Why does the hair on our bodies stand up when we smell blood?

"Because we are predators, not just me, you too," says Tjodolf the bear to Sem the boy.

Man is man's wolf or bear, but he can also be man's man.

Noble, helpful, good.

That would be the traditional way of looking at things.

With Frida Nilsson it is much more complicated.

It must also be more complicated.

After all, she doesn't talk about being good for just anyone, but for children.

You have to go back and talk about inconsistencies, you have to show the dilemma and yet describe it in a tolerable way.

Nilsson also succeeds in doing this in her latest novel "Sem and Mo in the Land of the Lindworms".

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

We shouldn't dwell on talking animals, they often appear in Frida Nilsson's work.

As early as 2005, animals talked in “Ich, Gorilla und der Affenstern”, which was later published in German, and in their first work, “Sommer mit Krähe” (2004), which was recently published in German.

What's more, they act humanely.

It is all the more inexplicable to the people, those in the books as well as those who read them, how it can be that they are hunted and eaten.

But sometimes you have to, and sometimes it is even necessary to kill for other reasons.

Where is the boundary between greed and necessity, reflected action and reflex, human and animal?

And what does this meandering border say about whether we, the people, are good, want to be good, or how we deal with the dark spots in our soul?

Sem, the first-person narrator, is eleven years old when he tells us the adventure in the land of the dragons in retrospect.

And Shem wants to be a good person with all the power that is available to him as a child.

Outwardly, that doesn't seem like much power, when you look at it closely, Sem and his little brother Mo are victims.

Orphans exploited as cheap labor.

Sem also remains powerless in the kingdom of the wyverns, of which there is only one left, Indra, the wyvern queen endowed with magical powers.

Her castle, which Nilsson describes so vividly and precisely like everything else that one can almost smell the dusty animal smell of old hunting trophies, must seem like paradise to children who have been so tormented among the people.

It's a deceptive one in which a handful of animals—rat, badger, fox, and bear—

Nilsson, who has received numerous awards, has become a master of the great philosophical children's novels in recent years.

In her fantastic narrative worlds, exploitation and capitalism, overexploitation of nature, the relationship between humans and animals, power and guilt are central themes - and death is always in the middle.

Nilsson remains true to this path, which she embarked on with “Siri and the Arctic Pirates” (2017) and “Sasja and the Realm Beyond the Sea” (2019).

Together with many of Nilsson's protagonists, Sem shares a love of life and the will to be good.

Again it is the transition into another world that Sem and Mo go through, like Siri and Sasja.

Again, this change has to do with names - in the human world, Sem and Mo have lost those pet names of their deceased parents and are Samuel and Mortimer.

The humor, however, which in the wonderful story of the afterlife that Sasja tells, has such captivating antics, is decidedly bitter this time and is mostly fed by the domesticated behavior of the wild animals.

Almost everything in this story is ambivalent, even the egocentric Indra scores points with her analysis of the ruthless exploitation in the human world.

But why she really wants little Mo is a cruel story.

The Wyvern cannot help it - Indra needs human blood to sustain her kind.

Humans, on the other hand, could not do otherwise: in order to protect their children, they had to exterminate the lindworms.

All creatures have always been the same for Nilsson, but now the dilemma is getting worse.

So "Sem and Mo in the Land of the Lindworms" is darker than its predecessors.

At times it seems as if Nilsson went beyond his own dictates in his narration, for example when Tjodolf demands the right to commit a heroic deed in order to “be more than an animal” and Mo becomes an animal.

It is worth re-reading from the end, as is so often the case with Nilsson – and as children always love to do when they love stories.

Frida Nilsson: "Sem and Mo in the Land of the Lindworms"

.

Translated from the Swedish by Friederike Buchinger.

With pictures by Thorben Kuhlmann.

Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2022. 400 p., hardcover, €22.

From 10 years