Assisted Living: A Novel

by Nikanor Teratologen

  NIGHTRAJAH—hip-long jacket

  PYTTEPANNA—(also pyttipanna), traditional Scandinavian dish; usually consists of potatoes, onions and meat, which are diced-up and then pan-fried

  LASSE BERGHAGEN—Swedish singer-songwriter

  POGLAVNIK—Ante Pavelic’s title when he ruled over Nazi-controlled Croatia during World War II

  Afterword

  Assisted Living has a rare quality: even when approached by relatively experienced readers, and people with strong stomachs in general, evidence shows that the novel has the power to give us at least a glimpse of that incredulity and confusion and delightful shock that a few of our first unsettling (and unsettling mainly because they were our first) reading experiences gave us. To be disturbed by a book is something that belongs to the childhood of our reading. Only as an exception, only very rarely are we blessed with being exposed to something similar later on in life. As we gradually put the years behind us, as we gradually see more, hear more, experience more, and read more, our chances of suffering a literary ambush are also reduced. We become situated, establish an overview, develop tastes, follow our preferences, know more or less what to expect if we go here or there; know pretty much what to expect as we embark upon page five or page seven. I, for my part, have to return to my youthful encounters with Burroughs/Miller/Genet to trump the almost puerile kick I got when I read Teratologen for the first time. “Chuckling at his impudence, weeping at histender sentiment, trembling with sorrow, paralyzed by hate”: he’s already summed it up pretty well himself, I think.

  Assisted Living, with its surplus of violence and obscenity, is, of course, not unique in literary history. Forerunners can be found in works by Rabelais, Lautréamont, de Sade, Apollinaire, Céline, Bataille, and Burroughs, to name just a few. Nonetheless, I believe that the novel has something truly original, especially in the way it combines the fairy tale with the surreal and the learned with the poetic, which in turn are mixed with a gruff, biting, and in many ways typical Nordic “rural realism.” The most striking thing about the novel is how complex it is, and how all-encompassing. In a mass of seemingly incompatible vegetation, it blooms explosively, evading most attempts to categorize it. Its a rough-cut and vulgar trash comedy. It’s a classic epic, with roots going back to the Middle Ages and Antiquity. Its a poetic hymn with some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in Scandinavian postwar prose. Its an exhaustive study in perversion and taboo-breaking. And it’s a radically experimental novel, which in a crossfire of wordplay, allusions, and quotations, converses with (and makes sport of) the entirety of world literature. As such, Assisted Living is a book that contradicts itself at just about every turn. And it’s in this odd polysubstance abuse, in this wellspring of self-contradiction, that Teratologen has developed his distinct voice.

  The fairy-tale tone, the grotesque exaggerations, the over-the-top fantasies, which, on the one hand, make it easy to distance oneself—my God, this is too wild!—are, at the same time, that unpredictable force in the text which puts us in direct contact with the harsh living conditions from which it (the text) springs. When Grandpa and the boy creep into Paul Holm’s cow barn and are ambushed by a monster with greedy cunts all over its body, or when stuffed authors and hydrocephalic skulls appear among the trophies in the rightwing Maoist’s [sic] rumpus room, its clear that, realistically speaking, plausibility has been discarded long ago and that the perfidious details are, therefore, not to be taken seriously. At the same time, it’s precisely because it’s all been laid on so thick, precisely because the details so thoroughly exceed the boundaries of probability and plausibility (and because they do so throughout the entire novel)—it’s precisely by virtue of these lunatic premises that the novel creates a version of re; ity that demands credibility. Obviously, the moment that the light from the seven-branch candelabra makes the rumpus room come to life “like a blood-clot,” it’s no longer a real space that we’re entering, but rather an all the more clearly defined space of possibility. In this way, a door is opened into the mental and emotional depths in us all. This is actually conceivable, it’s possible to imagine it, and, therefore, the possibility exists—in the individual, in us, in everyone.

  One could say, using Kunderas words on Kafka, that the Upper Kåge Valley—övre Kågedalen—is “an extreme and unrealized possibility” (The Art of the Novel). It’s the world according to the boy, and either we accept it or we don’t. Nonetheless, Grandpas relentless boasting and the first-person narrator’s tendency to distort anything and everything can be read as the last, desperate (read: literary) attempt of two degenerate and outcast souls to overcome their unbearable loneliness. The “dear friend’s” introductory comments regarding the appendix (“Memories of Grandpa”) supports this reading. And yes, perhaps it really is just the two of themmaking it all up … ? Perhaps the enchanted, devilish landscape is, in reality, nothing more than a gloomy, northern, deindustrialized, remote sort of place where nothing much happens … ? Perhaps the beastly murders and gory violence really are simply the quixotic daydreams of an old man and a boy the world forgot … ? It’s at this point that the endless transgressions and boundary-crossings of Teratologens tall tale takes on a tragic dimension, despite whatever wild and unbelievable hyperbolic heights the novel may reach. This idea invites a “realistic” interpretation of the novel, in which every character seems to have an aura of insane wishful thinking about them, an aura that, in the boys story, materializes in the form of real characteristics, real features, real artifacts in an obscene white-trash theater of dreams.

  In Downfall (Nedstörtad angel; literally, “Fallen Angel”), Per Olov Enquist writes of the monsters in the first Satanic church in California that “They found themselves on humanity’s outermost edge: there, on the edge, they set up camp.” And: “They were themselves touchstones: deformed human beings showing on whose side one stood: perfect God’s, or imperfect man’s.” {My translation.—kap} I believe that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to give this perspective renewed validity in the case of Grandpa and the boy. It’s for this reason that the relationship between these two moral freaks makes such a strong impression, despite all conceivable forms of depravity and degradation. They’re isolated in their outcast state, they seek out isolation and cultivate it, they—or at least Grandpa, to the extent we can take him at his word—finds in being cast-out and isolatedfrom the general community a last dormant possibility to truly exist in the midst of a corrupted, late-capitalistic, affluent society.

  Grandpa and the boy’s political stance is, therefore, more ambiguous than that which might derive from their alienation alone. With their ruthless destruction of life and value, they break with all norms of investment, production, and profit. The creation of value is replaced, in their case, with raw destruction and waste. Given their absolute violation of any existing formal or social law, then, they seem to have something heroic about them after all. They represent a freedom we can’t tolerate, a self-realization there’s no place for. And from their camping ground on humanity’s outermost edge, they sing (they screech and shout) the song of great irrevocable loneliness. Which isn’t a pretty song. But how could it be?

  When faced with offensive literature, or literature that’s ethically problematic in some other way, it’s a common strategy first to praise it for its amoral or immoral attitude, and then conclude that the author’s project is, in reality, deeply moral. To wit: “Don’t worry, he’s one of us after all!” With Teratologen, however, it’s more difficult than that, since his books—in addition to Assisted Living (Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen, 1992), the novels Förensligandet i det egentliga Västerbotten (Alienation in True Västerbotten, 1998), Hebberhålsapokryferna (Hebberlhåls Apocrypha, 2003) and Att hata allt mänskligt liv (To Hate All Human Life, 2009), as well as a collection of aphorisms, Apsefiston (2002)—are all permeated by such an obvious enjoyment of and delight in the incessant dwelling upon that which, obeying whatever prevailing standard, must count as unacceptable andintolera
ble human behavior. And it’s precisely this maliciousness, this genuine anti-humanism, this heartfelt cynical and nihilistic attitude toward life and literature that gives Assisted Living its remarkable power. There’s an affinity for the perverted and degenerate that one can’t escape, that one can’t ignore, when reading this book. It’s there, all that we’re used to keeping our distance from, imparted with such poetic joy that anyone and everyone can ask themselves what it’s good for. And perhaps the answer is, it’s not good for anything. And perhaps that’s the real reason that the novel has proven so difficult for so many to swallow. And, presumably, the reader has a single choice before him-or herself: turn away in disgust, or be swept along for all you’re worth. Those who choose the latter are forced to look death in its white eye and laugh. Without this laughter, Assisted Living remains an unreadable book.

  STIG SÆTERBAKKEN

  NIKANOR TERATOLOGEN (a pseudonym), born in 1964, is widely recognized as one of the most original and shocking young writers working in Sweden, where his Assisted Living is a famous— and infamous—bestseller, provoking scandal, hatred, and veneration in equal measure.

  KERRI A. PIERCE is the translator of Lars Svendsens A Philosophy of Evil, Mela Hartwig’s Am I a Redundant Human Being?, and other novels available from Dalkey Archive Press.

  As if in response to Dalkey Archive’s 2010 publication of Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsens A Philosophy of Evil—in which Svendsen argues that evil is all-pervasive and “should never be explained away”—Swedish novelist Nikanor Teratologen’s Assisted Living draws what must be the most purely evil portrait of humanity in all of Scandinavian literature (if indeed its cartoon characters can be considered human). Like the Marquis de Sade before him. Teratologen has plumbed the depths of the darkest reaches of the imagination with frightening glee, leaving no horror unattended to. no taboo unviolated—be it murder, incest. Nazi fetishism. substance abuse, or even continental philosophy—and what results is a nearly exhaustive catalog of evil’s possibilities and permutations. To say that this book is not for the fainthearted is an understatement, yet what is perhaps most disturbing in this work of fiction is not the parodic grotesquerie of the author’s imagination but rather the degree to which the horrors and hypocrisies of our contemporary reality show through.

  A novel $14.95 U.S. $16.00 CAN translated by Kerri A. Pierce swedish literature series www.dalkeyarchive.com

  978-1-56478-682-1

  Table of Contents

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  NIKANOR TERATOLOGEN’S PREFACE

  A DEAR FRIEND’S FOREWORD

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  Appendix: Memories of Grandpa

  Afterword