Klas Östergren: "Gentlemen", "Gangsters" and "Renegades"Klas Östergren is a swedish writer born in 1955. He made his litterary break-through withe the novel "Gentlemen" in 1980. This should in time turn out to the first volume in a trilogy where the second volume "Gangsters" came 25 years later and the third one "Renegades" not before 2020, 40 years after the first one. Klas Östergren was elected into the Swedish Academy in 2014, and was thereby for some years among those 18 persons who decide who is to be rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Litterature. In the autumn of 2017 a deep conflict emerged among the members of the Academy as a consequence of the unveiling of the fact that a person with very close contact to the Academy had conducted extensive sexual harassments and several rapes. Klas Östergren reacted very strongly towards the majority of the members of the Academy who wanted to defend the man and primarily not talk about what he had done in public. Östergren therefore were among the few who decided to withdraw themselves from the Academy in the spring of 2018. Normally, and according to its rules, the discussions in the Academy have been secret. But because of the high level of conflict and the heated public interest in what had happened in the dramatic meetings in the Academy the winter 2017/2018 Östergren decided to breake against the rules and unveil this in public. He did this by sewing the story into the novel project he was working with, which was "Renegades", was to be the third part of the story from "Gentlemen" and "Gangsters" and was intended to describe something quite different from what had happened in the Academy. I read "Gentlemen" and "Gangsters" shortly after the publishing of the latter in 2005, and have reread them now after having read "Renegades". It is absolutely possible to read "Renegades" without having read the two former books, (in fact, the connection between the two first volumes and the third one is rather thin). But I enjoied the reading of the three of them in one row. At first, "Gentlemen" can be seen as a novel about young wannabe artists in Stockholm in the late seventies, revolving around the somewhat mythomaniac protagonist Henry Morgan. But it develops into a darker story about how swedish industrial companies in the nineteenthirties and -fourties in deep secrety provided nazi Germany with weapons and other military equipment, and that the persons organizing this still were in key positions in swedish economic life and in the administration of the state. And not at least, that offerts were being put into keeping this part of swedish history hidden for the public. Altogether, this is a story covering more than 1600 pages and nearly ninety years. It consists of several stories that together give a multifaceted picture of Sweden through these years. It is entertaining and at times very thrilling. And it is fascinating how elegantly Östergren in "Renegades" manages to put the scandal in the Academy into a broader context. |
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