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

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.’

Raised in Rinkeby, the tough Stockholm suburb that serves as a byword for second-generation migrant subcultures voiced in macaronic slang, Jonas Hassen Khemiri is a media-savvy literary star. His op-ed interventions — about racial profiling by the Swedish police, for example — command almost as much attention as his fiction and drama. However, he keeps spells in the spotlight separate from his vocation, and The Family Clause, his fifth novel, offers much more than satire or sociology — even if it does depict a Sweden seldom glimpsed in morose rural policiers.

Our grandfather, a curmudgeonly, diabetic patriarch long divorced from his Swedish wife, returns to Stockholm twice a year from the — presumably Arab — country where he has gone back to live. His son is a shambolic freelance accountant on paternity leave, with a union lawyer partner and two small, all-consuming children.