In English
It is sad that english-speakers can not take part of my novels. But there are other texts which can be read or listened to.
My short-stories that are translated into English are: -Night -The Confessional Notebook -Remorse You can also search for "Jeremiah Karlsson" on Spotify and other music streaming-services to find my music. That goes for Amazon too, where e-books and music are available. Three of my novels take place in the welfare-state of Sweden. The main protagonist is the young social-service-man Edvard, the stories picture his struggles to help vulnerable children in a small Swedish municipality in Småland. They are written in the form of thrillers - "nordic noir", one might say - and they are the first novels in Sweden with this perspective. Here under follows a brief summary of three of my novels. Lover of Silence, Friend of Stars Staffan is an 11 year old boy who lives together with his father, Tobias, in Marås, a small village of only seven households. The father drinks too much alcohol and has friends which Staffan doesn't like, because they cause stress on the father. One evening when the father is away doing "business" with friends, Staffan together with friends shoots with air-rifles at a kindergarden. A woman reports the incidents to the social authorities where Edvard works, a 25 year old social worker newly graduated. He is lonely after a separation, but finds purpose in life through his work. He starts to assess the boy's situation, and along the way finds secrets one should keep away – even from children. The problems surrounding the boy are both unclear and at times horrifying, painting a picture of a boy close to social starvation. Staffan himself, which the reader follows in some of the chapters, discovers that there is a mysterious man spying on him when he walks home through the forest. Even the father is perplexed by the spying man. Who is he? For what reason does he stalk Staffan? At the same time, Staffan's mother applies for custody over the boy leading the father and mother into a war against each other before the authorities – a war with no winners and only one loser. In Jeremiah's debute-novel the suspense is created by many different factors. One is the search for answers to the boy's background. There is also a deadly bullying going on at school, leading up to Staffan's bloody revenge on one of the perpetuators – son to the mother's new boyfriend. The book deals with themes such as violence among children, state-intervention and social exclusion. His debute got good reviews for its close portrait of a young boys struggle, and for combining the ordinary crime-story's conventions of an police-investigation, here applied as a social service-assessment of a boy's rough past. "I have to pinch my arm to remind myself that this is a novel I am reading", one critic wrote. "'Lover of Silence, Friend of Stars' comes close, really close. The grade is A. Absolutely worth reading." Other critics made parallells to the rich Swedish tradition of social realistic crime-writers, such as Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Henning Mankell. The Chamber of Sorrow Mirjam is a 17 year old girl, who after a beach-party in Halmstad becomes pregnant after sleeping with an upper-middleclass boy named Robin. After revealing the truth to him, the mother of the boy together with the school-councellor tries to push Mirjam to an abortion. She refuses to obey them, and in an act of partly revenge, partly will to become mother, decides to keep the child. Edvard, the social worker from the first book, assesses her situation and possibilities to take care of a child, and decides to place her and the child Varg (meaning wolf) in an assessment-home where her abilities as a mother will be scrutinised. In this process, the reader gets to know Gabriel, a black metal-singer, who helps Mirjam out of the authorities' eyes, and together they go to an abandoned cottage in the middle of the Smålandian forest where she hides from the police who now looks for them. Gabriel and Mirjam starts their own relationship, leading to catastrophy, with most of the prize paid by the infant. The book deals with many topics, and has a more sinister tone than the first one, and many has praised it for its emphatetic and contemporary eye on the present society. The language is poetic and the themes eternal, as suspense and existentialism blend together in an outstanding combination. "Bloody good about human trashes", one critic wrote. Other noted similarities with the gothic novel and praised its honesty and integrity. The Protestant At the centrum of this story stands Simson, a young and powerful, but self-hateful, priest in the Swedish State-church. He lives in Lund, southern Sweden, and is married to Sofi, a nurse with spiritual doubts whether her protestant belief is all there is to a life in faith. Simson is full of contempt for people, since they seem to lead hedonistic and happy lifes without God. There is no light in his world, until one day when he meets Jannice, a young girl of 10, which is plagued by fears of hell. A human being like that Simson cannot but feel empathy for, and hence he starts pastoral care for her – meetings which gradually changes even the priest himself. However, Sofi decides to do what it takes to get to terms with her doubts and hence separate for half year with Simson, leaving him alone with his darkening mind. As a consequence, his inner turmoil gets worse, and he starts to preach more and more about the Apocalypse, which he secretly longs for. Sofi, who now lives with her parents on Öland, seeks depth in her faith and decides to convert to the Catholic church, which puts the lutheran priest Simson into real stress, since he is against the idea of having babies in a world as dark as this – but Sofi urges him to believe in the good of the world, and so a battle for their future begins, which holds the reader in a grip through many dramatic turns and events. "The protestant" is an existential novel in the style of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground", André Gide's "The Pastoral Symphony" and Pär Lagerkvist's "The Dwarf", an exciting and drastic family-drama as well as a serious and unconventional meditation about concepts such as faith, belief and grace. The novel's content has been compared to those of artists such as Ingmar Bergman and Hjalmar Söderberg and has been compared to the literary movement of "new sincerity". |
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