"Rolf" is superficially a novel about a stereotype, a story about an invisible middle-aged man in beige jacket, lost in the crowd at a bus stop. A person that no witness would remember.
Rolf himself feels like a deviant in every flock, a failed person who has become nobody and nothing. Depending on the business cycle of the time, he can be labeled with diagnoses, when his heartbreaking failure as a philosophy student is described as about social inability and narcissism. Maybe he got stuck in the role of school kid, cast in one piece with outdated jeans and reading heads, dragging it with him into the future.
He is a male counterpart to the women's position, built of equal parts of freedom and contempt, as Malin Lindroth wrote in the success of "Nuckan" 2018, the short, dense essay about a life as an involuntarily single woman, who recaptured subject and power in the grant.
"Nuckan" had a female voice that became deeply political as it called our society's borders. What is required, and what is suffocated, to gain access to the lifestyle religion and growth engine's demands on a modern man. "Rolf" is about the losers in our consumer society, the pain of his life bleeding from his dreams of "living in the great seriousness" - and as a hard student having been ejected from them too.
He argues full of resentment that the life lies that drape the abandonment of the middle age in "harmony" or "maturity" require some comfort. Preferably "a marriage with everything that belongs to it". He cannot afford the security of the lie of life.
It is thus easy to read the tomato-red novel "Rolf" as a masculine pendant to the poisonous lime-green "Nuckan", although "Rolf" has peeled off the essay form and dressed in the costume of the minimalist prose. But Lindroth, who is also a playwright, writes in scenes. Rolf is sitting in his kitchen with bloodstained pants trying to get his hand - a "cadaver on his back" - to call the police.
All he wants is to be human again. "Or is that right completely exhausted?"
What would we say? If a middle-aged isolated cowboy whose career never went further than an hour-long on a cowboy and now wants to explain the death of a teenage girl, the end for the young Pinkie with severe self-harm behavior that he spent in the evenings in the classroom where he "worked over"?
We think of the word "lolita complex", but Rolf - the incarnation of an unreliable narrator - claims that he spent the evenings connecting the girl's wounds. He is not a vengeful psychopathic incelman, he is the kind of man for whom it is impossible to even listen and care for wounds at the same time. But when Pinkie starts to feel better, Rolf is abandoned again. R as in rated. R as in scars. The dangerous abandonment requires new wounds.
Afterwards he is tormented in anticipation of the "you" who is being addressed throughout the novel, the police who will come with the punishment - or the reader who will release him?
Malin Lindroth is a great interpreter of the loneliness of our time, the one that usually takes place at a distance from society, the group, the others. Now in corona times it becomes something else. "Loneliness has moved into the center" she recently wrote (Svd 23 March).
But her novels have always done something different from normality and innocence, patrolling the boundary between violence and care. Here, the story of a deadly man becomes a story of lost illusions that lacks answers. It is black and oxygen rich and very uncertain.
Like when Chapter 19 reveals how Rolf wants "Rolf" to be read. He has tried to copy the logic of the romantic story, even the thief-linked language. "Do you understand the theme of this text? Do you understand that it is about love? ”.