Uppsala

I had been to Uppsala for a day trip before, 6 years ago, and had had a taste of the city; this time I could enjoyed it more leisurely. It’s a beautiful city, combining the historic feeling of an ancient capital with the modern bustle of a student city, since the university is the center of its life. I started by strolling along the river and relaxing at a nice café, before meeting my friends for a great Indian lunch, during which they gave me some invaluable tips about what to visit.

So I started with an incredibly good exhibition of old books and manuscripts at the Uppsala University Library, with some gems like Vesalius Anatomy, Newton’s Principia, Mercator’s maps, the Silver Bible, Persian, Jewish and many other beautiful books, even a letter by Marie Antoinette.

Then I visited the Trefaldighet church, with its beautiful wall paintings and altar piece, and then the Gustavianum Museum. It houses a small but excellent Egyptian collection, the curious and interesting Augsburg cabinets, a great collection of scientific instruments that look like works of art, and the recreation of the 17th century anatomical theater – not as beautiful as the one in Bologna but still remarkable.

Uppsala cathedral is an impressive building, both on the outside and the inside. Beautifully decorated, with many royal tombs and a small but great museum in the tower – medieval textiles, royal regalia from the tombs and the clothes of three nobles killed in the 16th century – interesting to see how small they were – people really got taller with the modern diet and health.

The Botanical Gardens are a good place to relax, the arboretum is great and the plants all labeled. From the castle one has great views over the city, and the Linneus Garden is also beautiful and informative. It was nice walking around town with a friend who explained about the Nations – the students’ places according to their origin – and several interesting anecdotes about the city.

I finished my visit to Uppsala in Gamla Uppsala, the seat of the old Viking capital. The burial mounds are still impressive, and the church – the former cathedral – beautiful. And it’s nice to have a feeling of a village just by the city.

I really enjoyed this trip to Sweden – resting, sightseeing and meeting friends, the perfect holidays.

Around Stockholm - Gripsholm and Sigtuna

The next day I took the train to visit the small and quaint village of Marienfred, by the lake Mälaren, and the castle of Gripsholm. Marienfred is a scenic little village, with wooden houses, a small church whose steeple towers over it, a nice waterfront with boats and views over the lake and the castle.

The castle of Gripsholm, built under the Vasas, is a beautiful red brick palace (the most recent tower is actually faux-brick, painted to resemble the rest) and houses the biggest portrait collection in Europe. And a truly remarkable collection it is, displayed all over the castle, whose architecture and décor are also worth seeing. There are portraits from all the royal houses in Europe since the Renaissance, the Swedish nobility, and Swedish personalities from the last two centuries, from Dag Hammarskjold to Greta Garbo or Björn Ulvaes.

After visiting the castle, I enjoyed a nice walk to the train station – only in Sweden can one enjoy walking 4 km in the sun at 3 PM of an August day! I ended the day catching up with a couple of old friends over dinner in a Thai restaurant in Gamla Stan – perfect.

The following day, I headed to Sigtuna in the morning. The oldest city in Sweden, it is a nice little town with a very touristy main street, some good rune stones, and a wonderful church. Mariekyrke was worth the trip by itself – beautiful wall decorations and altarpiece, and a bucolic graveyard.

Back in Stockholm, I walked from Odenplan to Karlavägen, a beautiful street lined with splendid buildings, towards the Historiska Museum. This is another wonderful museum, with an outstanding Medieval art collection, a treasury room full of amazing gold artifacts from the Viking age, and an interesting exhibition about the history of Sweden.

I walked along the sumptuous and super-posh Strandvägen, with its nice boat cafés by Djurgården, before having dinner with another old friend from Malmö who luckily happened to be in Stockholm – surstömming and Sauvignon Blanc at a terrace by the lake, talk of politics and travels, lovely.

Back to Stockholm

I finally went back to Sweden, after 6 years. I missed it, and not only because I try to learn Swedish, but because it’s such a beautiful and civilized country, and because I have several good friends there. Besides, where should one go in August when one dislikes the heat?
And I’m so glad I did it. Stockholm is just as beautiful as I remembered it, and I had such a nice weather – no more than 22ºC, a little rain in some evenings, perfect for walking around. After checking in at a hotel in Kungsholmen, I went out for an evening stroll. I walked along Norr Mälerstrand until the Rålambhovsparken, then across the Västerbron and then the Söder Mälarstrand, passing by the many anchored boats, and the boat hotel where I stayed on my first time in Stockholm. The Slussen is still undergoing renovations – for years – and then I revisited the lovely Gamla Stan, where I had a very nice Swedish dinner of steamed salmon with lingonberries (you cannot get much more Swedish food, unless you have meatballs of course).

The next day I started by walking through Vasastan, enjoying the sunny weather to look at the beautiful urban architecture – along the lovely Odegatan until Odenplan, then down to Drotningsgatan, where I had the pleasant surprise of finding a second-hand book street market. I love this kind of markets, and enjoyed myself browsing through the stalls, looking for Laterna Magica by Ingmar Bergman – that I eventually found and bought – and trying my feeble Swedish with some sellers. I ended up buying four books – couldn’t resist, they were all so cheap (between 1 and 4 euros), hope to be able to read them. I felt quite happy heading towards the National Museum, that for some unremembered reason I hadn’t visited on my previous trips to Stockholm.

