Ever since I was I kid I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Preferably, I’d go to some distant, exotic land and report on a quaint civil war. Well, the dream has come true – only the country isn’t really that far away, it isn’t all that different from anywhere else in continental Europe, and the war is neither civil nor quaint.
179 pages. That’s the sum total; that’s what we’ve written, my wife and I, over the course of these last two and a half months. We went here, after all, to write a book about the war. We call it a war diary.
In eight days from now, we’ll submit the manuscript to our publisher. And then (after an editing process done at breakneck speed) it will hit the shelves at the end of September, right about the time of my 47th birthday. This is not, however, as stressful a prospect as it might sound (at least to someone familiar with the normal pace of book publishing). We decided early on that we wouldn’t go back to alter a whole lot. If we figured something wrong, if we misunderstood this or that dynamic, or made off-the-charts projections, it would still be better for the sake of historical record not to change that. Because a book like this should be a journal of what it was like.
What it is like, then, to move to a country fighting for its very survival? What is it like to live through this shit?
I have to tell you, I spend a lot of my time trying to forget about the war. I re-watch Better Call Saul. I try out Crimean food. I plot upcoming spy novels, books that I like to imagine I will one day be able to write, even though deep down I know I never will. I have come to believe that we are at the beginning of a world war, and for every day passing, my belief gets uncomfortably verified by events.
The other day, we did a 20 minutes long interview for Swedish national television. (Whenever Maggie and I do something, like move to a new country or release a new book, there will be interviews; Sweden is not a place where it takes an awful lot to be singled out as different. Or should I say, deviant.) One of the questions has stuck in my mind: “How come you decided to write a book about the war in Ukraine?”
When, in fact, what we did decide upon was not to write another one of our dystopian cli-fi novels; not to go back to me writing political thrillers; not to keep writing articles and essays for newspapers that were only ever after us, and not what we wrote.
It struck me, hard, during the interview that this woman had never been howled awake by air raid sirens. She had never formed a bond with a foreign people simply because of a common hatred, a sentiment so strong that not even a nuclear holocaust could break it. She had never, in short, lived through a war while surrounded by friends.
How I have come to hate the enemy, and how I have come to love Ukraine. Never before have I been a nationalist – I haven’t had the faintest sympathy for that notion before – but I am now.
And so, I think some of my countrymen have come to view me as a freak. It must be discomforting, I suppose, to look upon a fellow Swede and find him having returned to an earlier, Charles XII-like stage of development; by all modern, progressive standards an evolutionary leap in the wrong direction. And it’s true, I have gone back to a more primitive state of mind; only, it’s not in the wrong direction at all, it’s in the necessary one.
There it is. In the defeat of barbarians, refinement has no use.
You have the most honest account about the war that’s why I like your writing. I am so much looking forward to read your and your wife’s diary. Is the tide turning in favor of Ukraine or is it too early to tell?
I'm glad to be able to follow your inside writing about Ukraine. I'm looking forward to your next book.