The tenant farmer system, what was it? Patrik Svensson asks rhetorically. After "The Eel Gospel" and "The Measuring Man" he has continued his low-key documentary storytelling, this time based on his own family.
These are people on the margins. It's interesting to write about them, but also difficult. Here I come and tear them out in some way, I do it when they are most vulnerable, it becomes a bit like an assault as well and I have struggled a lot with it, he says.
Deepens
Patrik Svensson wanted to try to understand how "a kind man" could have killed children and wife.
"The Merciful Murderer" is just as much a description of astonishing Swedish social development as of a person, Patrik Svensson's great-uncle. The tragedy is deepened by the fact that Elof Nilsson cannot see the enormous improvements that are then, on February 26, 1942, within reach, not least thanks to a cycling young union leader - Gunnar Sträng is his name - who manages to gather the socially passive bottom layer of society, the landless farm workers.
Many have talked about the tenant farmer system as serfdom and it's a fairly reasonable description. It was a tightly regulated unfreedom, and what does it do to a person who has been shaped by it?
The tenant farmer couple Elof Nilsson and his wife Matilda are hit harder than others and are forced to bury 6 of their 13 children. 5 of them did not even reach the age of one before they died from diseases such as pneumonia, blood poisoning, and cholera.
This grief becomes a kind of constant, what he obviously suffers from is something that Ivar Lo calls "tenant class fatalism". This misery that they have lived in all their lives, he cannot see an end to it, says Patrik Svensson and adds:
Inequality and injustice can create a kind of fatalism that is literally life-threatening.
Mirror Image
Elof Nilsson's eldest daughter, Märta, wakes up to the rifle shots and probably never recovers from what she is forced to witness. Patrik Svensson sees his new book as "a dark mirror image" of his own origin.
Today, Elof Nilsson would have been sentenced to life imprisonment, he thinks. But the forensic psychiatric examination in the 1940s concludes that Elof Nilsson suffered from a depressive psychosis.
After four years at St Lars mental hospital in Lund, he is declared healthy and moves home to his son Folke, whose family takes care of Elof for the rest of his life.
There is something very big about that forgiveness, you can't really understand it.
Born: 1972.
Lives: In Malmö, but grew up in Kvidinge east of Helsingborg.
Family: Wife and two children.
Previous books: "The Eel Gospel" (2019), "The Measuring Man" (2022).
Currently reading: "'The Witch Rings' by Kerstin Ekman. Will soon start on Sara Lidman."
