A Swedish Meatball

John Nadler, at the Contemporary Nomad blog, headlines this excerpted story “The Case of the Swedish Ghost Book: A Critical WhoDunnit, or Hell Hath No Fury like a Swedish Literary Critic Who ‘Detests’ You.” He writes by way of introduction: “We’ve all heard of books being reviewed after being lightly read or even unread, but how about a careful reading and a harsh review of a book that doesn’t exist? ...

A book reviewer on a Swedish newspaper has got himself into hot water for writing a review of a book that has not been written. To make matters worse, Kristian Lundberg claimed the book’s plot was ‘predictable’ and said the characterizations were one-dimensional.

Lundberg made the comments in Helsingborgs Daglad, in an article about recently published thrillers, reports Dagens Nyheter. Among those he reviewed were Britt-Marie Mattsson’s novel Fruktans Makt (The Power of Fear).

Unfortunately for Lundberg, while the book had been advertised in Publisher Piratforlaget’s autumn catalogue, Mattsson never actually got round to writing it.The newspaper has made an ‘unreserved apology’ to Mattsson. Lundberg’s apology was more qualified. He told Svensk Bokhandel magazine that he had ‘got worked up in advance about Britt-Marie Mattsson because I detest her so very greatly. But let’s hope the book is published so I get the chance to say it for real.’

Mattsson has not yet made her views on the subject known. But Piratforlaget’s spokesman Mattias Bostrom said it confirmed what they’d suspected about reviewers.

‘We’ve known for a long time that reviewers skim-read books, but now we know what really happens,’ he told Dagens Nyheter.

Read all the responses from Nadler and others to this piece here.