Bread of Love by Peder Sjögren

Elegiac Swedish war novel

Bread of Love, a novel by Swedish author Peder Sjögren, was first published in 1945. An English translation by Richard B. Vowles was published in 1965 by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of their Nordic Translation Series. Eleven books from that series, including this one, can be read online for free at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries website.

Sjögren’s novel takes place during the Finnish Continuation War of 1941 to 1944, a conflict that formed part of the Eastern Front of World War II. During that conflict, Sjögren volunteered to serve with Finns and Germans in combatting the Soviet Union, and some details of the novel reflect his own wartime experiences. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who travels to the home of his fallen comrades’ mother to explain the circumstances behind the deaths of her two sons, a pair of brothers with whom he served. The war story is thus told through flashbacks and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks. The narrator is one of a troop of 20 soldiers holed up in underground burrows beneath the ice and snow. Their entrenchments are surrounded by enemy mine fields, so every foray into the surrounding wintry forests brings the possibility of instant death, in addition to the lethality of the unrelenting cold. The plot concentrates on the narrator and three of his foxhole-mates, two of whom are the brothers in question, plus a Russian prisoner named Plennik whom they capture and befriend.

Sjögren illustrates the hardships of winter warfare in boreal regions with details that ring true to reality, as only one who experienced such conditions firsthand could. The story, however, is hardly indicative of the typical soldiers’ combat experience. The yarn that Sjögren weaves is a romantic tale that often harkens back to life and love before the war. Despite the bookending narrative framework involving the narrator and the mother of the two deceased soldiers, the real protagonist for much of the book is the Russian prisoner. At times Sjögren inserts suggestions of supernatural forces toying with the destinies of man, which divert the narrative from the realm of realism into the world of fable.

Sjögren repeats the mistake made by many modernist writers of wartime novels by making the narrative just too poetic to evoke the visceral experience of its setting. Certainly some soldiers who fight in armed conflicts do possess artistic souls, so one can’t be too surprised when the narrator describes frozen corpses or the sound of gunshots with the sensitivity of a lyrical poet. The delicate artfulness of Plennik’s love story, however, with its fairy-tale romance, dream sequences, and siren songs, does clash with Sjögren’s gritty scenes of the brutality and filth of war. It’s as if Sjögren, belying the indiscriminate killing of modern warfare, went out of his way to find the most complicated and operatic ways for a small group of soldiers to die. The result is a story that never feels grounded enough in reality to do justice to either the soldier or the lover.

Nevertheless, if you are interested in Scandinavian literature, Wisconsin’s Nordic Translation Series is a good place to look. Rather than Bread of Love, however, I would recommend The Great Cycle by Norway’s Tarjei Vesaas, Kallocain by Sweden’s Karin Boye, or People in the Summer Night by Finnish Nobel laureate Frans Emil Sillanpää.
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