation alone. With their ruthless destruction of life and value, they break with all norms of investment, production, and profit. The creation of value is replaced, in their case, with raw destruction and waste. Given their absolute violation of any existing formal or social law, then, they seem to have something heroic about them after all. They represent a freedom we can’t tolerate, a self-realization there’s no place for. And from their camping ground on humanity’s outermost edge, they sing (they screech and shout) the song of great irrevocable loneliness. Which isn’t a pretty song. But how could it be?
When faced with offensive literature, or literature that’s ethically problematic in some other way, it’s a common strategy first to praise it for its amoral or immoral attitude, and then conclude that the author’s project is, in reality, deeply moral. To wit: “Don’t worry, he’s one of us after all!” With Teratologen, however, it’s more difficult than that, since his books — in addition to Assisted Living (Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen, 1992), the novels Förensligandet i det egentliga Västerbotten (Alienation in True Västerbotten, 1998), Hebberhålsapokryferna (Hebberlhåls Apocrypha, 2003) and Att hata allt mänskligt liv (To Hate All Human Life, 2009), as well as a collection of aphorisms, Apsefiston (2002) — are all permeated by such an obvious enjoyment of and delight in the incessant dwelling upon that which, obeying whatever prevailing standard, must count as unacceptable andintolerable human behavior. And it’s precisely this maliciousness, this genuine anti-humanism, this heartfelt cynical and nihilistic attitude toward life and literature that gives Assisted Living its remarkable power. There’s an affinity for the perverted and degenerate that one can’t escape, that one can’t ignore, when reading this book. It’s there, all that we’re used to keeping our distance from, imparted with such poetic joy that anyone and everyone can ask themselves what it’s good for. And perhaps the answer is, it’s not good for anything. And perhaps that’s the real reason that the novel has proven so difficult for so many to swallow. And, presumably, the reader has a single choice before him-or herself: turn away in disgust, or be swept along for all you’re worth. Those who choose the latter are forced to look death in its white eye and laugh. Without this laughter, Assisted Living remains an unreadable book.