Lars Andersson’s sentences! Much of what is unique about his writing is encapsulated in this one small element: the construction of each individual sentence. If it weren’t for the fact that he squeezes every single word to its very limit, I would call his prose ecstatic. One might compare it to music, dance, or perhaps most of all to basketball.

Basketball? Absolutely; the player’s loose limbed, relaxed stance, the way he strolls across the court – then all at once a lightning spin, a single explosive step to the side and past, followed by a leap into the air, high above the court towards the basket. The movement takes only a second, but it lifts the match to another dimension, a kind of ecstasy for both the player and the crowd.

Ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis and means ‘rapture’. A human being suddenly steps outside himself and lays himself open to the world. This is a familiar theme in Lars Andersson’s writing. Listen to Emil Thorelius, the main character in The Hive of the King Bee (Bikungskupan) from 1982: “It’s just that little sloughing off of our skin that we’re so very afraid of, deep down: changing our class allegiance! Crawling out of the skin of the bourgeoisie!”

That’s how Lars Andersson pictured ecstasy twenty-five years ago: a single leap, freeing us from the class identity that had our fate laid out before our feet. I “am airing my character so that it doesn’t become a moth-proof bag for the society I’m fighting against,” says Thorelius.

Martin Tomasson, the main character in Andersson’s new novel The Road to Gondwana, also wants to go beyond his own boundaries. For him too, the transformation is a political affair, although he does not show the card of Marxism as openly as Andersson, a child of his time, did at the beginning of the 1980s.

From Blekinge to Bombay and on to Gondwana – this is the journey in his new novel. “A free-ranging fantasy about a brief moment in the life of Harry Martinson during his nomadic travelling days in the 1920s,” it says on the back cover. The book’s chronological and geographical sequence corresponds roughly to Martinson’s career. The main character has the same name as Martinson’s alter ego in the autobiographical novels Flowering Nettle (Nässlorna blomma) and The Way Out (Vägen ut). The action takes place in 1924, when Martin Tomasson, a stoker on the steamship SS Fernmoor, meets the washerwoman Pushpi in Bombay harbor. They travel across the subcontinent to the place Pushpi came from, the town of the orphans in Hoshangabad by the river Narmada.

In Hoshangabad their paths separate. Martin travels on to the wooded mountains of central India, the land of Gondwana, the area which, because of geological discoveries, gave its name to the great continent of the Cretaceous period, from which many parts of the world and many islands have broken away over millions of years. Most people associate Gondwana with the land where the dinosaurs grazed on forests of bracken. But what do we know about Gondwana today, inhabited by the Gond, a people regarded as among the most primitive and poverty stricken in India, but also among the most rebellious? During the days of the British Empire, Gondwana was the last white patch on the map. In order to subdue the country, the colonists classified whole villages as criminal.

During the journey from Bombay, memories of other places and other encounters run through Martin’s mind – his own childhood as an orphan in Blekinge, working in a textile factory in Jonsered, his travels in America and his meeting with a Swedish American who tells him about growing up in the forests on the border of Värmland and Närke. This is Andersson’s own area, where, in the novel The Water Organ (Vattenorgeln, 1993) he sent a group of turn of the century artists who wanted to immerse themselves in folk consciousness. In this new novel, the crofters of the Värmland forests become a mirror image of the Gond. Both regions produce generation after generation of rootless, poverty stricken individuals who wander out into the world to look for a better life.^*

This is the material; on the surface, a loose montage of sketches with different nuances and perspectives. After only a dozen or so pages you begin to sense the hand of an author who quickly and skillfully stitches together the patterns of the world, securing the loose threads of his thirty years as a writer. The Road to Gondwana is not as immense and meandering as Andersson’s previous novel The Mountain (Berget, 2002), but it has a linguistic intensity and a density of thought and ideas which surpasses anything else he has written.

On the road to Gondwana Martin remembers how, one day at the factory in Jonsered, he found a feather that had arrived with a bale of cotton from India. “He had stood there with the feather in his hand and tried to place it on a bird, singing somewhere unseen. . . Was it a feather from the neck of a grey jungle fowl, stretching and twisting its head?”

Just as the feather transports the textile worker in Jonsered to the India of the jungle fowl, so Andersson’s ecstatic style suddenly whisks us away towards an encounter with the unknown. This move is not unique in Andersson’s novel; every successful metaphor has a similar effect. But Andersson has his own way of transplanting this fine, metaphorical, poetic mechanism into the wider body of the novel.

