Granskningar och kommentarer

The basic paradox at the heart of paleontology is that almost everything we know about life comes from death.

There's a poetry in Halliday's plural-of-apocalypse tale of life on Earth, played up backwards from the wooly mammoths to the first precambrian predators. The way he notes that the same mountain range that once, before the Atlantic split it, stretched from Scandinavia to Scotland to the Appalachians, is still united by the sound of fiddles made from trees that still grow there. The way he - to slightly varying degrees of success - puts on an Attenboroughian tone in describing the life of biomes that he will then go on to tell us how they ended. Sic semper Tyrannosaurus. The way he actively encourages the reader to use our Pan Narransian sense of pattern recognition to see where we came from - and all the possibilities that had to disappear for that to happen. Life on Earth is a long story of deaths. Death on Earth is a long story of survival - not of individuals or of species or of entire phyla, but of life. The dinosaurs might have launched a Bruce Willis to blow up the meteor if they'd known how. What's our excuse?

Would probably have loved this more if my knowledge of surrealism was fresher. As it is, it's fun, but feels a bit didactic, especially with the footnotes spelling it out. Still, a good companion piece to Codrescu's Tzara and Lenin Play Chess.

Likable enough, and I suppose the story continues to advance in coming installments. It just feels a bit... I dunno, like any old schoolyard romance? Which I suppose is a good thing, that LGBT+ stories no longer need to come with a side of persecution and huge amounts of both internal and external coming-out angst. Or maybe I'm just old and jaded.

BRD, 1970-ish. Three educators from three generations and very different backgrounds meet up in Hamburg to edit a chapter for a textbook on the subject of "The Good Example". Should be easy: Just pick a short story that gives the youth, the future leaders of the Bundesrepublik, a paragon to discuss and look up to. Except... 30 years after Hitler, in the middle of the cold war and student riots and a very dreary and cold November, what does that even mean? Who the hell can agree on what's a good example in times like these - and even if you find one, who would take it seriously? Isn't this how we got here in the first place?

I love Lenz' language; the way his sentences unfold, subjunctives piled three layers deep, the slight irony that his hopeful but jaded narration takes on as he carries us through the lives of these three people over a couple of days past a cast of dozens of people just getting on with their lives, sold-out protest singers, over-it ex-wives, disillusioned academics, bored Burgessian hooligans... The central idea of the novel, the search for an ideal, is a tricksy one; Lenz makes the reader take part in the search, looking not just in the texts that our three anti-heroes peruse but in every single person here for that one Just Person that we can all agree shows us something to aspire to. Which, ironically (and I'm pretty sure that irony, too, is deliberate) makes the book just slightly annoying; the whole book becomes a case of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, you see it everywhere until you want there to be just one scene that doesn't mean what the entire book means.

But still, damn.

First read the original, then the Swedish translation.

I remember really liking hearing this read out loud. Reading it on the page, it's still very likable, but also harder not to read with a slight critical eye - how even the most benevolent, inclusive American exceptionalism still comes across as American exceptionalism.

Den svenska översättningen är lite märklig - Timbuktu spikar både tempot och innehållet, men det är anmärkningsvärt hur en modern amerikansk patriotisk text verkar vilja ha en svensk språkdräkt som vagt men tydligt doftar 1800-talshögtidlighet.

And the norms and notions of what "just is"
Isn't always justice.

Och de begrepp och sätt som "rätt visa"
Inte alltid är rättvisa.

Where a skinny Black girl,
Descended from slaves and raised by a single mother

Där en mager svart flicka,
Vars ätt varit förslavad, och som danats av en ensamstående mamma

etc.

Good wrap-up to the saga. The whole thing still feels a bit unplanned, but I love the world she's created and I really, really, really want someone to make a TV series of this.

It feels almost older than the late-60s British novel it is, a post-war generation still stuck in the Proper Way of Things and a lifestyle that hasn't been viable in decades. Into this, plop an almost Dostoyevskyan misanthrope with power over rats. If someone had asked Ray Davies ca 1968 to write a horror novel, this would have been it.

"De hade inte talat mer om det. Det hade varit en öppen fråga mellan dem om man kan se in i sitt eget mörker och om det rentav är ens skyldighet att göra det. Eller om man framkallar mörkret och gör det till sitt eget genom att kela med det."