“Det var en lycklig tid”

Abstract

Comparing Lars Gustafsson’s novel Tennisspelarna (1977) and Sven Delblanc’s novel Åsnebrygga (1969) as two similar accounts of a Swedish professor and writer encountering American campus life in the years around 1970, this article analyzes the differences between Europe and the United States from various perspectives, using Jean Baudrillard’s travelogue America as a guide. I tentatively read the novels as autobiographies, campus novels, and travelogues. Thereby, I study the treatment of time, space and the human body in the novels, uncovering the role of the desert and of the fitness cult, as well as the way the novels treat the civil rights movement and new developments in media and technology. In the end, I argue that the encounter with America is treated as an expansion of media ecology and that the narrators experience a serious case of future shock: America is shown as a world that is deeply simulational, more science-fictional than real.