There is something Platonic about summer in Sweden. On one level, it is an abstraction, a collection of ideal things about summer, much as I remember summers from childhood, even though they could never have been like this. But it’s a fact that the light here is yellower, the sky brighter blue; it’s like looking at an old color photograph of summer, lens flare and all. And just as with a photograph, there are no flies (yet), and no humidity, and the sun in the late afternoon seems fixed in the sky — it will hover there for as long as you care to look.<\/p>\n
Summer in Sweden is also a summer of the mind. It’s brilliant daylight outside at 5 am, and by then you feel as guilty as sleeping till noon in New York. People go to work early, but then spend most of the day rooted in parks and on terrace caf\u00e9s — human sunflowers. After work, behind the Kungliga Biblioteket in S\u00f6dermalm, they’ll play a mysterious game that involves setting up a miniature wooden set from The Lord of the Rings, then taking turns destroying it by throwing wooden sticks at is, playing Sauron. It goes on for hours. I sometimes go to watch, pretending to read my first Swedish-language novel, a Henning Mankell detective thriller. My main fear: At the end of the novel the detective will tell me whodunnit, and I just won’t get it. Is there a word for butler<\/em> in Swedish?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is something Platonic about summer in Sweden. On one level, it is an abstraction, a collection of ideal things about summer, much as I remember summers from childhood, even though they could never have been like this. But it’s … Continue reading