She is heard and seen on “Café Bambino” and “Babel,” and is currently releasing her third novel “Ultravåld”. But even though Tone Schunnesson gives the impression of being everywhere, she chooses carefully.
I want to be involved where I have something to say that isn't about myself, my boyfriend or something I baked, she says.
If you take up people's time, you have to be a little careful with it.
High on mom's pills
The desperate influencer Bibbs in her previous novel “Days, Days, Days” would probably have resorted to violence if it had only helped her. But previously Schunnesson has written about violence only as a lived experience. This time she wanted to portray it from within the perpetrator himself.
When the aspiring film director Jarl, high on his mother's "benzo", kills his father Carl-Fredrik halfway through the novel, the reader has had time to become aware.
"I didn't want to shy away. I had never thought about violence from the perspective of the perpetrator. What shocked me when I wrote it was that it is not incorporated. It is not nearly as important for the perpetrator as it is for the victim," she says.
The family's capital of violence is an ancient story, notes Schunnesson, who sees her novel as a fairy tale.
Her main characters, the Gripenbrand family, are in free fall, freed from realities such as wage labor and a meager economy, “the corset for us mere mortals” that she did not want to write about.
I think they are so rich that they become perverted, but also that I am a perverted person who can only find an outlet for it in literature because I am so rigid in my ordinary life.
“Crazy positive”
At the same time, she has made study visits to castles in Scania and read police interviews with teenagers who have committed murder.
I've been struck by the fact that people don't really understand what they've started, but that 'now I've started it and then I just have to finish it.' There's something so childish about it.
Jarl's mother Monica, on the other hand, grew up in a Mexican brick villa where she was raped as a teenager. She lacks a language for her life, notes Schunnesson.
Her strategy is not to feel it and to be crazy positive. To me, it's a female survival strategy. There's something about her that's true about that pain.
Facts: Tone Schunnesson
Born: 1988 in Svedala.
Raised: In Malmö.
Lives: In Södermalm in Stockholm.
Family: Boyfriend.
Selected titles: "Tripprapporter" (2016), "Dagarna, dagarna, dagarna" (2020). Has also dramatized "Jane Eyre" and "Anna Karenina".
Future plans: Going to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne in July. The next novel will also be set in Paris.
