Collaborative Authorship and Postmigration in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Novel Montecore

Montecore stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. Through this metafiction – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order.