I’m happy I visited this time, it’s an excellent museum (and free). I was particularly stricken by its painting collection from the 16th and 17th centuries, and then the design collection from the late 19th century until the present times, the glass works were exquisite.
Then I went to the Modern Art Museum, which shares the building with the Architecture and Design Museum that I had visited before and loved. This one is not as good, it has some very good pieces from the 1910s until the Abstract Expressionism, but I cannot really appreciate the contemporary works. (One aside about the restrooms – I’m all for mixed toilets, but it’s really not practical in crowded places, since it begets queues for everyone, when usually only women toilets have them! It’s a practical matter!)
The day ended with a nice Chinese dinner in Hornstull with a Swedish friend, we talked about politics, travel and life in general, and I went back to the hotel in a rainy but warm evening.

Spies of No Country, by Matti Friedman

I highly recommend this excellent book to anyone interested in the history of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not only is this book a real page-turner, it's also extremely informative about the origins of Israel and the way it relates to its Arab neighbours. Matti Friedman is not only a great writer, but also a sensible and accurate thinker, I've reading his columns and books and wish there were more people with his acumen, intelligence and sensibility.

Crossing, by Pajtim Statovci

My Cat Yugoslavia was a remarkable debut novel, a work of genius. And Pajtim Statovci doesn't let you down with his second novel, Crossing. It's a mesmerizing read, so good you just don't want it to end. Always moving but never corny, often funny is an ironic way, Crossing puts the questions of identity and the search for one's true self in a non-judgemental way, refusing easy labels or victimizing. Pajtim Statovci comes across as one of the great contemporary writers, I cannot but highly recommend reading his books.

The Book of the New Sun - Shadow & Claw, by Gene Wolfe

I don't know how I hadn't heard about this book before, there was a time when I read a lot of science fiction. This is a very good book of sci-fi / fantasy - actually two books, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, of a series of four, and I hope to read the other two soon. I'm always fascinated when an author can convey a whole believable alternative world, and this one is on a par with Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea and much better than JRR Martin's Game of Thrones. It's an engaging and page turning read, and still intelligent and interesting, for its clever plot and its original depiction of a world thousands of years from now, when the Sun is cooling.

Looking forward to read the next two books!

Yourcenar Biographie - "Qu'il eût été fade d'être heureux", by Michèle Goslar

Marguerite Yourcenar has always been one of my favourite writers, ever since I read the fabulous Mémoires d'Hadrien at 18 (I still consider it one of the most perfect books ever written). I read most of her books - novels, essays, memoirs, correspondence - and my admiration never decreased, just the opposite. Books like L'Oeuvre au Noir, Alexis, Le Temps ce Grand Sculpteur or Sous Bénéfice d'Inventaire have marked me deeply, and I've read them and reread them several times, always with the same pleasure and sense of discovery and wonder. Not only because the writing is exquisite, whether in French or in translation, but because the characters, the ideas, the feelings and reflections speak to me deeply.

Being such an admirer of her work, it was only natural that I wanted to know about her life. There is a lot of information about it in her writings - especially the essays, memoirs and letters - and I read her biography by Josyanne Savigneau years ago. Now I read this other biography, by Michèle Goslar, which comes near to a hagiography. And the impressions I get from all this reading cause me some ambivalent feelings - as much as I admire and love her work, I don't think I would have liked Marguerite Yourcenar as a person had I ever met her. I guess we are all prone to one particular mortal sin, and in her case what comes across is Pride - it looks like she was endowed with such arrogance that would make her unbearable. I had that impression from some of her essays and memoirs and especially from her letters, and it has been only strengthened by her biographies. So much self-righteousness, so much intellectual arrogance, such pride in her origins and upbringing, such a punctilious attitude in her dealings with her publishers, fans and even with her friends. An example, among many others, is her pride in her father, that she obviously idolised, but if one looks at his life and character as depicted in Archives du Nord and the biographies objectively, was no more than a cultivated fainéant that transmitted his own pride and conceit to his daughter. And this sense of arrogance is just reinforced by her pose as a modest and humble human being, which she certainly was not.

Yet her life was certainly interesting, and I cannot help but sympathise somewhat with her intellectual arrogance, suffering from the same ailment myself - thence the ambivalence. She was a keen observer of human nature, an admirer of the natural world and understood uncommonly well the great picture in history - and those are all admirable features. And I also sympathise with her hopeless passions for André Fraigneau and Jerry Wilson, not so much withe the way she treated her devoted companion of 40 years, Grace Frick. So what bothers me is not her life or personality, but her pretence of modesty, that verges on hypocrisy, which is a characteristic I loathe.

As for the biography - Michèle Goslar takes a too much hagiographic approach for my taste. She even tries to write in the Yourcenar style, which of course she isn't able to equal, and giving much information about a lot of her life events, she doesn't really capture or is able to depict some of the phases I would be most interested in, like her life in the 1930s and her relations to the French and Greek bohemia at the time - many hints, but not much enlightenment. And she seems to assume the same pose of her subject that displeases me - starting with the title of the book, the quote from Feux "qu'il eût été fade d'être heureux". As if she didn't care to be happy! When she obviously did, and the failure to be so haunted all her life, as her strong attachment to keep on living and her late passion for Jerry show. And that's one of the most obvious clues to the distance between her pose and her true self - the inability to resign herself to death, her strong and desperate will to live until the end.

So, I'm left with loving Yourcenar's work, and ambivalently relating to her personality, with her flaws that somehow make her more human and relatable. Maybe she was not a very nice person, but her books are wonderful and will endure and keep on giving us a sense of wonder.

Infidèles, by Abdellah Taïa

This is my favurite Taïa book so far, and I only don't accord him 5 stars because of the ending. The writing is beautiful and moving, as are the characters of Jallal, Slima and Saiâda. The feelings of the outcasts are wonderfully depicted. But then, why the religious dénouement? I really couldn't feel it as an adequate development. Anyway, it's a very beautiful book.