[ book tip by Hannah Geismar ] The story in Popular Music takes place in the 60s, more specifically in the Swedish town of Pajala, located above the arctic circle, close to the Finnish border. With approximately 7 months of winter and degrees down to –30 C°, you have to be thick-skinned in more ways than one to survive in Pajala.

Looked down upon by the Swedes for being too Finnish and by the Finnish for being too Swedish, the people of Pajala share a universally accepted inferiority complex that is dutifully passed on to the next generation. The idea of a better future is to leave and never look back. Which is what most young Pajalans do, or try to. Only problem: you have to grow up before you can leave, and that's what Popular Music is about. But the book goes way beyond its own narrative of coming of age in the 60s - of putting up with family, school and society in general while discovering music, girls and sex in the company of those all-important childhood friends.

Behind the storyline and the humor, Popular Music is most of all about coming out on the other side and finding that mental platform, where you can look back at your childhood with generosity and accept it without judging it. Pajala might not have had much to offer on the surface, it might even have been an incredibly boring place to grow up - but for any child, the place where he or she grows up is a country of its own, a magic kingdom, and what’s outside doesn’t matter much until you reach your teens. Niemi reminds us that something as simple as discovering music (in Niemi's case The Beatles) is not only mindblowing but world-shattering for most children - changing life in their magic kingdom forever in a matter of minutes.

Popular Music proves that if you manage to make peace with where and how you grew up, it will allow you to re-enter your own magic kingdom and re-live some of the moments that marked you forever.

Available in French as “Le gout du baiser d’un garçon”, Editions Actes Sud, 2004.

[ book info ] Niemi, Mikael: Popular Music. Harper Perennial, 2004 .