Rather than feeling dejected at having been treated like rubbish for collection by our neighbour, I was weirdly fired up. The spontaneous elegance I’d shown when deflecting his comments – so forthright and dynamic, and delivered with such sparkle – had highlighted his miserly dismissal of a woman he didn’t know, and was a stark contrast to my optimistic, liberal view of humanity.
Just as I made it to the top of the last hill before reaching our cabin, I caught sight of Kai, who was sweating over his work down by the water’s edge, and it occurred to me who the man with the fishing rod was.
It was Per Sinding. The author. Though he was most famously and unavoidably known for being the spouse of another author, the eminent Hilma Ekhult, whose renown completely eclipsed his.
They were so famous that they didn’t even live in Norway. Nor did they live in New York, for that matter, which would have made them seem a bit comical or pathetic, really, a poor imitation of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. They were too big for Norway but too small for New York. No, I was sure they lived in Stockholm, which was statement enough in itself: Norway? No thanks. But its closest neighbour? Sure!
Per Sinding had been indignant. Indignant at the fact that an ordinary woman had dared set foot on his private property, or his wife’s, as the case may be, since I was fairly certain that of the two of them, she was the only one who actually earned a crust. Per Sinding lived off her the way a chaga mushroom lives off a birch tree. It was thanks to her that he could afford to write his own navel-gazing novels and stand around fishing – fishing with the same fruitless results he saw from his writing, and yet still he felt that he had the right to turn others away with two simple words, ‘private property’, both of which he’d scarcely bothered to articulate properly.
This was the ‘great humanist’ Per Sinding, I’d read several interviews he’d given where he came out with cryptic statements about his books, work that didn’t seem as difficult to understand as he liked to make out – examples of bitter, self-obsessed autofiction focused on the conflict on his mother’s side of the family, ruminations on bad decisions he’d made in the past and obligatory reflections on his own identity, all interspersed with ponderings over the problematic role of men in society.
He was always photographed with the same calculated expression on his face, solemn and stern, his eyes slightly screwed up and surrounded by deep wrinkles, preferably posing under a tree, burdened by no end of pain.
In addition to his narcissistic interviews, he specialised in pompous sermons delivered via op-eds whenever a new crisis arose, preferably humanitarian in nature – he’d refer to his own humanity with passionate zeal, pointing a finger that trembled with rage not only at our elected representatives, but also, rather tactlessly, at all of us.
And yet, he couldn’t bear … I started thinking, then realised that my thoughts about Per Sinding were going round in circles, I needed to pull myself out of this spiral, to rise above it.
I shouted down to Kai, who waved back at me, then made my way inside and grabbed the iPad, which was lying on the intimidatingly vast kitchen worktop; I sank down in a chair by the dining table, and this time around I searched ‘Hilma Ekhult + cabin’.
In-depth interviews in holiday homes were clearly a genre of their own. I found no fewer than three extensive interviews with Hilma Ekhult, all conducted in her cabin in late summer, and all in connection with a new book, so sheer self-promotion, really, I thought to myself, letting out a little snort as I skimmed the sections outlining the serious themes in her upcoming novel, combined with animated depictions of nostalgic childhood summers spent in this very spot, a never-ending omnibus of small-screen nostalgia, aFanny and Alexander summer special, a big, blurred family in technicolour.
Per Sinding’s specialty was bouillabaisse prepared wit
