Review: Livet är ett äventyr

This is a collection of short stories by Staffan Heimerson, the veteran Swedish journalist who seems to have spent much of his career turning up in places where sensible people were either evacuating or strongly advised not to go.

The stories jump cheerfully between the dangerous, the ridiculous and that particularly entertaining territory where the two overlap. There’s the hunt for Bin Laden in Falun, admittedly not the first place the CIA should have looked. Followed by a road trip along the Karakoram Highway, that spectacular ribbon of asphalt connecting China and Pakistan through mountains seemingly designed to remind humans of their insignificance.

The opening chapter recounts Heimerson’s meeting with Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp in Chatanga before Kropp’s ill-fated North Pole expedition in 2000. Heimerson himself eventually made it to the North Pole. Having reached one of the most remote and mythologized points on Earth, surrounded by endless ice and the crushing majesty of nature, he did what any distinguished foreign correspondent apparently does, namely peed on it.

There are darker adventures as well. In Zimbabwe, Heimerson was taken prisoner and found himself disposing of classified documents in an outdoor toilet to avoid suspicion. Journalism, it turns out, occasionally involves less Woodward and Bernstein and considerably more creative use of sanitation facilities.

That’s largely the pleasure of Livet är ett äventyr. Heimerson doesn’t treat travel as some solemn pilgrimage toward enlightenment. The world is strange, dangerous, funny and frequently absurd, and he seems perfectly happy to let it remain that way.

The stories are short, fast and entertaining. Easy summer reading for anyone who prefers their travel literature with dictators, questionable decisions and the occasional act of territorial urination. Adventure, after all, is usually what we call a bad idea once enough time has passed.

And if you want something with a little more weight, I can recommend Heimerson’s Sarajevo from 1995, which goes deeper into his travels through Eastern Europe.