Maxim Grigoriev's "Adrian" is an ambitious and painful contemporary novel

In Eyvind Johnson's novel "Romantic story" from 1953, something strange happens to the main characters. The three turn out to be different sides of the same self: the bourgeois writer Yngve, his cousin the journalist Greger and the working-class writer Olle, who is clearly related to Olof in the autobiographical novel suite "The Novel of Olof". In the end, the other two ask themselves: where did Olle go? Something similar is happening in Maxim Grigoriev's new novel "Adrian". The question is asked at regular intervals: where did Adrian go?

I belong to those who have greatly appreciated Grigoriev's critically acclaimed novels "Europe" and "Rain". The slightly hypnotic rhythm of the prose and how the elegiac suddenly steps over into black social criticism. "Adrian" is a continuation - but Grigoriev has now decided to take even greater risks. It is exceptionally good.

The plot revolves around the three friends - are they friends or are they perhaps just stuck in each other's lives? - Adrian, Kristian and Johannes. As well as the Ukrainian Elena, with whom two of them will live. The three young men meet in the A-level literature course at Stockholm University and have a tentative, shared interest in Gunnar Ekelöf. Kristian soon loses his desire for literature, but is all the more obsessed, physically, with the picture-perfect Adrian. It gets complicated because for a few years they share a dingy apartment in the Atlas area - in the same block where Elena cleans for a pawing elderly gentleman. Johannes is the one who goes on to get a doctorate, fascinated as he is by the "fragment", the "unfinished" of Ekelöf, among others.

The title character Adrian has, as the name suggests, a complicated background. His Russian academic mother fathered him with a Kurdish refugee who abandoned them for the "struggle". Adrian grew up with the cheerful Chilean exile Claudio, who gave him the Spanish language. But Adrian's only real home is literature, a place where, as a young man, he believed that one could "speak properly".

Academic life appears, as in many Swedish novels, as a hell of careerism, hierarchy-obsessed and complacent mumbling. Adrian ends up among people who immediately notice if you bought your shirt at Dressman, and his supervisor politely asks "how it is in his home country". Adrian is soon expelled from the academy, despite his – as it turns out – rather unique insight into Ekelöf.

His life's project becomes the strange "elegy" he incessantly writes (and which he pronounces with a hard g, which his peers snidely note) - increasingly isolated, during the bohemian years in Berlin with Elena and then alone on the sunny Spanish coast. Does he succeed in carrying out what he intends? It's the nail-biter of the plot, and I'm not going to gossip.

So far this is an artist and educational novel. But Grigoriev wants much more: to write a total novel that captures an entire society and an entire era (roughly 2000–2025), about a Sweden where everything is even about "housing career", to have the right index fund and where art, in the words of the materialistic Kristian, is really a kind of home decoration. I underline a number of pithy phrases, such as when young Adrian dreams of "real" inner-city life: "This is what you'd wanted to create for the last eighty years, he thought of the commuter trains or night buses back to his boyhood room, over and over again, or at least what you'd been able to. A series of islands in the dark, separated by freeways."

Or when he returns to Stockholm as a bitter adult: "Outside the record stores on Sankt Eriksgatan, musicians stood smoking and watching SUVs drive by. They explored bdsm in controlled ways and worried about climate change." There is also the aftermath of an abortion and a lingering wonder about what a different everyday life could have looked like. It is a pain point, which in a concrete and lackluster way makes the question of the relevance of art quite leaden.

The novel is on every level related to the classic Russian novel whose main exponent is Fyodor Dostoyevsky: large parts of the action are driven forward by conversations or monologues, not infrequently about the nature of art, or about the "financialization" of society and the soul, where someone gets to drive their thesis into the brick. Adrian is, in his own way, one of Dostoevsky's holy fools.

This is a prose that wants to contain everything, not least an enormous sadness. It is no coincidence that Adrian's name is almost an anagram for the mythical "Ariadne" - which gave rise to the story of the red thread leading out of the labyrinth. As the young Adrian thinks, as he enters the inner city that soon spits him out again, and reflects on how his idealized Atlas region takes its name from Atlas Copco's now-forgotten factory:

"This was his home: a pit of stone with panes of glass where the factory once stood: where thousands, tens of thousands, stayed before him". We are all part of stories larger than our own lives. Maxim Grigoriev's "Adrian" is a novel that has the ambition to use all the possibilities of literature to get a glimpse of that matter. Without such we easily get lost in the world.