Oskar's scrapbook

Oskar’s scrapbook is a stolen sketchbook turned into a private archive of murder, a place where Oskar Eriksson collects accounts of real crimes and tests the frightening possibility that he might become a killer. It begins as a solitary practice during his growing isolation at school, but as a new murder draws his attention, the scrapbook also becomes a means of following events beyond his immediate life—and of imagining himself at their center.

Origin and Material Form

Oskar begins the scrapbook around the time bullying at school becomes serious. By the end of fifth grade, he has become a persistent target, and even friends outside his class call less often to ask him to play. The scrapbook offers a project to return to: when he arrives home, he is looking forward to spending time with it. The timing connects its creation to loneliness, though the evidence presents the scrapbook as something he actively values, not merely a record of what has happened to him.

Its physical form is an ordinary large sketchbook that Oskar stole from the discount department store Ahlens in Vällingby, walking out with it under his arm. He keeps it hidden beneath a stack of comics and takes it out to look through its contents. That contrast between commonplace object and carefully gathered material defines the scrapbook: its covers belong to a sketchbook, but its significance comes from the clippings inside. Oskar’s pride in having taken it also fits the self-image he cultivates elsewhere as a daring thief rather than someone who can simply be pushed around.

The Crimes in Its Pages

One early clipping comes from The Home Journal and recounts an American murderess who poisoned fourteen elderly people before she was caught and sentenced to death. Oskar focuses on the fact that she was executed in the electric chair despite requesting another method. He imagines what such an execution might look like and makes it one of his dreams to see one. The scrapbook therefore records crimes, but it also preserves the attention Oskar gives to their outcomes and to the machinery of punishment.

A later entry, from Afton-bladet, concerns a Swedish murderer who killed two male prostitutes in a home sauna and buried them behind it. Oskar studies the photograph and finds the man’s face unremarkable: he could have been anybody. The thought turns inward. Oskar imagines that he himself could look like such a person in twenty years. This is not a confession or a prediction; it is a disturbing possibility prompted by the contrast between an ordinary-looking face and the crime described beside it. The scrapbook lets him consider the distance between appearance and identity without resolving it.

Following the Vällingby Murder

When Oskar reads the reports of a boy murdered in the forest, he examines the available details closely. The newspaper photograph shows the victim as a school-yearbook student Oskar has never seen. The boy had been on his way to handball practice at the Vällingby gym, and the reported timing fits the period Oskar is trying to understand. Oskar wonders whether the coincidence could connect the crime to the tree he had cut, while recognizing that this is only a possibility. His reading moves between concrete information in the articles and speculation about what it might mean.

The reports give him little about how the boy was killed. Oskar reasons from the description of a sixteen-year-old girl as being in extreme shock that the scene may have been disturbing, but the newspaper does not confirm his inference. The photograph instead shows police tape around an ordinary wooded hollow with a large tree in the middle. Oskar anticipates that people will leave candles and messages there, drawing on other cases he has collected in the scrapbook. The accumulated clippings provide a pattern through which he reads this new case, even where the available evidence remains incomplete.

An Archive That Oskar Wants to Grow

After considering the murder, Oskar goes inside to work on his scrapbook, cutting out and pasting in the newspaper articles. He expects there may be many more if the killings continue. More uneasily, he hopes there will be another murder, preferably in Blackeberg. He imagines police coming to his school and teachers becoming serious and concerned, an atmosphere he says he likes. The scrapbook thus connects his fascination with crime to a wish for public attention and disruption close to home; it does not establish that he caused the murder or that his speculation about the tree is true.

The collection’s significance lies in that unresolved tension. It is a refuge and an absorbing personal project begun as Oskar’s social world contracts, yet its subject matter encourages him to identify with the perpetrators as well as to study them. As new reports arrive, the scrapbook shifts from a record of distant crimes to a running archive of a local case whose timing Oskar finds personally unsettling. Its pages preserve both what the newspapers establish and the fears and fantasies Oskar builds around what they leave unknown.