Days & Days & Days by Tone Schunnesson
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
When I visit other countries, I always try to seek out a bookstore. My purchases are usually but not always tied to the place. Years ago in London, I discovered Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, while in Amsterdam I bought a copy of the sci-fi novel The Book of Strange New Things by Dutch-born writer Michel Faber, and in New Zealand, I found An Angel at My Table, an autobiography by one of that country's most famous writers, Janet Frame.
On my vacation to Sweden last summer, I meandered into Nord Books, an English-language bookstore in Stockholm's charming Södermalm neighborhood, and I asked the clerk to recommend a contemporary Swedish novel that wasn’t crime-driven. Much of Scandinavian fiction in translation seems to lean toward crime thrillers, which I don’t often read. He steered me to Days & Days & Days (Dagarna, dagarna, dagarna in Swedish), a 2020 novel by Tone Schunnesson. This novel sat on my bookshelf for months, but I finally got around to reading it.
The blurb promises a "pitch perfect study of success and destruction." Its protagonist is Bibbs, a one-time reality TV star who is pushing 40 and has just been dumped by her boyfriend, who holds the lease to their lavish apartment. With an extravagant lifestyle to maintain and dwindling cash flow, she resorts to extreme measures to retain her relevance, dignity and social media following.
While I was excited to discover a new author, I didn’t connect with this book, unfortunately. I did, however, appreciate Schunnesson’s sometimes sharp and trenchant commentary about celebrity-obsessed culture and the tragicomic existence of living one’s life online.
The main issue was that I didn’t relate to any of the characters. The writing, or perhaps the translation, also felt less than smooth in spots. For example, the cash-poor Bibbs at one point talks about getting walloped by a 170,000 kronor tax bill, which felt like “an insuperable spiritual mountain.” I have no idea what that means.
Still, at about the 100-page mark, my empathy for Bibbs began to increase and I started to warm to her wry sense of humor. I realized that while she desperately needs the instant gratification of social media “likes” and having strangers recognize her on the street, she’s not so self-delusional as to think she has any special talent or that she works hard. She also recognizes the absurdity of her existence as a semi-famous person. At one point, she encounters a man who exclaims “I’ve seen you on TV,” and then thinks twice and asks her, “or we were neighbors once?” The joke is that it’s all a blur, with peripheral celebrities so omnipresent and unimpressive they could just as well live next door.
Bibbs’ convoluted logic about money also helped humanize her. At one point when she is especially down on her luck, she justifies spending 3,000 kronor on perfume, because it really cost only 2,600 if you factor in the money saved by taking the bus instead of a taxi, and by buying something else at 25% off. Her math is clueless yet comic.
There are a lot of Swedish cultural references in the book that went over my head. One that I did get was the discussion of “snus,” a smokeless tobacco that comes in little tins and is sold everywhere in Sweden. And taxes are a common thread throughout the book, which does not seem surprising given that Sweden is known for requiring its citizens to chip in heavily to the nation's welfare.
In the end, my most memorable Swedish literary discovery from my trip was not this book at all. Instead, it was my realization that a café in Stockholm where I enjoyed a glass of wine was on the ground floor of where Astrid Lindgren, the creator of the irrepressible Pippi Longstocking, had lived. Pippi, with her bright red pigtails and superhuman strength, was one of my favorite fictional characters from childhood. While Bibbs did grow on me over the course of reading Days & Days & Days, Pippi will remain infinitely more endearing.
