Chile in Sweden

Thanks to having found a good online bookstore which ships to the USA (based in Denmark, no less!), I just ordered a book and CD of a upcoming Swedish writer named Alejandro Wenger. As the first name might suggest, his family is originally from Chile. (Many Chileans migrated to Sweden during the 1970's.)

Wenger wrote a book called Till vår ära [To Our Honor] in 2001, which has been fêted in the Swedish literary press as indicative of an important new voice: litteraturen från förorten, or literature from the suburbs. (In Sweden as in most other European countries, there is an inversion of the typical American center/peripherary dynamic of decaying inner cities and rich suburbs.)

One piece in particular, "Elixir," I remember hearing when I was on Tjörn in 2002 -- the prose piece was recorded as part of a spoken-word compilation callled Fyra nya [Four New]. Wenger reads the piece in Spanish-inflected Swedish -- the kind of immigrant dialect some refer to as Rinkebysvenska, after a well-known immigrant suburb outside of Stockholm. In content as well as dialect, reviewers have interpreted this as the new voice of Sweden -- multicultural and hetrogenous, and a fascinating mirror of the Latino influences in California where I grew up.

When the book and CD get here in a few weeks, I'll look through them to see where they lead me in my investigation of immigrant literature. At the very least, it's a snapshot of one of the most promising new writers of the 2000's, a decade that may yet see a new generation of voices emerge from the north.