What Lies Beneath

From under the even-keeled Swedish national character, the warm, imaginative and even edgy personality of Stockholm emerges like a surprise ending.

By Jennifer Edwards

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Photo by David Sanger

There’s a sculpture in Stockholm that still haunts me. In the grey glimmering waters, just in front of the parliament buildings, the lower half of a face – nose, mouth and chin – juts out of the water. About six metres away from the face is a hand with an index finger that points inexplicably up to the sky.

Every day during my week-long stay, as I crossed the bridge that leads from Normalm to Gamla Stan ( Stockholm’s city centre stretches over 14 islands), I stopped and stared at that partially submerged being. I found myself becoming transfixed as I wondered what she was doing there and what it was that she wanted me to see. A German couple came by and laughed as though they were in on the joke. An orchestra of Japanese gazed quizzically for a moment and then took pictures. It was a lone Brit who came closest to articulating my thoughts: “I think these Swedes are playing us,” he said, nudging my elbow.

Lagom is a word that is often used to neatly sum up the Swedish national character. It comes from the expression laget om (around the team), and was used by the Vikings when they passed around the horn so that everyone could take a sip from the mead. It means not too much, not too little, just the right amount. To the Swedes, though, it has also come to mean, well, ordinary, highlighting a collective distaste of anything extravagant or self-aggrandizing. The thing is that as I island-hopped around this floating capital city, I kept sensing something else bubbling up from below the waters.

It’s true that on the surface, Stockholm is nothing but calm and sensibility. Its streets are orderly, and there’s virtually no graffiti. Its waterways, after massive purification efforts, are clean enough to swim in, and its fresh-faced Bergmanesque blondes effortlessly glide through the city on old bicycles while talking on their mobile phones. Everyone here is greeted with a hej – which sounds like “hey” but ends with a perky upturned “y” – and is thanked, as if to compensate for the exuberant hello, with an abrupt and perfunctory tack. On the busier shopping streets, the famed stationery store, Ordning&Reda, which literally means “neat and tidy,” gleams with stacks of colour-coded notebooks, binders and pens.

At check-in, I am assured by Chris, the clean-cut guy at the front desk of my hotel, that I won’t have any problems navigating the city. “ Stockholm has become very ‘Swenglish’ in the past few years,” he says, referring to the fact that today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any Stockholmer who can’t switch to perfectly enunciated English on a dime. No, the only people I’d have to keep an eye out for are the “Vikings,” he mysteriously warns before pointing me to the elevator, which in Swedish is ominously called the hiss.

My room is small, but bright, and overlooks the park across the street. As I browse through the music library – an iTunes collection of techno, trip hop and bubblegum Swedish pop (how could I have forgotten Roxette?) – I notice a guest book lying on the table. I flip it open. The first page I land on has an exuberant pronouncement: “Is this town sexy or what? Make love and have fun… The Swedes are great at both!” I climb into bed and during my jet lag-induced 12-hour sleep, I dream I’ve landed a plum role in a Viking musical.

Over the next few days, in between exploring the contemporary art museum, the Moderna Museet, and the city’s former working-class but now trendy neighbourhood of Södermalm (or SoFo for its location south of Folkungagatan), I meet an assortment of Stockholm characters. Some play bit parts, like the suave student waiter with the dark curly hair at the Berns restaurant, who kibitzes with his guests in whatever language they speak, fully aware of the eyes that trail him. Then there’s the group of kids gathered in the park for a skateboard tournament. With a whiff of wood smoke in the air and “Ballroom Blitz” blasting from a set of huge speakers, a hell-on-wheels 10-year-old boy with long blond hair, ripped jeans and a black hoodie leads the pack while being coached from the sidelines by his mum.

There are others who play leading roles in my Stockholm script. The first is Ida Sjöstedt, a rising fashion designer whom I meet one afternoon in the store that she shares with other local designers. She shows me her latest collection of military-meets-romance styles. There’s plenty of gold buttons, collarless jackets and frills. As we talk, her hands fly about and every now and then she flips her long, straight brown hair over her shoulder. I finger a “tutu wrap” made out of tulle and a satin ribbon that ties up in front. She puts it on. Instantly she looks like she might take flight with this sudden sprouting of gauzy white wings. Surely, this is not very lagom.

“A few years ago, Swedish design meant knitted, crafted stuff, but that’s all changed,” she says later as we stop for fika, the Swedes’ almost-sacred coffee break. “Designers here now have a more underground appreciation and expressiveness.” I ask her about the massive worldwide success of homegrown retailer H&M and its huge influence on the local fashion scene. “If grads don’t set up their own shops, they’ll go to work there. But sometimes it’s difficult to work in a city where everyone is so focused on H&M’s high street fashion.” She pauses, then adds, “At least it means that the world’s eyes are on Sweden.”

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