Boyd Tonkin

Stockholm syndrome: The Family Clause, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, reviewed

Love, fury, guilt and grief surface when a curmudgeonly patriarch visits his family in Sweden

The Stockholm waterfront. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 01 August 2020

Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only as ‘a grandfather who is a father’, ‘a sister who is a mother’, and so on. Stick around: this gets better. That grandfather, an immigrant trader who ‘could sell sand to a beach’ or ‘wind to a hurricane’, remembers his first taste of Swedish TV: a child- ren’s programme featured ‘two different coloured socks with sequins for eyes’ discussing ‘how vital class struggle was for a happy society’. Later, after the long-distance skating, came ‘a documentary about Latin American poets or Ukrainian beekeepers’. The granddad would meet his entrepreneurial mates (Peruvians, Poles, ex-Yugoslavs) by the Stockholm waterfront to gossip, deal and lament the ‘Swedish flu’ that ‘slowly suffocates you’. Their cosy welfare state’s ‘free’ stuff is ‘an addiction’, warn the veterans. ‘They’ll get your soul in exchange.’

‘Looks like Midas has been suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune again.’

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