Shifting Passions is a novel of ideas and passion, a Bildungsroman about a young man’s search for love and a meaningful life. The story begins during a time that was rocked by youth revolts and protests against the Vietnam War, a time of collective passions that culminated in 1968, only to be followed by a turn to private passions, which in the 1980s gave us Thatcher and Reagan.
After the hippie, the yuppie.
After Mao, Deng.
Part One: My Future Is With the People
Part Two: Love without a Compass
Cecilia moves in with Johan and he trades his inner-city studio for a two-bedroom apartment in a working-class suburb. When the editor of the Maoist student magazine leaves, Johan is appointed editor. It turns out to be an all-consuming job. A series of events in late 1978 and early 1979 undermine their relationship, which was built on a shared political ideology. Deng Xiaoping assumes power and introduces capitalist economic reforms. Vietnam invades Kampuchea and China invades Vietnam. Johan struggles to fit the pieces together, but he ends up losing his faith in Maoism and Marxism, while Cecilia begins to dream of starting a family. He is on the other hand overtaken by a private passion and falls – unhappily – in love with another woman. Then his father dies, deepening his existential crisis. He leaves Cecilia and takes a job at a big city newspaper. A new phase of his life begins.
Part Three: Trying to be Normal
Johan is now thirty years old, and he has cut off his ties to the Maoist movement. He is a graduate student and supports himself as a journalist at a large newspaper; but it’s only as a temporary job. He has also resumed his search for a woman. He meets Penny and they end up in her bed that same night. She’s not interested in politics but is generous and sensual. His feelings grows and he proposes to her during a trip to Crete. She tears up but asks for time. Realizing that she looks for safety in a man, he gives up his graduate studies in economics and takes a job as a computer journalist. He waits patiently for her answer, but she breaks up with him after having found another man, one with a good job, a car, and a house. “It was you trying to be normal,” his old friend Carl says. Johan continues his work at the computer paper, but he is elected leader of the local union and ends up in a conflict with the owner. He wins the fight for a contract but leaves to become a freelance journalist.
Part
Four: Zigzagging in the Middle Kingdom
Adrift and lonely, Johan sets out on a three-month long journey to China, seeking answers to questions lingering from his youth and collecting material for articles about its economic, cultural, and political transformation under Deng. There are signs that China might be opening up not only to foreign investments and technology, but also to new ideas, and maybe even democratic ones. Can socialism and democracy co-exist, like China’s dissidents hope? Could this be the next collective passion? He has spent the much of his youth first admiring and then studying China. Now he sees the country with his own eyes, and meets many Chinese, and gets to hear their stories. But he is also searching for love. Two months into the journey, he meets an American woman in Beijing. Their paths only cross for two nights, but they fall in love and begin a correspondence that confirms and deepens their feelings. Having written and sold his stories, he flies to New York where she welcomes him. He proposes, and she says yes.
III: Trying to be Normal
IV: Zigzagging in the Middle Kingdom
(If you are interesting in reading this novel and give me feedback before it is published, please send me a personal email to h4sweden@gmail.com)
