6th book of 2024.
Osebol, a random village in Sweden, is the focus of this 800-page oral history. Kapla interviewed a variety of people who live there/have lived there. I don't exactly know what I was expecting, whether I expected it to be deeper than it is. The mundanity of it struck me in the end as being the most profound thing about it. Over the many voices, people complain about the local bridge, the wolf problem, the landscape, the Swedes (from the foreigners who moved there). They also talked passionately (the passion showed through) about their childhoods, partners past and present, the natural world of Sweden and the evolution of the village against the backdrop of their lives. The noun "sonder", which is that realisation that everyone has a life as deep and complex as your own, those little jamais vu moments on planes and trains, is essentially the driving force of this book.