My photograph of Bodil while signing books at Akademibokhandeln in Stockholm. Copyright belongs to me, so don't you dare snatch this pic, you loafing oaf.

Bodil Malmsten is one of my favourite Swedish writers, perhaps the favourite Swedish one.

She wrote along the lines of Michel de Montaigne and Thomas Bernhard, longing for the real, never settling for the bad.

Her immediate, non-apologetic, deeply human tone of voice went through everything she ever did.

She wrote a blog which was then published as a book; very Montaigne.

Jag skriver inte av mig smärtan, det är främmande för mig. Livet är råddigt, stökigt, det händer saker hela tiden som man inte vill ska hända. Syrien, Palestina, det är ingen drömvärld vi lever i. Min tillflykt har alltid varit skrivandet, hur dåligt jag än mått. Efter ett tag blir det lustfyllt, ibland plågsamt, att hålla på och leta efter det där ordet.^[1]

That translates to:

I don't write off the pain, it's foreign to me. Life is untidy, messy, things happen all the time that you don't want to happen. Syria, Palestine, it's not a dream world we live in. My refuge has always been writing, no matter how bad I felt. After a while it becomes pleasurable, sometimes painful, to keep looking for that word.

Links

• Essäismer: Bodil Malmsten om behovet av Montaigne

That I came to read Montaigne is due to a professor obsessed with public education who thought I needed Montaigne and sent all three essays in Jan Stolpe's translation to the house where I lived in Finistère on the French Atlantic coast.

Everyone needs Montaigne – it's just that for me it was fifty years too late.