that she was exploiting a credulous childhood friend. That may be, but equally likely is that they were just two very lonely people in exile who kept each other company where the world is at its most beautiful and most cruel and again most beautiful. But that Malaise, at least, was in love is no wild guess. Everyone loved Ester Blenda. She had something that everyone fell for, both women and men. No one has ever managed to say exactly what, although many have tried.
She was born in 1891 and, still young, made a name for herself in the Stockholm newspapers under the pseudonyms Pojken (The Boy) and, later, Bansai. Her eyes, people still talk about her eyes, their enigmatic charm, so full of contradictions. She was unpredictable, everyone who knew her agrees on that. Socially, she could glitter like a star—an irresistible party girl, high-spirited, funny, inventive, always ready to play a song on her accordion or to tell a good story in the whirl of a giddy evening. But as often as not she was overcome with sadness and withdrew, tore off on her motorcycle or disappeared on long tramps in the wilderness. She travelled a lot, often alone, sometimes incognito. Jack Kerouac had not been born when Ester Blenda Nordström bummed across the United States, hitchhiking, hopping freights and cattle trains.
Her debut as an author was an immediate success. In 1914 she published a book of undercover reporting called A Maid Among Maids that sold 35,000 copies. Disguised and using a false name, she had taken employment as a housemaid with an unsuspecting farmer in Södermanland. Her book opened up a whole world of social evils whose existence her bourgeois readers had apparently forgotten. The debate was hard and long, and Ester Blenda’s name was on everyone’s lips. She herself went away to Lapland to work as a nomadic teacher in a Sami village. She was gone for nine months. It was a hard life, but The People of the Kota (1916) is one of her best books.
Nowadays, people often compare her with Günter Wallraff, who also was not yet born when she wrote her books, and the comparison is apt. She was just as fearless, just as outrageous, just as drawn to hardship. Even their success is comparable. But there is something this comparison misses. Of course it is her social reporting that people still talk about and that academics still discuss in their genre studies, but it is something else that seduces the reader who picks up one of her books. And this something is a far cry from German hard-hitting journalism.
It’s not Wallraff she resembles but, if anyone, Bruce Chatwin. No other Swedish author reminds me more of Chatwin. They are both puzzling, inaccessible and luminous. The same devastating eye and the same unbeatable brilliance in their ability to please. And they were escaping, constantly, perhaps from themselves, leaving behind a trail of dreamy-eyed admirers, questions and perpetual speculation about disjointed sexuality and conflicting passions of every kind. Even their obsessive interest in nomads and people at the edge of the world, even that is the same, almost identical. Two wanderers who disappeared. What’s left is legend. Chatwin died of AIDS at the age of forty-eight. Ester Blenda Nordström died at fifty-seven after suffering a debilitating stroke at the age of forty-five.
Her most remarkable book, and incomparably her best, is Village in the Volcano’s Shadow (1930), which is about the years in Kamchatka—“the golden land of indolence and optimism.” Its epigraph is a line from the poet Robert William Service: “Lover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you.” It’s a funny book, hilarious in places, but at the same time deeply gripping and melancholy. She tells about life in the village—sits at a desk somewhere at home in Sweden and looks back with a sense of loss that carries through all the sometimes uproarious, sometimes tragic human destinies that she describes.
But she never wrote about
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