The stance of mysticism on language is located in the field of tensions between the fundamental inability to express the essence of God through the medium of language and the imperative, or the need, to talk about it. In the space betwixt and between, there extends mystic silence as a paradoxical, but effective way of communication and insight. Depending on individual mystics, whose selection from the Middle Ages to the Baroque is presented in the text, silence receives also various additional aspects.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in 1978, is one of the most interesting contemporary Swedish and European writers with a Tunisian immigrant background. His second novel Montecore: en unik tiger ( Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger), published in 2006, has got an epistolary form deducted from the exchange of letters between Kadir and Jonas. However, the main character of the novel is Abbas Khemiri – the disappearing, estranged father of Jonas – a figure close to the real writer. Khemiri’s book has got an innovative linguistic form and contains many erudite references to the phenomena of popular culture. It is also a complex portrayal of the different generations of (mainly Arab-based) immigrant and post-immigrant communities in Sweden coupled with a nuanced look on bright and dark sides of the Swedish state, model of identity and integration. This material is enriched by the examples taken from Khemiri’s novel Everything I Don’t Remember and short story As You Would Have Told It To Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died.
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