From the perspective of Ström, pregnancy remained an abstract condition—something that only became fully real in the moment he first held his son. Confronted with the overwhelming reality of birth and the transition into fatherhood, he began to question his own significance and place in the world.

He gradually came to recognise his perceived unimportance as a shifting awareness of the inner self. Presence, rather than the fixed identity of “father,” became central. Attempting to articulate these emotions, he turned to writing, producing around 1,700 journal pages during his son’s first year of life.

From this extended stream of consciousness, only a small portion remains in the final book. After an intense process of selection and reduction, the author felt that the result was still not entirely truthful. What was removed, he argued, was also what revealed meaning; the act of subtraction intensified the voice of the text. The material can be read as both image and language, where meaning is not diminished by fragmentation but rather sharpened through it.

The resulting work becomes the diary of a subject in transition, navigating loss of self, reconciliation and transformation while entering a new phase of life as a parent. It follows an internal journey shaped by shifting paradigms, oscillating between creation, attachment and self-preservation.

The title is a Swedish neologism derived from “monteur,” meaning to assemble or put together. The author understands this role as a form of self-definition: one who constructs and reconstructs meaning through making.

Neither images nor text function as explanations of one another; instead, they coexist in tension, reflecting the split between creative impulse and domestic reality.