Author Paul Auster’s death last week threw me back in time and I remembered exactly, crystal clear, the first Auster book I read and how I pulled it from the science fiction shelf at the library, the author’s name in big blood ¶da sans serif letters.
The classification is debatable; “I de sisté tingens land†(1987, in Swedish 1993) is a dystopia but there is not that much science in it – the more fiction, it is a fantastic and unspeakable depressing vision of the future. The book takes place in an unnamed city after a total societal collapse. There is no longer any production, no industries, what remains of goods and things are collected, reused, regurgitated until they fade away even from the language. Here there are starvation, cannibalism, suicide cults – such as the one where the members train themselves to extreme physical prowess, strong and sinewy, so that they can then run one last suicidal ultramarathon until the soul leaves the body and they collapse dead. (This passage spoke strongly to me, monumentally athletically untalented teenager who already cultivated an intense disdain for sports cults.) It is a culture’s last gasp.
47 percent of all books demanded to be removed are about LGBTQ people or non-whites
Part of “In the land of the last things†takes place in a large library, where the main character Anna Blume ends up by chance. The library houses the remaining fragments of an intellectual sphere; academics and religious thinkers.
The image of the library as the superego of society is a common trope, not least in science fiction. It is the last bastion of civilization, filled with knowledge and history but also a symbol of a kind of mastery and clear-sightedness. That’s how the library burns in Paul Auster’s novel – also, of course, symbolically.
It says something that even in the cruelest dystopias, the library is often still there. It can be ragged, damaged, dysfunctional, but it is there. As if it were a constant, as if we take it for granted that it will be among the last to fall.
It almost feels cute, given how reality looks. On the contrary: libraries are among the first to be attacked when democracy is under pressure. The American Library Association in the United States reports that demands to ban books increased by 65 percent in 2023 compared to the year before, and this affects not only school libraries but also public libraries. The increase is mainly due to individuals or groups making demands concerning quantities of books at the same time – mass applications, dozens or hundreds. 47 percent of all books demanded to be removed are about LGBTQ people or non-whites.
The specific culture warfare has not (yet) taken hold in Sweden – but less than half of all school children had access to a staffed library in 2022, and then it was nd¥ a small improvement from the year before. The number of public libraries has gradually decreased in recent years.
I spent what must have been years of my life on the Bible as a child, long afternoons after I, so to speak, resigned from leisure (the children were so loud), inappropriate literature was my biggest interest. Horror, blood, sex, space. Perhaps in hindsight I wish there had been more books in the category of “diversity†so feared by the American right – the science fiction shelf was decidedly one-sided at the time .
But I’m glad someone chose to catalog Paul Auster there. It had a positive effect on my social life later in my teens – name-dropping the New York Trilogy was invaluable cultural capital for a few short years in the 1990s. Think, even a bent little library toon could feel cool sometimes.
Read more chronicles and other texts by Hanna Fahl. For example a long interview with Petra Mede – who is back as host of Eurovision
