Jerry Määttä, Department of History, Stockholm University. 

War, the Uncanny, and Dystopia in Jerker Virdborg’s Sommaren, syster (The Summer, Sister) 

Jerker Virdborg’s novel Sommaren, syster (2017, The Summer, Sister) depicts the siblings Anna and Erik’s attempts to escape from a Sweden afflicted by civil war. Given that Sweden has not experienced war in over two centuries, the purpose of this article is to examine how the novel portrays Sweden and war, and how this relates to some of the novel’s other central themes, such as children, childhood, and Swedish everyday life and nature. As the whole novel is narrated by Erik, a teenager with what seems to be autism, very little of the actual war scenario is conveyed, and it takes a relatively long time before he even outlines the story’s exact setting and plot. In the analysis of the depiction of the war, Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny (“das Unheimliche”) is used to try to explain some of the novel’s aesthetic devices, such as Erik’s descriptions of how Swedish daily life has been distorted in the war, but also vice versa, when glimpses of everyday life manifest amidst the conflict. The uncanny, in the sense of something familiar yet terrifying that has been repressed, could also be traced in the novel as a whole, as the nightmarish and chaotic civil war raging in the Swedish summer idyll represents the return of the possibility of war itself, which in Sweden in the 2010s remained collectively and culturally repressed. The analysis also highlights the significance of children, childhood, and Swedish nature, often contrasted with the war, and the article concludes with a discussion of how the novel relates to dystopias as well as to other genres, foregrounding utopian counterpoints such as sibling love and Erik’s childhood memories, but also a brief discussion of the novel as a commentary on the civil war in Syria and the refugee crisis. The article is part of Jerry Määttä’s project “Utopia Unsettled: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Swedish Dystopian Fiction”, funded by the Swedish Research Council.