Customer Reviews

Fishing in Utopia

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An interesting story of Sweden written by a British journalist with
maybe "a little axe to grind." Andrew Brown spent many years as
a resident of Sweden in the 1970s-80s. Went back to Britain a bit disgruntled, remained there for awhile, then got the urge to try
Sweden again. He found Sweden had changed. FISHING IN UTOPIA is a
lament for a lost Eden. It is a journey into the past. You may
appreciate this book for countless reasons: contemporary state of affairs of Sweden and vivid descriptions of the country's nature
because of somewhat unusual fishing trips for fish.

For a well written book that is both educational and entertaining;
this is one to read now!

Dag Stomberg
St. Andrews, Scotland

I grew up in a household where Swedish was still spoken, my Grandmother and my paternal great grandparents having come over on the boat. As I read the book I felt like I was finally coming to understand my childhood and Swedish heritage. First of all, Sweden was never really socialist, if by that one means public ownership of the means of production without the dictatorship of the proletariat. Britain and France were the leaders in that department. Sweden's welfare state was not an economic policy but a cultural one and my understanding of that was improved dramatically, although perhaps only viscerally, by this book. The financial implications were just a part of a broader culture of ademantly enforced conformity and uniformity. The fact is an entrepreneur could do at least as much, and often times more, in this Utopia than in Britain or France, he just couldn't keep the profits. His description of his experience of why this was so and his brief mention of the theory behind it, the laws of "Jante", was spot on. Perhaps it's because this English cultural "spy" could also speak to the side of me that is of English extraction, but I do think it is accesible to many.
I'm not into fishing, but the fishing stories are more about the people who fish and the many places it took the author than the fish themselves. His contrasts with fishing in Britain were instructive. The Swedes I know have no self awareness and if forced to develop it become extremely combative. This may have been what changed Olaf Palme while at an American college. They don't like this in themselves, so they instead become extermely insular and the explanation for the dynamic of the welfare state becomes reduced to mere finance, which is not.
The author does give a good explanation of why this is disappearing, but it is brief as his return to Sweden was brief and thus may not be readily understood without someone with a Swedish background.

I don't have much of an opinion about this book, but since, as of this writing, Amazon's page has zero information about it, I guess I'll write a few lines to help out a bit.

I picked this book up and read it because I am interested in Sweden's economy. Thus the book's subtitle, "Sweden and Future That Disappeared," attracted me.

More particularly, I'm interested in socialist states, especially successful ones. But lately I've been reading articles about how Sweden is basically leveraged to the hilt, United States style: they have borrowed so much money to fund various entitlement programs that in the future, their taxes will have to be super-high, not to provide super-great benefits, but merely to pay the interest on their national debt.

I'm also interested in the gradual Islamization of Europe, particularly in countries that have had liberal immigration policies for the past few decades.

This being the case, it seemed like the book for me.

Unfortunately, while the book does TOUCH on these items, it's chiefly about fishing, about which I know zilch and have zero interest.

Here's part of the publisher's blurb from the inside, which I should have heeded more carefully:

"Andrew Brown spent part of his childhood in Sweden during the 1960s. In the 1070s, he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill, raising their small son, first in a housing estate on the edge of Gothenberg, and then in a makeshift chalet in the forest. Fishing became his passion and his escape from a country that alternately seduced and oppressed him with its mixture of communal philanthropy and deep conservatism. During the 1980s his marriage and his country fell apart as the temptations and compulsions of the outside world forced their way in."

As it turns out, immigration and unsustainable social benefit programs form a very minor part of this book.

The chief focus is instead of Brown's family situation and the wisdom he has received from fishing in a beautiful country. As far as that goes, it's tenderly -- may I say delicately? -- written and recalls me of the best nonfiction of Annie Dillard. Or, if I may presume, Izaak Walton.

So there's no problem from that angle; it's just that I wasn't expecting that. Passages like this are typical:

"In those days I fished as I lived, to a very rigid system. I would walk into the woods every chance I had, to feel that I was free, or at least elsewhere; but when I reached the lake, I cast always the same way, and fished only imitations of natural nymphs as slowly as I could move them -- though sometimes I'd forget, and catch a fish by accident, tugging a muddler through the ripples when there was a breeze." (p. 103)

Towards the end of the book, there does appear a chapter on immigration:

"Reading about the country from the outside, especially in the work of American hyper-nationalists, you would suppose that the whole place was on the verge of a jihadi uprising, that the satellite towns are slums full of disaffected Muslims." (p. 252)

. . . but the problem here is that the discussion simply doesn't seem candid. In fact, Brown never confirms or rejects the sentence above, or really seems to give his frank opinion about the matter, conclude anything, or make any projections. What discussions there are, I should add, contain very little in the way of hard data. Instead it's all along the lines of "Some think that . . . " and "Others have observed that . . . "

So not very satisfying as far as what I was looking for. Make sure you're interested in and knowledgeable about fishing if you pick this up. (E.g., what the heck is a "muddler"?)

The author, a Brit, has written for the Independent and the Guardian.