It’s not that Åsbrink has set the year 1947 as a structural constraint on her project. 1947 doesn’t seem to play a pivotal role there, but this is where it becomes obvious that the book is much more than an extended and scholarly version of my youthful doodling.

It’s a terrible story of loss at the hands of the Nazis and of mysterious, almost miraculous escapes, of resilience and heroism and devastation. A number of personal dramas play out: Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren begin their passionate relationship, and she starts work on The Second Sex Eric Blair aka George Orwell drafts 1984 Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs shine a literary light on the horrific recent past.īetween June and July is a chapter entitled ‘Days and Death’, 17 pages of the author’s family history, in which her personal connection to the events she narrates becomes clear. We see the beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood and a new significance for the term jihad, the rise of new white supremacist nationalism from the ashes of Nazism and Italian Fascism, the consolidation of Soviet domination of eastern Europe, the birth of the United Nations Genocide Convention, the role of the powerful western nations in setting up Israel to be a focus of conflict in its region, the cavalier and callous role of Britain in the partition of India and Pakistan. From these splinters a number of narratives emerge.

It progresses through the year, month by month, in tiny sub-chapters. I didn’t get much beyond the civil war in China, the new constitution in Japan, the establishment of the 40 hour week in Australia and a list of births and deaths.Įlisabeth Åsbrink’s project of assembling the year ‘into a splintered whole’ is much more ambitious than that, and has produced a hugely readable, enlightening and disturbing book. In my early 20s, before there was an Internet to make the task stupidly easy, I spent a little time drawing up a list of big events that happened in that year.

I have a personal interest in the year 1947: it’s the year when I began. This is lunacy, but time does not leave me alone. I try to assemble the year 1947 into a splintered whole. Elisabeth Åsbrink, 1947: When Now Begins, translated by Fiona Graham (2016, translation 2017)

1947 by Elisabeth Åsbrink