BLAZE ME A SUN DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
CHRISTOFFER CARLSSON
1.
How would you describe Blaze Me a Sun in three adjectives? Why those particular words?
2.
hy do you think Christoffer Carlsson begins the novel from the point of view of a writer returning to his hometown in W 2019 and then flashing back?
3.
Which element of this novel did you find most compelling: the characters, the setting, the plot, the mystery . . . and why?
4.
laze Me a Sun has a notable ensemble cast. Which characters most resonated with you and why? Did your feelings for B any of them change over the course of the novel? Please explain.
5.
What does the novel say about the role of community in shaping our lives?
6.
he discovery of Stina’s body coincides with the assassination of Sweden’s Prime Minister. Why do you think Christoffer T Carlsson made that parallel?
7.
o you think the complaint against Sven was warranted? Please discuss. Sven had doubts himself and later the D prosecutor thought he bore some responsibility, despite dismissing the case. How did these facts enter into your assessment?
8.
hy do you think Sven decided not to tell his wife and son about the negligent manslaughter complaint lodged W against him?
9.
Two years after the unsolved crimes, did you have theories about who the killer was? Discuss your reader’s journey.
10. What role does the Swedish setting play? Would the story be different if located somewhere else? Please explain. How does the environment play into the mystery?
11. How do you think the author maintains a growing sense of unease and tension throughout the narrative? 12. The father-son dynamic is a potent theme: “Sven looked at his son and wanted to touch him, but whether it was to give Vidar a hug or a slap he couldn’t decide.” Why do you think this relationship was so fraught?
13. Aside from the murders, what do you think is the greatest tragedy in Blaze Me a Sun? 14. Why do you think Vidar returned to being a policeman at the end of novel? 15. Is there room for forgiveness in this story? Which character deserves it most, and why? 16. Carlsson incorporates the 1986 assassination of Sweden’s prime minister into his plot. Why does the event shock the novel’s characters? How do national tragedies affect us, both collectively and individually? What makes them linger in our psyches?
A CONVERSATION WITH
CHRISTOFFER CARLSSON
AUTHOR OF BLAZE ME A SUN: A NOVEL ABOUT A CRIME
HOGARTH, JANUARY 3, 2023 As one of Sweden’s leading criminologists, how has your work studying the origins of crime influenced your writing and Blaze Me a Sun? I started writing stories as a kid, to pass the time and to dream. If you were a kid in Marbäck, Halland, in southwest Sweden, in 1993, you had a lot of time to kill and you needed something to make you dream. So that’s what I did. I didn’t come to criminology until much later, when I was around the age of 20 having finished high school and looked around for something that would get me out of Marbäck and to Stockholm (this is somewhat ironic, considering that I these days spend about as much time dreaming and thinking about my birth place as I do where I live, here in Stockholm). So initially, my fiction-writing and my work in criminology were two separate workshops. However, with time, of course, most things in life tend to mesh together. Criminology offers some ideas, tools, or notions of what it means to be a human being, how what we are is connected to what we do and how that, in turn, may be connected to criminal activity. Criminology, of course, provides you with knowledge about how the police work; always useful. A writer also, sooner or later, needs to tell a lie, and criminology is great there too, as it sort of tells you when and how you can lie without making it apparent that you’re doing it. Beyond that, though, on a deeper level, I mean, one of the first things you learn as a criminologist is that while crime is a very common phenomenon, luckily, serious crimes are relatively rare in Sweden—but when they do happen, they are often the result of the most human things in us. Love, jealousy, friendship, loyalty, desire, safety. When crime occurs it is often the result of these very human things taken to their extremes or turned on their heads. Criminology also teaches you the rough brutal truths about crime: it’s dirty, bloody, messy, painful, raw, and costs a lot. Writing about crime is a delicate balance, where you don’t want to tip over into anything resembling a romantic idea of violence where you exploit suffering and pain, but you don’t want it to be too clean or polished either. Criminology can help you in that way. For Blaze Me a Sun in particular, I believe, aside from these things I’ve mentioned, there were two things that were important. One, of course, was the 1986 murder of Sweden’s prime minister, Olof Palme. Being a criminologist helped in understanding the big changes taking place in society at the time (and after) the assassination, maybe as a result of it. So it gives you that perspective, the analytic one, which—if used in the wrong way—can be terrible for a writer. Or great. The other thing is more difficult to put into words. Like all of us, criminologists are obsessed with meaning. That’s what science in general does, don’t you think? It provides us with meaning, or context. It explains things. But criminologists also know that, sometimes, meaning can be elusive. Two of my American colleagues wrote a book on crime, and at the end they quoted a Bruce Springsteen song: “They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” In Blaze Me a Sun, this notion of meaning is sort of tested. Could the worst of crimes be devoid of meaning? Strange things happen all the time, every day, and we don’t think too much of them because they don’t affect us that deeply. They just are, “coincidences” or something else, depending on what you believe in. But in Blaze Me a Sun, every character’s idea of meaning is tested, just like the country was tested back in 1986 when somebody killed Palme. So there’s that micro to macro connection.
