Review of Circulation, by Magnus Florin, trs. Harry Watson, pub. Vagabond Voices 2024

Elin:
 “How long have you been here?”
Me:
 “Sometimes I think it’s several months. Sometimes only a few days.”

The word “Kafkaesque” is bound to come to mind when discussing a novel about a man working in a huge building (“the bank”) whose business is always a bit of a mystery to him and where life constantly repeats itself. The bank’s crooked managers are periodically found out by the auditors, fired and replaced by equally crooked successors, a staff party is promised but never materialises, bizarre accidents happen for no apparent reason. Meanwhile our unnamed narrator, whose existence at first revolved entirely round “the bank”, gradually begins to make a life outside it, courtesy of Elin, who becomes his wife, and their two children.

There is quite a lot of speculation as to what money actually is and how it works:
“You misunderstand the nature of money. If I steal money from you and buy something from a seller and this seller then buys something from another seller, it does not happen that the law, when it discovers the theft, tries to follow the route of the money and demand it back from the last seller.”
Me:  
“But why?”
Him:
“Because it is no longer that money.”

But I think it would be a mistake to assume that money is the crux of the matter. “The bank” could actually be any large business or organisation and anyone who has worked for one, not necessarily a bank, will have many moments of rueful recognition:

“The manager introduced the new standardized paper formats. All the tables, pedestals and cupboards were replaced to suit the new formats.”

Then there is the caretaker asked what his recent promotion entails: “According to the manager, the promotion of a caretaker means the right to be designated as promoted caretaker”.

It seems to me that “the bank” represents the whole world of paid work, that monolith that dominates so many of our lives, and so seldom to our benefit. It begins much like a fairytale: our narrator, effectively orphaned, is expelled from the world of childhood and walks to the big city to seek his fortune, ending up at the bank because he has family connections with it. Indeed it seems most of its employees dropped into the work by chance: “They say that this is not exactly what they once dreamed of”. Our narrator makes periodic noises about leaving and trying something else, but it does not sound as if he ever will.

He does, however, marry and start a family, and judging by the novel’s ending, this is the only truly worthwhile part of his life. Though, as his children Monika and Henrik (his family are the only people in the novel to be named) play in the park, one wonders if they too, eventually expelled from childhood, will end up in “the bank”.

This is such an unorthodox novel that one feels grateful to Harry Watson and Vagabond Voices for getting it translated from Swedish and introduced to a wider audience.