Almost 20 years ago, Sara Danius published a small book called Proust's engine. About the French writer Marcel Proust's (1871-1922) seven-band work On the search for the time that has passed, an uncountable number of books have been written. Most are about Proust's preoccupation with the past, of a world about to disappear, and of this world's customs and morals.

Sara Danius saw something else at Proust: his interest in the modern, the latest technology and the future it promised. She saw his ambivalent relationship with the car, the camera, the movie and how they affected human minds. Proust's engine is an essay in the original sense of the word, an experiment but also an experiment. The essay writer makes a detour off the beaten track and finds something no one has noticed before.

The kind of essay that strolls about nature and literature, seemingly aimless, but with open minds to the unexpected in everyday life, made Sara Danius her genre. In 2014, she collected a selection of her newspaper articles in the volume Husmodern's death; few newspaper articles are in book form, that Sara Danius did so is largely due to the fact that they always look beyond both the current and the accepted.

She reads old cookbooks and sees a bloody and demanding female craft being lost: when there was no one saw it, now no one remembers. She reads Thomas Manns Bergtagen and sees "another scenography" slip into the novel. It is not only an educational novel about a young man's spiritual development, but also a story rooted in the 1920s technological revolution that forever separated vision and knowledge. What she saw was the X-ray machine at the sanatorium where the healthy young man spends seven years.

Gave the essay art something new

In the essay collection The Blue Soap from 2013, Danius turns her interest in the visible in the literature, for "things and things" as she says, into a theory of realism. It is usually said that 19th-century prose reflects reality, for example, Émile Zola described his novel art as "a corner of reality seen through a temper."

But Sara Danius turns a bit on the perspective and discovers that the realistic novel, instead of mirroring, makes reality visible, teaches us to see it as it is, but we have never seen it. A blue piece of soap in a story by Flaubert or a fried kidney by James Joyce then becomes shocking, not because they symbolize something but just because they are just.

Sara Danius gave Swedish essay art something new, a look at the detail and its ability to change the whole, and a disrespect for conventions. Essays on elevated classics had to be entertaining, yes, must be entertaining! If there are thousands of works on Proust's romance series, but no one has seen how fun he rides his car in it, it's a shortcoming that needs to be addressed! Sara Danius took on that task.