The language of love sounds the same in Rwanda
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Loading... - Liam Burton
- 09 Sep 2022
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Yes! I can hereby solemnly promise that whoever opens Marit Kapla's new book Love in Swedish will not be able to stop reading. About thirty people, from north to south in Sweden, talk about the love they have experienced or lack. Lifelong love, homosexual love, love between Swedish-born and foreign-born, a landowner's love, a reindeer herder's love - and so on.
The pages devour me and I wonder where the strong magnetism of this 587-page long talk consists. I can only conclude that a kind of crystalline ordinariness arises in the small and short utterances that reach me in the form of broken lines. It's not really poetry, but it's poetic in the deepest sense of the word and more fun to read than most poetry collections, and sometimes the lines touch on this miracle: "That someone / in this total fog of people and impressions / that person / looks back on one / in this blur of people and feelings / and say / I see you / and I like you.”
"The documentary means that things are said that no literary imagination would really think of or consider worthy."
Marit Kapla has, as in her debut hit Osebol , started from interviews with people and cut sentences and paragraphs from them. Not that they're always particularly well-found or shiny, they're not. Rather, it is about a strange everydayness that comes to the fore. Sometimes it's dramatic: "Job, life, death, boom" - a sudden and wonderful line can be heard.
When they talk about love, many emphasize the mundane: "It's the little things," says Lena, 79, "what goes without saying / but which is terrible when you don't have it" - that is, someone who holds you, or gives you a blanket if you're cold. Read More…
