Björn recenserade Inferno av August Strinberg
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3 stjärnor
An admittedly great writer writing from within the depths of psychosis. And I'm not exaggerating. He rants about how evil feminists have driven him from his homeland, tries to make gold (literally), is convinced that everyone up to and including the devil himself is after him, describes how electric fields come from out of nowhere to tear him apart, how invisible forces push over his absinthe glass, how signs appear everywhere and he sees maps of cities he's yet to visit in the useless flakes of mineral that refuse to obey his will and turn into gold...
...he flees every hotel, runs from Paris to Lund to Berlin to Graz, he reads Swedenborg, he reads Nietzsche, he reads Balzac, he reads the OT, he quotes Ezekiel 25 120 years before Samuel L Jackson did...
...friends contact him, begging him not to throw his life away on a suicide mission to …
An admittedly great writer writing from within the depths of psychosis. And I'm not exaggerating. He rants about how evil feminists have driven him from his homeland, tries to make gold (literally), is convinced that everyone up to and including the devil himself is after him, describes how electric fields come from out of nowhere to tear him apart, how invisible forces push over his absinthe glass, how signs appear everywhere and he sees maps of cities he's yet to visit in the useless flakes of mineral that refuse to obey his will and turn into gold...
...he flees every hotel, runs from Paris to Lund to Berlin to Graz, he reads Swedenborg, he reads Nietzsche, he reads Balzac, he reads the OT, he quotes Ezekiel 25 120 years before Samuel L Jackson did...
...friends contact him, begging him not to throw his life away on a suicide mission to the North pole, and he explains in vain that that's his nephew in the papers...
...basically, substitute "electricity" for "chemtrails" and he'd feel right at home in the darker corners of Reddit.
And yet, there's something to it. His insistance that this is August Strindberg writing, this is not fiction, this is exactly what he's going through and you're welcome to compare it to his diaries if you want. His refusal both to back down from his earlier ideas, and his refusal to NOT change. Those magnificent last few chapters when he goes through his crisis, not out of it. The older Strindberg is a deeply unpleasant person, and Inferno - much like Confessions of a Fool - a deeply unpleasant book. But as fin-de-siecle madness and timeless manpain goes, it's hard to deny the power of it.