His prose flows laterally in a striking manner. In contrast to most poets, he does not place things in a cosmic hierarchy, nor does he construct a ladder reaching from humanity up to a higher power; instead, he ambles along the road like a beggar, linking a piece of square, white soap on a stone by a Swedish beach with coconut soap in Bombay harbor and with the hard graft of the black washerwomen in Savannah. His rapid shifts in perspective and his fresh new metaphors draw together worlds and people which are far apart. His style becomes the solution to the ethical riddle: how does a sense of belonging, a sense of closeness arise?

Andersson’s reply to this question breaks with accepted ideas about the nature of closeness. Most people take it for granted that a sense of community is something that exists between similar individuals, within the family, the clan, the race, the nation, the state. The sense of belonging which interests Andersson is, in contrast, that which springs up between strangers, crossing all boundaries, outside the city wall and the law. Martin Tomasson was auctioned off to foster families, and Pushpi, his travelling companion, comes from the town of the orphans. They belong to the international band of the homeless, expatriates without a patch of land, a family, property or possessions. Andersson links their fates together. The body of the novel becomes the body of a collective.

One could almost call it a globalization from beneath; it began when people emigrated to America from the forests of Värmland, continued when Harry Martinson signed on as ship’s boy, and it still goes on when men and women from Gondwana travel down to Bombay to work themselves to death or to rebel.

Does this movement have a goal? When Andersson published The Water Organ, he wrote that, along with The Hive of the King Bee, the novel formed a diptych, The Book of the Water (Vattnets bok). Both books deal with the onset of modern times, how people pour from the country into the city, or emigrate, and how Swedish artists and intellectuals travel upstream against the flow of history in order to preserve folk traditions and knowledge without the devastation caused by modernization. In these stories, water becomes an allegory for an ancient historical force which is controlled and dammed, but which still retains the ability to break through every fortification.

During the decades that have passed since The Water Organ, Andersson has got to know India and has seen a parallel process in the country’s history: the damming of the river Narmada, the water cult of Hinduism, the grassroots resistance to colonial rule and the modernization of the Congress party. It is this parallel which is brought out in A Road to Gondwana, a book Andersson has added as a third part to The Book of the Water. At the same time, it also purports to be a third volume in Harry Martinson’s autobiographical series.

In the young Martin Tomasson, Andersson has found the perfect link between the Swedish and the Indian. This rootless trickster, dreamer and rebel helps Andersson to create the world literature which he had in his sights in his two earlier books containing Indian material, Kavita and The Mountain, but never realized. At the end of the novel, Martin swims upstream through water-filled caves in the rivers of Gondwana until he reaches the source of the great rivers, which is in fact the source of all humanity – just as Emil Thorelius in The Hive of the King Bee dives to the bottom of the river Klara, down into the depths, the depths of folk memory.

It is as if Harry Martinson has given Andersson another pair of eyes, so that he can now look at the world from two angles at the same time – from the east and from the west, from Värmland and from Maharashtra, from above and from below, from a historical and from a utopian perspective – to put it simply, dialectically.

Just as dialectical as the German theorist Walter Benjamin, who hovers like a guardian angel over the pages of The Hive of the King Bee. In this novel, Benjamin speaks of how Utopia borrows elements of prehistoric times: “In this dream, in which every epoch can see the next unfolding in pictures, the latter emerges mixed with prehistoric elements, that is to say, elements of a classless society.”

Prehistoric elements? A classless society? The next epoch? It seems as if Andersson already knew in 1982 that he would travel to Gondwana. For what is Gondwana with its primitive folk culture, its free customs, its collective ownership of the land and its relics from the days of the dinosaurs, if not a picture which jerks the reader out of the age in which we live, so that he or she can stand back and settle their account with the world order. In this way, the leap back into Gondwana’s prehistory is a step towards the future.

Harry Martinson also realized this, when he allowed the paradise land of Gond to be destroyed in the apocalypse in Aniara – “a cry is heard from this coin of Gond” – and then to be rebuilt as a Utopia for history’s losers: “And she stood up and quenched with milk the thirst of this refugee from the moorland of Gondrin.”

Translator’s note:
* The text refers to ‘Vägen till Klockrike’. The title of Martinson’s novel is translated simply as ‘The Road’. As it is difficult to find an English equivalent of ‘Klockrike’, I have translated this as ‘to look for a better life’. This means the allusion to Martinson’s book is lost, but I can’t see a way around it.

Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy