Captain Nemo’s Library     by Per Olov Enquist, Translated by Anna Paterson Original title: Kapten Nemos bibliotek Original language: Swedish Country: Sweden   Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: 250 pages ISBN: 0704370190 List Price: £14.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £12.95

With deep autobiographical roots, and reflecting the private mythology of his childhood past which Enquist has made use of in other works — notably the magnificent, agonising play, The Hour Of The Lynx (l988) —Captain Nemo’s Library can be seen as (so far) its author’s crowning achievement as a novelist. Interestingly, for a writer famous for his social conscience and political commitment — and some of whose earlier books, HESS (l966) and The Legionnaires (1969) have a documentary nature — Captain Nemo is an intensely personal and emotional work, though with far-reaching existential preoccupations. To what extent do our secret desires determine what happens externally, both to ourselves and to others? Should we feel guilt for our wishes, our inner life? How, without violating our sense of responsibility or reality, can we find redemption for ourselves?


In fact this strange and baffling novel, in which we move in and out of the mentally disturbed narrator’s subjective world, had its origins in a real event. In the author’s native province of Västerbotten — Enquist shares with his virtual contemporaries, Kerstin Ekman and Torgny Lindgren, a deep attachment to Norrland, and an imaginative interest in the workings of remote, spiritually independent communities — a mix-up of two male babies took place. In Enquist’s novel, in September 1934 (the month and year of his own birth), the midwife at the local hospital gives the wrong baby to the two mothers under her care. Six years later her mistake, long suspected, is proved — and rectified. The nameless narrator is taken away from the ‘green’ house he proudly thought of as his own home and from Josefina, the woman he’d thought of as his mother, and sent to live in a very different household nearby, with his real mother who is of gypsy stock and somewhat deranged. Meanwhile Johannes has the benefit of the more prosperous home. The two boys become best friends, but there must inevitably be tension under the surface.


This potentially tragic situation is compounded by another, also involving a child of gypsy extraction: Josefina decides to adopt a daughter (an older girl) to be a sister to her true son. But a close bond grows up between the outcast narrator and this girl, Eeva-Lisa. Later he tries to help when, in her teens, she gives birth to a boy who then dies and has to be disposed of. The feelings that prompt him to help her are made more complex by his blaming Johannes, his best friend (and rival), for having failed Eeva-Lisa.


The climax of the novel and its terrible aftermath are presented elliptically, and though it is clear in stark fact what happens, the events are ultimately inseparable from the surges of emotion and the hallucinatory states of mind they inspire in the boy at the book's centre (as recalled by the older institutionalised man he has become). Here Enquist shows himself as at the height of his (very considerable) powers. I know little in contemporary literature to compare with the final scenes of this book — when the narrator, who has found an alternative life for himself in Jules Verne's stories of Captain Nemo and who, to a heightened degree, shares Enquist’s empathy with the natural world, retreats, away from society and danger, to a place called the Cave of the Dead Cats. This, so it’s said, is where the cats of the neighbourhood go to die. And it is here, imagining that Eeva-Lisa has come to him in the form of a cat, and that Johannes, his dear companion is missing not dead, that the boy experiences a kind of prolonged mystic communion with living and dead — to be shattered when authority apprehends him.



It is not too early, I believe, to think of Captain Nemo’s Library as a great novel; it is certainly one that can — and should — be turned to again and again. It yields different meanings on each reading, both literally and spiritually. It is possible, for instance, to take the novel as a working-out by the traumatised, speechless, asylum-inmate narrator of psychoses the external causes of which cannot be found. In this interpretation the betrayed and drowned Johannes is but a projection of the hero's mind, an embodiment of who knows what tragedy; hence disturbing reverberations are set up in the reader's mind about the nature of reality, the otherness of other people, the creative faculties of the fractured self.

‘Out there, above the water, hung a strange morning mist: the darkness had lifted, but there was still a hovering grey cloudiness, not white but somehow reflecting darkness; it hovered a few metres above the surface of the water which was absolutely still and shiny, like mercury. The birds slept, tightly wrapped in themselves and their dreams. Can it be that birds dream? The mist was so low that it left only water and birds to be seen, only a black unmoving surface of water, an endless sea. I could imagine myself on the outermost shore, and in front of me nothingness. An outermost boundary. And then the birds, wrapped tightly in their dreams. Suddenly a movement: a bird taking off. I heard no sound. I just saw it, beating the surface with the tips of its wings, free itself, rise at an angle, upwards: and it happened suddenly and so lightly, so weightlessly. I saw how it took off and rose and rose up towards the grey ceiling of mist, and vanished. And I heard not a single sound.’ p246