And I also agree with you about the rest. Most of the great books I’ve read over the last few years have come from Europe. Particularly the eastern end. Some of them too have been from south of the Pyrenees.

“Some decades ago, British author J.G. Ballard described his vision of a future hell. He had accidentally found his way into a residential suburb of Düsseldorf, where he saw street after street of manicured lawns and perfectly straight hedges, with a BMW in every drive. That was the worst future he could imagine: a paralysing uniformity.

Reading Koppel’s Homemaking, it is tempting to recall Ballard’s vision and to conclude that we are living in his future. What Koppel describes is the utterly predictable, total tedium that living in a small western country in the year 2008 implies.

I wish I could have called Homemaking a satirical novel, but it isn’t. It works within a realistic tradition, with scenes and analyses that individually hit the mark and make us laugh, but when taken together amount to a devastating portrait of the robot-like middle classes’ voluntary incarceration in the burglar-alarmed, electrified, homemade sheepfolds of post-capitalist society…

Hans Koppel’s novel may take a hatchet to the supposed good life at the top of the food chain, but its depiction of the way such a life is lived is borne out by various other novels published in the past year. These are mostly the simpler form of literature, written by bestselling women in the local chick-lit genre, and staggeringly neo-conservative. Of course there are small waves of dissatisfaction, particularly with sex roles – but in the final analysis they are nothing that the traditional nuclear family, another pregnancy, or a new patio can’t fix.

We self-mockingly term them the problems of industrialized nations, those petty details that daily ruin our lives: disasters like the coffee shop on the corner running out of cardamom for our latte, or the Pride parade clashing with our middle daughter’s birthday. Swedish literature currently abounds with problems like these. It’s all very dull.”

Exactly.