"Reine Never Went to Camp": An Excerpt from Barnens Ö (Children's Island) by P. C. Jersild, Translated from the Swedish

Introduction

P. C. Jersild is a contemporary Swedish novelist whose satiric portraits of life in his own country spark controversy and debate every time he publishes a new book. Written for adults, Children's Island (Barnens Ö) was a bestseller in Sweden in 1977. It describes the life of a boy named Reine Larsson, not yet eleven years old, whose young mother had hoped to pack him off for the summer to a municipal children's camp while she enjoyed her own vacation during the country's annual industrial holiday. Reine ducks the camp, returns to his empty apartment in Sollentuna, one of the Stockholm suburbs, and gets through the summer as best he can, working at odd jobs, joining a gang of motorcycle hoods, and seeking whatever adventures turn up.

Jersild has said that he intended the book as a kind of Huckleberry Finn, the difference being that Reine's search for summer adventure in Stockholm illustrates that individual freedom cannot be found in contemporary urban life. Despite the boy's brave—and comic—attempts to play hookey from organized social services and adult supervision, he is a prisoner. His sterile environment offers him little opportunity for sympathetic human contact and affection. In a society with a decreasing birth rate, where adults have no time or need for children, Reine feels most keenly his own insignificance; as he reflects, "How could he compete with them [adults]? There was actually nothing that children were the best at, except possibly creeping in and out of small windows." In Reine's world, reading gives him his most reassuring contact with a larger human community: The Guinness Book of Records is his encyclopedia of the world's useful knowledge, and a Donald Duck comic is his "security blanket," furnishing a comforting image of family stability as well as escapist relief.

Reine Larsson is only a couple of years older than Pippi Long-stocking, the fiercely independent Swedish child created by Astrid Lindgren a generation earlier. But the whimsical fantasy of Lindgren's self-sufficient little heroine is completely absent in Jersild's book. Instead, we see a harshly realistic portrayal of the lives of many young people now living in Sweden, without significant contact with adults—young people who may have been encouraged to adopt the ideal of self-sufficiency from Pippi in countless Swedish children's books, films, and records, but who also exhibit the effects of the depersonalized society that Jersild depicts so chillingly. The Guinness Book of Records and Donald Duck comics, both the staples of Reine's home library, are the favorite reading material of most Swedish schoolchildren today.

Reine Never Went To Camp

At quarter to six the alarm clock started beeping. When it had beeped a few times, there was a series of short rings. Reine shut it off. He'd been awake a long time. He had packed, gotten dressed, napped awhile, and wakened again about five-thirty. He threw off the sheet and got out of bed, already dressed in jeans, yellow tee shirt, and sneakers with laces that were too long. Today he was to go to Children's Island.

He went over to his mother, who lay snoring on the sofa bed, one naked, freckled leg sticking out. Blouses and dresses were hung on clotheshangers scattered throughout the room, on the curtain rod, the ceiling light, and the handle of the door leading to the balcony. His mom was also leaving today but in the other direction, west to Uddevalla. But her train wasn't until ten-thirty. What the hell if he just didn't wake her up? If she wasn't awakened, she'd probably sleep until early evening.

He went to the kitchen and glanced at the breakfast table, which he'd set at dawn, between two and three o'clock. Goddamn it, he felt sick just looking at the cornflakes box. Oatmeal, he thought, and felt how his stomach turned like a seal inside him. Oatmeal, of...