In author Lars Andersson's acclaimed biography "Göran Tunström – An Attempt at a Life", meetings with Leonard Cohen are recounted over several decades. The two met in the early 1960s on the Greek island of Hydra in the bohemian artist collective depicted in the drama series "So long, Marianne" (2024), which is currently being shown on SVT Play.
On Hydra, Tunström borrows the Norwegian author Axel's house. "A guy from Canada" has the key and lives with Axel's ex-wife, Marianne.
I think Göran Tunström tried not to be too associated with Leonard Cohen and this Hydra mythology, but it was still important, says Lars Andersson.
Lost Fathers
Tunström and Cohen were both wandering souls who had lost their fathers at an early age, he emphasizes. Whether – and if so, how – they influenced each other's writing is harder to pinpoint.
They must have felt a chemistry between them. They had some sort of religious – unclear but still – resonance. I believe there was a mutual resonance chamber.
When Göran Tunström later in life visits Cohen in the USA, he fills his own notebook with ideas and inspirations for the Sunne novel that Lars Andersson holds as Tunström's very best: "The Holy Geographers".
Turning Off
But Cohen makes Tunström irritated. During a visit to New York, the singer plays the recording of what will be his first album – Tunström asks him to turn off the noise: he wants to talk.
I think that what was called pop music had completely passed him by. He probably thought it was something pitiful that mumbled and went on in the background.
In the early 1990s, Tunström lightly ironizes over how Cohen claims to be a teetotaler and a non-smoker – at the same time as he has received expensive whiskey as a gift from the monks and gladly beds women. But Tunström always writes with warmth, according to Andersson.
I think they had a special wavelength between them.
Erika Josefsson/TT
Facts: "Göran Tunström. An Attempt at a Life"
TT
Lars Andersson, himself a Värmland novelist and translator, had pondered the biography for over 20 years and also asked Göran Tunström's wife, artist Lena Cronqvist, for permission to write it. In 2020, he began working on it in earnest and also signed a book contract. Only after that were 16 fully written notebooks by Göran Tunström, which became crucial for the biography.
In August 2024, even more material was found, which meant that Lars Andersson had to rewrite that part.
Why should a novelist write about another novelist? I have felt that there is a value in being able to follow the thought processes and impulses in a way that I think maybe only a colleague can do, says Lars Andersson.
He began reading Göran Tunström in the 1970s and got to know him in the late same decade.
I think there is something fine and almost imperative in passing it on. The flow between generations is something that I think lies in the essence of literature.
