Claes G. Ryn is Emeritus Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. He is Distinguished Editorial Director at AGON and Editor Emeritus of Humanitas. His many books include A Common Human Ground and, most recently, The Failure of American Conservatism. He frequently appears in major American and Swedish papers, such as The Hill and Svenska Dagbladet.
In this post you will be able to induldge in his experience of The Coffee Party.
What follows is from a letter in Swedish from Claes Ryn to the author a few months after they met by chance in the small coastal town in Sweden in which Linus Jonsson was born and raised. The translation was made by the editor of this home page. The translation has been shared with and approved by Claes Ryn.
December 23rd 2024
We met this past summer on Myriam’s veranda in Valdemarsvik. I bought a copy of Kafferepet (ed. original Swedish title), and said that I would get in touch. We are both authors, I as a political scientist but also as a novelist. I am writing now, belatedly, from Washington, D.C., where we have lived since 1974. Since that same year, we have had a summer place in the St. Anna archipelago. It takes us about 17 minutes to drive to Viken (ed. what locals call Valdemarsvik).
Congratulations again on the publication of this, your first novel. I began to acquaint myself with it soon after returning to the USA. I would very much like to say something about it, but I suspect that I, who belong to a completely different generation than you, may not be the right person to do it justice. I must admit that I am the kind of reader who, in a novel, fairly soon wants to know roughly where I am headed, who is who, who is called what, and who says and does what. Without the author’s help, I have a hard time telling apart still-unknown characters. When I began reading your novel, I had just that kind of problem and had some difficulty getting a grasp on it. The conversation was also, well, at times, trivial. “Annika, do you want more coffee?” and the like. I wondered why the author wanted me to be drawn into this everyday realism. With time, short remarks were now and then dropped that could sound important but whose meaning was hard for me to interpret either because the context was unclear or because I don’t normally live in Sweden. The dialogue showed that these women were struggling with serious life problems and that they generally speaking were more or less dissatisfied. But they also seemed immature, disoriented, restless and lacking in willpower, which made it hard for me to truly engage in their conversations and small outbursts, especially as the problem “who says what” often returned. Why was it important that I feel empathy for these people and follow how their moods shifted? I did, however, read on now and then and guessed that the purpose of the story would eventually become clear. When, after a longer break, I returned to the novel, I had seriously begun to wonder whether something had been wrong in how I had read earlier. Perhaps the author intended to impress upon the reader just that kind of view of these women that I described? The reader needed to become properly familiar with life as it is experienced by average, normally gifted but confused and passive Swedish women. I began reading again and thought I had here found a thread. These women would probably illustrate the situation in which “bourgeois” and other economically fairly well-off Swedes are assumed to find themselves. They are ill at ease or depressed but occupy themselves with small amusements. Society, the media, the schools, their families—yes, cultural life in general—has thus not given them meaningful, sustainable life goals but only fruitless wishful dreams and whims, and this has made them lost, slack, self-absorbed, lacking in imagination and—perhaps out of anger over their life situation—even prone to violence. It maybe doesn’t matter very much in the novel who is who, so that I on this point have made an effort in vain. It is probably a matter of different sides of one and the same enterpriseless and impulse-driven personality type. I am reminded of Plato’s description of what he in the dialogue the Republic calls the “democratic” human being. This person flutters between impulses, tries now one thing, now another, without steadiness and overarching goals. This personality type is according to Plato closely related to the “tyrannical,” completely ruthless person who has let the diabolical take control of the personality. One senses in one of your women a quasi-Nietzschean rebelliousness, but one has the feeling that nothing will come of that either, or that it will only become some sort of pretentious criminality. These women twitch back and forth. The lack of willpower has become so chronic that a genuine pulling oneself together seems ruled out. When one of the women faints, yes, more than once, and of course really should be taken to the emergency room, the other women prove to be scatterbrained, despicably indecisive, and complacent. On the emergency number, they are even given medically completely incompetent advice. The operator is probably, due to lack of resources, meant to avert as many ambulance dispatches as possible. What we in your novel seem to get to experience is the relationship between people in a society that have gotten stuck in a spiritually substandard life and that are not capable of lifting themselves toward anything better, except perhaps sporadically and temporarily, flailing really. The final lines of the novel say that what we have experienced will continue more or less as before. These women are probably a study of how people who in and of themselves are not lacking in skills and opportunities have gotten stuck in a chronic life crisis, this because those who set the tone in their society do not have the insight and qualifications to help them, to inspire them, to something better. Your novel seems to me emphatically to illustrate that Swedish (European?) society has pulled away the foundation for a life that is satisfying in a deeper sense. It is painful to be confronted with this self-absorbed, bored, confused attitude toward life, but much is gained if someone like you can make others realize the need for a thorough revitalization.
I do, however, doubt my own ability to understand. I suspect that I have missed something important for the understanding of your novel. There occur, for example, many thought-provoking short remarks, but to me they are not always transparent, and I am unsure whether they together make up a message. A rereading would surely give better information, but I can no longer delay getting in touch. So you should regard my reactions as perhaps only preliminary.
It was a pleasure, and, I thought, perhaps important, that we met in Valdemarsvik, you from Holland and I from the USA, both of us writers.