If you crave romances about beekeepers in the Algarve, or sagas of whimsical poisoning in Kensal Green, Nicolas Lunabba’s memoir probably isn’t for you. The clue is very much in the title. Will You Care If I Die? is a raw, intimate story of desperate trust and betrayal, of people perpetually balanced above a terminal abyss. Elegantly translated by Henning Koch, the prose juggles twisted humour, poetry, love and polemic in an aching, challenging journey. Lunabba anatomises what happens when a guarded heart surrenders and when someone always told they were worthless is redefined as precious by even one person.
Lunabba, who is a Swedish social justice campaigner, uses tiny, searing flashbacks to conjure up his past as an immigrant child steeped in trauma, and using detachment and rage to fend off a hostile world. Escaping violence and deprivation, he then works in social care, trying to support immigrant children – blattes. With painstaking honesty, Lunabba portrays himself as a do-gooder who doesn’t feel good, suspicious of his own motives. Craving and dreading hope, he’s haunted by a past of toxic masculinity, while attempting to live tenderly. He surrounds the reader with the risks besieging the children he tries to reach, as a complacent Swedish establishment allows the far right to consolidate and its press to blame capitalism’s failures on immigrants. We begin to share his anxieties and moments of piercing affection for the feral, basketball-obsessed teenage outcasts he encounters. Each turn of the page could bring yet another death.
