Dowlatzai’s “Hassan Blattejävel” Offers liberatingly Complex Portrait of a Young Refugee
Stockholm, Sweden – Faiaz Dowlatzai’s latest novel, “Hassan Blattejävel” (2024), delivers an expressive and aspiring work exploring the fractured identity of a young man navigating life as a refugee in Sweden. The novel, reviewed by Kristina Lindquist in Dagens Nyheter, revisits themes from Dowlatzai’s previous work, “Gosale. Three Idiots’ adventures” (2023), including the landscapes of northern Afghanistan and the experience of displacement, but expands significantly in scope and literary experimentation.
The protagonist, Hassan, is depicted as a complex and often contradictory figure – a threatening presence in school, a hopeful dreamer anticipating police interaction (“I had planned everything in advance; how I would sit, how slowly and confident I would speak, how properly I would smile, sigh, put one leg over the other, ignore the inspector’s questions and instead ask for a cig.”), a romantic drawn to nature (“Thanks the dearest forest. Thanks the sun and thanks the wind.”), and a young man grappling with love and loss, haunted by a past that includes exhuming his brother’s body for a final kiss.
Lindquist notes the novel’s structure – over 200 short chapters interweaving scenes from Afghanistan with a brutal escape narrative – contributes to a disorienting effect,mirroring Hassan’s internal state. “The text is a confession with constant retakes that will soon make the reader doubt everything she heard,” Lindquist writes.
While acknowledging some flaws, including “incorrect caricatures” like a teacher depicted with a Hitler mustache and occasionally arbitrary literary devices, the review emphasizes the novel’s overall power. “It doesn’t realy matter,” Lindquist asserts, “Not when the book is also saturated with desperate energy and a sense of life that captures the space where meaning and meaninglessness strike each other.”
Ultimately, “Hassan Blattejävel” is presented as a powerful exploration of what constitutes a reasonable life and who has the right to define it, offering a liberating embrace of “complex, complex and irrational humanity.”
