Image kindly provided by Jessica Pamp on Unsplash
A Letter to Claes Hylinger
Swedish Author
Dear Mr Hylinger,
You do not know me, but your writing has accompanied me for more than thirty years.
In 1994, my daughters' Swedish pen pal invited our family to Målsryd, situated in Borås Municipality, Västra Götaland Sweden for a holiday. Wanting to make the most of the visit, I spent the previous year teaching myself Swedish. I worked through a Linguaphone course and another self-study book whose title I gradually forgot.
At the end of that forgotten book was a short bilingual story. It was simple, almost understated, about a schoolteacher trying to understand what his pupils were thinking. It touched something deep within me. Long after I had forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar, that little story remained and It would return to my mind from time to time over the years, refusing to disappear.
Eventually I forgot where I had read it.
For decades I searched for it. Google never seemed able to help, despite my returning to the search again and again. I even convinced myself it might have been written by August Strindberg and contacted scholars who specialised in his work. None of the leads came to anything.
The irony is that, although I lost the story, I never lost what it awakened in me.
As a young man I had never encountered the personal essay as a literary form. Yet your story quietly revealed the kind of writing I longed to do. Years later I completed an MA in Creative Writing, where essay writing formed part of the course. Those essays became my strongest work, and I realised I had finally found my own voice as a writer.
Only a week ago I decided to ask ChatGPT for help. At first it drew a blank, but I persisted, refining the search again and again. Eventually it identified the story as Dagar och nätter i Paris och Göteborg by Claes Hylinger. It also identified the language course where I had first encountered it: Hugo Swedish in Three Months (1992 edition). Within days I found a copy on eBay for just £4.
When it arrived, I turned to the final pages and there it was.
After more than thirty years, I was reunited with the story that had quietly influenced the course of my writing life.
You could never have known that a brief piece included in a Swedish language textbook would influence someone living across the North Sea. Yet that is exactly what happened. Your writing planted a seed that took many years to flower. Now I am writing my Own book of personal essays, little notebook parts are found in some article on this blog.
I simply wanted to write and say thank you.
With warm regards,
Jim McCrory
Scotland