A CONVERSATION WITH
CHRISTOFFER CARLSSON
Your mother was a 911 dispatcher and you’ve said that as a boy you visited her at the station. What do you recall about those experiences? Do you think seeing police work as a child shaped your broader understanding of the effects of crime? I remember being there with my mother a few times, me and my brother rarely got to go with her because you know, mom’s work place wasn’t like my father’s. He was a car mechanic and I remember just always being there, with him. To this day, a workshop where you repair cars and trucks is one of the safest places I know. I just feel at home there, like something in my soul goes “oh, right . . . this is how it’s supposed to be.” But when I was with my mother, things were different. My mother had a serious job where kids weren’t supposed to be. You could see things, or hear things, that they wanted to protect you from. So that’s what I remember, that sensation of being in a room where I shouldn’t be, with police officers coming and heading out, talking about things police officers talk about (coffee, sports, politics, family, and what they saw on the streets). These things, of course, had an immense importance for me. Because what I learned very, very early on was that police officers were people, regular workers. They were, in a sense, just like the carpenters and plumbers who lived a few kilometers up in the village near us. They got up, did their job, and then went home. They weren’t superheroes or anything, they were just people. Like me. The stakes were a bit different, to be sure, but the basic moral code was not: the principle about labor and life was pretty much the same. That’s ingrained in me ever since.
In Blaze Me a Sun you write about the far-reaching impact of crime on a community, not just the victims and their loved ones. What led you to this insight and why is it important to depict? When you come from a small place, you quickly learn how everything is sort of connected, trauma and pain becomes collective in a different way. Everybody talks about the same thing, and I haven’t experienced that in Stockholm too many times (although I have, after the terror attack in 2017). So I wanted to explore that. In a sense, that’s sort of the task of the writer, isn’t it? To search for the very depths of an event, how deep they can penetrate a character and how far-reaching they may be out there, in the world. The narrator of Blaze Me a Sun is a failing novelist who returns to his family home in Halland, a rural and agricultural part of southwest Sweden. What makes this region such a rich setting for a crime novel? Well, Halland is a very complex landscape. It has the sea, the great beaches and tourism places, open fields and meadows, but it also has the deep old nature and darkness of other parts of Sweden. It’s rural and agricultural, but it also has places of industry and commerce. It has cities but also villages and just areas of no man’s land. It’s bigger than you believe, and it feels even bigger as you travel through it. It’s a landscape that welcomes you, it seems, but with caution, and people are friendly but watchful, elbows could go out any second if you don’t behave like you should. There’s light, and darkness. In many ways, it symbolizes Sweden for me, and it always awakes the writer in me. I’ve paid my therapist a good deal of money to tell me why that is, exactly, but so far, he’s mostly been listening. Frustrating phenomenon, therapists. In the novel, a serial killer commits his first crime the same night Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme is assassinated. How has Palme’s murder affected Sweden in the subsequent decades? You were born in 1986, the year of the assassination. What about this crime haunts you? Oh, how much time do we have? Better lock the doors so you can’t get out. . . . The thing with Palme, for me, it was the last tragedy of my country that I managed to avoid. I was, so to speak, under construction at the time (I was born in August). My mother tells me that she was working on the night of the Palme murder. When the calls start to flood in after midnight and she slowly understands what’s happening, she calls home to tell my father: “They shot Palme.” And my father, who never cried, my mother tells me he bawled like a child right in her ear. I was always struck by that image, for me it’s incredibly
