Some Kind of Record Year

About a novel I translated – and some upcoming events

I’m still finding my bearings in this new year. If 2022 was about writing a book and 2023 was the year I took that book out into the world, then I’m not sure what my 2024 is about yet. But meanwhile, I wanted to share the story below – and also some invitations to upcoming events, starting with a public conversation at Sjömanskyrkan in Gothenburg this coming Tuesday as part of their series På Djupet (On the Deep). So if you know anyone in that part of the world, do send them along – and look out for further announcements at the bottom of this post.

Everything is white. Frost on the trees. Snow on the ground. Ice, ice, ice. It’s some kind of record year. The sea ice in the archipelago has never been this thick. Or not in a long time.

These lines from the opening of Jesper Weithz’s Anything That Isn’t Growing have been running in my head.¹ Back in 2018, I translated his novel from Swedish because it was one of the few attempts at ‘climate fiction’ that actually worked for me. And it struck me as typical of Jesper to set a cli-fi novel against the background of a record-breaking winter.

The day the schools broke up for Christmas, Anna and Alfie took the bus to Uppsala and onwards to Sigtuna, where her parents live. Two days later, when I was due to follow them by car, it took me most of the morning to dig my way out. In twelve years in Sweden, I’ve never seen as much snow as we’ve had this winter. Even as the global heat maps and charts of ocean temperatures show wider patterns of alarming heat, our corner of the world has been in the white since early November. There’s a temporary thaw today and tomorrow, so as I sit at the kitchen table writing this, every now and then there’s a roar and a whoompf as a slab of snow and ice slides off the roof and hits the ground. But the latest forecast says we’ll be down to -25° again by the middle of next week.

In Jesper’s novel, all the literal climate stuff happens in the background, from the weird weather to the activists breaking onto an airport runway. The foreground characters barely seem to notice, caught up in the events of their own lives. But meanwhile, these smaller-scale events provide a series of potent images for a subject that is hard to look at directly, a dark reflection of the trouble humanity is in, how we found ourselves in this mess and why it seems so hard to imagine a way out.

The book works because none of this is ever spelt out. Instead, its story unfolds with the pace and tautness of a thriller. (Maybe this is the moment to mention that Jesper co-founded a magazine with Stieg Larsson, who found posthumous fame with The Millennium Trilogy.) Here’s the dust-jacket version of Anything That Isn’t Growing:

When Henrik and Lotte kiss goodbye, they expect to be together again soon under the São Paolo sun. Waiting for them in Brazil is a treatment for Lotte, whose pregnancy has hit unexpected complications. She just needs to finish packing up the house with their daughter Molly, while Henrik stops off in London for a meeting. The days until their reunion should be a straightforward sequence of transport connections. But then the thin ice of modern life begins to crack under their feet, and they find themselves in free fall, thousands of miles apart.

I don’t expect I’ll ever write a novel, so this translation took me as deep as I’m likely to go inside the workings of a book like this. I took on the project because I’d seen a lot of climate fiction since starting Dark Mountain, and very little of it worked for me. (I touch on this in At Work in the Ruins and mention a couple of other exceptions: Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. I’m sure there are others that I haven’t read, or that just didn’t land with me the way they did with other readers.)

Anything That Isn’t Growing had done well in Sweden, Jesper had been getting interest from scholars who didn’t read Swedish and he had some funding to make a translation. What we didn’t have was a publisher, though – so if what I’ve written here has pricked your curiosity and you might be in a position to help us get the translation into print, then get in touch. Or, failing that, perhaps I can persuade Jesper to publish it in serial form on Substack.

In any case, twelve years on from its original publication, the near-future world conjured up by Anything That Isn’t Growing feels more plausible than ever, the novel just as timely, and not only because of this strange winter we’ve been having here in Sweden.

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As promised, news of a few upcoming events.

First, a heads-up about an online course I’m teaching on, starting next month: ‘Contemporary Spirituality: Meaning and Mysticism in the Modern Age’ is curated by

Hannah Close

for Advaya, and my fellow teachers include

Elizabeth Oldfield

, Vanessa Andreotti, John Vervaeke, Tim Morton and Vandana Shiva. (Use the discount code TEACH-CS-HINE when booking and you’ll get 20% off the regular course fee.)

Then here are a few in-person events in the Nordic countries over the coming weeks and months:

• This Tuesday (16th), I’ll be in conversation with Lisa Westberg of the Church of Sweden at Sjömanskyrkan in Gothenburg. This is a Swedish-language event. Details here.

• On Tuesday 30th January, I’ll be the guest speaker at NAV Stockholm’s Glänta På 2024 evening, a public event of facilitated conversation and exploration looking to seed new collaborations in 2024. Again, this will take place in Swedish. Details here.

• On 7th and 8th February, I’m giving a pair of public talks (in English) in Denmark at Himmelbjerggården, Ry and Sager Der Samler, Aarhus. Details of both events here.

• This summer, I’ll give the Saturday keynote at the European Ecovillages Gathering which takes place this year at Ängsbacka, Sweden. Details here.

Finally, it’s a year today since I gave my first online talk about At Work in the Ruins, followed by a roundtable with Bayo Akomolafe, Ciclón Olivares and Maya Kóvskaya, so here’s the recording of that event.

Thanks for reading and for your support, in all the forms it takes.

DH

1. Originally published as Det som inte växer är döende (Natur & Kultur, 2012).