“It is something of the primordial force in man, in me, that must come out,” wrote Agneta Klingspor, twenty years old, in her diary. “It’s not good to shut up.” Those words would apply to her whole life. And all her writing.
Despite the surname, she had nothing to do with the upper class, rather the opposite, she was very pleased with the title of Maria Jönsson’s dissertation (2006) about her: “Like a coat rack. Autobiography, aesthetics and politics in Agneta Klingspor’s authorship ”
In the debut book “Don’t just cut rice”, which stretches from the teens to the thirties, you can read about Klingspor’s upbringing in Uddevalla in a not entirely unproblematic family.
When she made her debut in 1977, she worked in psychiatry, but now the diary ended up at the top of the lists of this year’s best-selling books.
The inspiration came among other from Suzanne Brøgger and Anaïs Nin. But the diary broke many unwritten rules and fell outside the wave of feminist novels of the seventies, which was then contemptuously called “confessional literature”. Even if one were to be private, Klingspor was too private, and if wrong things (sex), she was considered too uninvolved in certain women’s issues (snotty toddlers, disk) and her erotic descriptions were dismissed as porn (“nymphomaniac”, as she was called in a review). But one can rather see that aspect of the diary as a precursor to contemporary novels about tinder dating, even if they are received more kindly.
She wrote erotically and sensually, but at the same time crass and fast. Agneta herself remained unmarried, never had any children, and her relationships were sometimes subtle, sometimes skyrocketing: the soggy boredom was not her thing. She was more Rut Hillarp than Sonja Åkesson. It was a conscious choice, the nuclear family did not interest her, it requires too much adaptation to norms. The question that ran through her life and writing was instead: How is one a free woman? Through passion and independence? She lived a political life and portrayed it literary, but she never came up with any pointers.
Seeking female freedom is for better or worse. Agneta Klingspor was not afraid to explore the risk zones that the pioneering woman could end up in. After “Do not just cut rice”, she had a more fictional diary take over, entitled “Key novel”. Here she also lay ahead of her time, with a book that today would be called autofiction. The collection of short stories “Köttryckningar” also says something about her attitude to relationships, and in the novel “Pressa läpparna här”, which was nominated for Swedish Radio’s novel prize, she writes about the backs of the wild attraction.
The lack of a family security safety net also led to greater financial vulnerability. The novel “If it goes to hell, I’m still born”, an “activity story”, is a report from the fragile reality that takes place right in front of the noses of everyone who moves through the city, but which most people choose not to see. The main character lives his life on Södermalm and sees, both through television and on his long walks, with an initiated and unsentimental look at poor pensioners, addicts, outsiders and beggars. She feels the thin line between her own life and theirs, she sees decay and loss and is herself afraid of falling through. Klingspor’s drastic and short-sighted humor also emerges here. “If it goes to hell, I’m still born” is a furiously funny book, in the middle of misery, according to Agneta Klingspor herself “a gallows humorous, desperate critique of civilization”. In a couple of sequels, “Closed due to health soul” and “If it goes to hell, I will still die”, social criticism continues, but now reflected in the vulnerability that comes with a cancer diagnosis and with aging.
I got to know Agneta when I was a teenager. It’s almost forty years ago. There have been many wine and cig nights in the beautiful second home by the White Mountains. Her home was full of strange objects that she had found cheaply at the flea market and managed to load with magical life. On the walls hung peculiar art, often created by her artist friends. When my friends and I went home from Agneta’s dinners, we had with us a whole survival manual of raw findings mixed with unexpected and pragmatic tips.
In recent years, she worked part-time as an SFI teacher in Tensta and Rinkeby, at the same time as she wrote about art in Expressen and about literature in BLM. Her lyrics – a selection can be found in the pocket “Well, you got it” – always had a moment of lightness about it, a spontaneity of discovery, and the gaze always came from below or from the side, never von oben.
Throughout her writing career, she was sometimes a super celebrity, sometimes a hidden figure. She had great integrity, she set boundaries and spoke and wrote plain language, seemingly simple but with strong energy and intensity. There was nothing flattering about her, and cold talk was not her thing – even when she dwelt on more mundane topics, they gained depth and meaning. My daughters renamed her Magneta, which says something about her charisma.
Now the burning, brutally wise primordial force has gone out of her body. But her books are still hot.
Read more:
The author Agneta Klingspor is dead – she turned 76 years old