A CONVERSATION WITH
CHRISTOFFER CARLSSON
moving, of my father just breaking down. If he reacted like that, I thought, how did others feel? That very scene is actually in Blaze Me a Sun. It was too emotionally raw not to use. As for the bigger question, of course, you can’t look at Sweden today and understand what you’re seeing if you don’t include the Palme killing. Palme wasn’t just a national politician, he was an international icon. Many people who came to Sweden from other countries felt so proud because they felt that they had come to “Palme’s country.” And when he died, something in us died too, I think. Or maybe not? Maybe what actually brought about the changes in Sweden weren’t the fact that he died, but that the police never caught the killer. Would the Palme murder have been “THE PALME MURDER” if it had been solved back in ‘86? Maybe it’s as powerful and painful, still, because it never got solved. What does that say about us? Maybe not that we can’t deal with the worst of catastrophes, we are surprisingly strong in that regard—but we need closure to heal? I don’t know. Blaze Me a Sun sort of delves into that darkness to see what is there, and what it finds, I think, is maybe, most of all, a change in mentality. A change in how we see ourselves, what we see in the mirror. The Palme murder brought to light the dark parts in us, and forced us to confront it. Since 2020 and the murder of George Floyd, many Americans have come to understand that the police are not always a force for good. How are the police viewed in Sweden today and has that changed in recent years? So, in Sweden, the police and other authorities are viewed in a comparatively positive light, actually. It varies from place to place, of course, and in the big cities’ public housing, they’re viewed more negatively and considered a repressive rather than protective or constructive force. Issues of police violence, racial profiling, and unjust use of force are discussed and debated every year, when something happens or comes to surface. There have been many instances of riots or protests in Sweden, as a result of police actions, predominantly in public housing. So there are problems here too, and as the criminal networks have begun to increase in strength and their use of violence, so has the police’s efforts to combat them—which of course brings about collateral consequences. So I’d say differences between Swedish and American police are differences in degree, not in kind, but the distance in degree is quite large.
Blaze Me a Sun marks your American debut, but it’s already a bestseller in many countries. How are readers reacting to the book and what kind of questions do they ask? Yeah, what’s going on is just amazing. It’s beyond my wildest imagination. One thing that’s struck me since the book started traveling around the world is how geographically specific it is but how emotionally and thematically universal it seems to be and how strongly that seems to resonate with Polish, Dutch, German, and French readers. All countries have events or things that shape them, wounds that struggle to heal, and love is love, obsession is obsession, fathers and sons are fathers and sons— not matter if you’re Swedish, French, German, or Polish—or American. The world becomes both bigger, in a sense, but also smaller. I’m so happy about that, it makes me feel less alone in the world, haha. You are the youngest writer to win the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award, whose past winners include legends of crime writing like Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. How does Blaze Me a Sun fit into the tradition of Scandinavian crime writing? How does the book expand and update that tradition? Oh. I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer that question, really. I’m not sure Henning or Stieg would have answered any differently, either, so that’s my defense. Haha. All I try to do is tell the stories that, for better or for worse and for one reason or another, come to me, and then do what I consider every writer’s task: to explore that story in all of its complexity and depth, even when it’s ugly (especially when it’s ugly), to tell it like it’s the last thing I’ll do, and walk my characters all the way home.