JONAS RYDIN

 
 

JONAS RYDIN was born in 1969 in Stockholm, studied political science and languages first in his native Sweden, and then later in Paris. In 1998, he settled in Vietnam where he has lived ever since and pursued a career in business. His debut novel, Världens åttonde underverk / The Eighth Wonder of the World (2021),
is a darkly evocative account of people connected to a clothing manufacturer outside Saigon. The author Carl-Henning Wijkmark has described the book as the first significant novel on the Eastern-Western theme in the Swedish language – in the same spirit as Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad and E.M Forster. "A masterpiece" wrote Stig Larsson in the Swedish newspaper Expressen.

Rydin's second novel, Dö som en konstnär /Die as an artist (2022), is a mournful and dreamy play about a man haunted by his past in a theater. The audiobook is narrated by Swedish actor Ola Rapace.

Photo: Thuy Chau

Agents Erik Larsson & Maja Hjelm

 
 

WORKS

DIE AS AN ARTIST

 
 

Published 2022
Genre LITERARY FICTION
Pages 206

Imagine that your name is Erik Hagelin and you have just returned to Sweden, after more than twenty years in Ukraine. You are a successful businessman and have recently published a book that has garnered some attention. Imagine trying to reconnect with your grown son even though you barely know how to recycle your garbage. Now you witness the advancement of the nationalists in your home country and feel an inexplicable discomfort in the entrance hall of your own apartment.

You are a person with big dreams and a lot of unprocessed history. One day you get an invitation to the 100th anniversary celebration of the theater where you worked as an usher as a young man and fell in love for the first time. Imagine that all of these things are pieces of the same puzzle.

Die as An artist is a game of self-deception and disguise; absurdities and improvisations. Everything can happen, everything is possible, and everything is probable.

 

REVIEWS

”Rydin is driven by a mild rage, and it's a fruitful method. It's entertaining most of the time [...] With Johan Heltne's book Sympathy for the Devil and to some extent Andrés Stoopendaal's The Dunning-Kruger Effect fresh in mind, one can read Rydin's book as yet another entry dealing with a crisis of masculinity in intellectual environments, among artists and cultural individuals. It is a world where the beautiful is taken over by the ugly.”
- Björn Kohlström, bernur

"Die as an Artist is different and unpredictable, the main character Erik is divisive and vaguely superstitious in an annoying way. He shifts from shy to mean, to rational to cocky. He has dreams of being an author, but is troubled with jealousy, love, self-doubt and family problems. We have a politically correct son with an unreasonable hatred for his aging father and surprising cultural figures – all wrapped up in a humourous story. Birger Sjöberg is cited: "The expensive drops of self-belief must be bought in the silent shed of one's own being." Or one’s own blood. An artistically exciting book.”
- Nina Lekander, author, journalist and translator

 

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD

 

Published 2021
Genre LITERARY FICTION
Pages 300

"It's just a job," said Magnus.

"You are wrong," replied Pamu. “It's people's lives. For you, it's just a job.”

The Eighth Wonder of the World takes place in Southeast Asia during the late 1990s. The unscrupulous Frenchman Harnois runs clothing factories for the company WhiteRock. Two young men from Sweden and Sri Lanka, Magnus and Pamu, are hired to investigate suspicions that something is not right in the facility outside Saigon.

Soon the men find themselves in a hidden power struggle and are adrift from their origins in the foreign land.

It is a novel about inequality and complicity, transformations and obscure love, told through different characters connected to a factory in Vietnam.

 

REVIEWS

”A strong and strange contemporary novel. East and West – the theme has followed us from both directions since ancient times. In the field of the novel, great classics have given their varied portrayals of the worldwide subject: Conrad, E.M. Forster, Malraux, Graham Greene, and several others. In Swedish, we have interesting and initiated reports about East Asia, but as far as I can see there have been no significant works of fiction. Jonas Rydin's novel contributes in a masterful way to filling the gap."
- Carl-Henning Wijkmark, author, translator and literary critic

“I realize that I'm holding a masterpiece [...] It's like a bank of knowledge, a bank of experience, which you can constantly draw from. It is so carefully written that it is a pure pleasure to read it [...] The world you enter through Rydin's care is fascinating in the same way as looking at the person you long for."
- Stig Larsson, poet, author, director and critic

"When you read Jonas Rydin's The Eighth Wonder of the World, it is almost incomprehensible that it is his debut novel. [It is] ... astonishing with what maturity and understated weight the book is written. The whole thing is also in a style that is kept intact from beginning to end. […] Similarities to Heart of Darkness and other novels about colonialism are not hard to find, but The Eighth Wonder of the World has found its very own place in that genre.”
- Fredrik Bergman, @Bestiarium

"For Swedish suspense literature, this is groundbreaking. This year's novel is The Eighth Wonder of the World and takes place in the textile industry of Vietnam and Cambodia – John Le Carré meets Graham Greene.”
- Cyril Hellman, journalist and poet

"Jonas Rydin describes in The Eighth Wonder of the World in a cold and initiated manner how global capitalism works [...] The theme is unusual but the novel is as exciting as a detective story [...] In a sensuous, fragrant, colorful Swedish – as if sifted through the French – he portrays people at different levels in the garment factory and about life from their perspective [...] His story about the contrasts between East and West makes me think of writers like Malraux, Greene and Forster...”
- Lena Torndahl, translator