Although something of his picture’s earnestness survives as a flavour in his books it is dominated

Although something of his picture’s earnestness survives as a flavour in his books, it is dominated by someone more vigorous, incisive and contradictory. It’s easy to imagine the man before me searching out a gym in the middle of the Sahara. This is the apartment of the writer who once wrote of his elemental need to escape an atrophied home life, quoting Isabelle Eberhardt’s line: “The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all.”Lindqvist suggests we do our talking in a bar, and we walk to the Gondolen, one of the city’s landmarks. It’s a touristy cousin of The Ivy on giant stilts and offers astonishing views of Stockholm, which glitters across a clutch of islands. Lindqvist is a rigorously self-aware travel-writer, yet he carries his Swedishness with him as he builds snowy landscapes from Saharan sand.He is well known in Sweden, having published 30 books.

Accosted in the street, he listens patiently and then tells me how much he enjoys having a responsive audience. When the man returns a fourth time, Lindqvist finally becomes curt and flicks me a mischievous grin. In his brilliantly intimate account of Europe’s genocidal approach to Africa, Exterminate All the Brutes, he describes the book as “the story of a man travelling… through the Sahara desert” and as “the history of the concept of extermination”. I recalled that location as we negotiated his densely familiar neighbourhood. It struck me that Sweden is the capital of Sven Lindqvist ­ an insider who ventures out.It was this very homeliness that he fled to write Desert Divers.

He was living in a house bought from his parents, when he found that “as long as I remained in my childhood home, I could remember nothing about my childhood It seemed to have been erased.” So what happened?”Well I had a divorce Erm.. I went to the Sahara and this new erm… period started.” Lindqvist’s discomfort about the subject in person repeats the elegant ellipses in Desert Divers. Eventually, I volunteer that his rediscovery of a childhood dream of Saharan travel seemed to free him to write again, and to explore his own silent expanses He gives a good-humoured bark. “It sounds reasonable.”He’s more forthcoming about the genesis of his books, and the way that one project leads to another That happened with Desert Divers. “I was well into Exterminate All the Brutes before I discovered…

no! This is a new book.” It happened again, and he wrote a history of anti-racists, published in the US as The Skull Measurer’s Mistake (1995). “I read a lot of very racist future tales,” he says, “and I noticed that bombing was the favourite means of doing away with all of these ‘doomed races’.” His research into international law revealed that non-Europeans were not signatories to, nor covered by, the colonisers’ treaties. “I think that is where the concept of total war was created,” he adds, rehearsing the new book’s thesis. “Europeans returned from genocidal blitzing of colonial subjects and applied the same techniques and thinking to one another.”So, while the British obliterated German cities, the Germans treated the Poles and Russians “as colonial people that should be eradicated, as they were not useful”. Lindqvist makes a convincing case for this in the book, before a more contentious claim that the Holocaust was a logical extension of genocidal imperialism, with its loopy notions of racial inferiority. The argument seems forced to me, though it’s the kind of iconoclasm that so enlivens Lindqvist’s moral journeys.The wonder of these books is their very natural fragmentary form.

Lindqvist describes himself as “a non-fiction writer that uses many of the stylistic methods of fiction”. A History of Bombing is made up of 23 separate beginnings, whose pathways circle back on themselves, accumulating into a history that feels uniquely fresh. He is a master of telling details, brilliantly conjuring his childhood fear at seeing the uncanny resemblance between the Swedish words for “bombers” and “children”.Lindqvist did national service as a conscientious objector during the Korean War and articulates this principle well. However, I wanted to know whether the passionate commitment that sharpens his literary weapons would ever extend to action. In Srebrenica, for instance? He said: “I could of course imagine such… but I’m not sure I could take part in it.”Lindqvist’s angle of approach revives life-and-death questions. Ironically, the ethical insistence in his affecting story of bombing reminded me why I could “take part in it”.