Gustafsson's story about playing tennis and trying to teach Strindberg and Nietzsche in Austin in 1974 is just... fun. Which doesn't mean it's just fun, and there's a lot to it that still resonates even if the technology has moved on a lot; paranoia, secterism, reworking of literary Truths, the fear of technology taking over for us... Hmm, maybe we should just try to feed Inferno into Facebook's algorithms, see what that does. It's not like it could get any worse.
Gustafsson's story about playing tennis and trying to teach Strindberg and Nietzsche in Austin in 1974 is just... fun. Which doesn't mean it's just fun, and there's a lot to it that still resonates even if the technology has moved on a lot; paranoia, secterism, reworking of literary Truths, the fear of technology taking over for us... Hmm, maybe we should just try to feed Inferno into Facebook's algorithms, see what that does. It's not like it could get any worse.
The Good Intentions is a fascinating book for several reasons.
- As a follow-up to The Magic Lantern and Images, tackling not Bergman's own life or work but rather forcing him to humanize someone other than him: the father he spent so much of his life in conflict with. To give Erik Bergman (or Henrik as he has to name him here to preserve some buffer of fiction) his due, not as a son but as a biographer. To expand the story beyond the comfortable. To try to do what his father the priest was supposed to be able to do: Forgive, perhaps not for his father's sake but for his own. (That said, in After the Rehearsal, Bergman has his alter ego, played by Erland Josephson, loudly declare that it's wrong to hate your dead parents - just because they're dead doesn't mean it doesn't hurt them. …
The Good Intentions is a fascinating book for several reasons.
- As a follow-up to The Magic Lantern and Images, tackling not Bergman's own life or work but rather forcing him to humanize someone other than him: the father he spent so much of his life in conflict with. To give Erik Bergman (or Henrik as he has to name him here to preserve some buffer of fiction) his due, not as a son but as a biographer. To expand the story beyond the comfortable. To try to do what his father the priest was supposed to be able to do: Forgive, perhaps not for his father's sake but for his own. (That said, in After the Rehearsal, Bergman has his alter ego, played by Erland Josephson, loudly declare that it's wrong to hate your dead parents - just because they're dead doesn't mean it doesn't hurt them. Not because of any particular belief in an afterlife.)
- As a very unsentimental portrayal of a time that Bergman himself only knew from his elders, and that nobody alive today remembers. Bergman was rarely interested in social issues, so it makes sense that his version of his father is largely clueless too. His attempts to capture anything about pre-democracy Sweden and the early conflicts of the labour movement in a small forest town feel... off. His portrayal of early 20th century bourgouisie much less so. But it's Henrik and Anna (Erik and Karin) and their stormy courtship and marriage that really sells this - a romance that never feels in the least bit sepia-toned. Things were changing rapidly, and the generational divides he paints here feel eerily alive.
- As source material for so many of his films - or perhaps, as a rewrite of them. He openly admits that a lot here is fictionalized, for obvious reasons - he never asked his parents all the questions he should have, and now he's an old man and nobody is alive to ask. So do Winter Light, Fanny and Alexander, Torment, Hour of the Wolf etc etc spring wholesale from family stories, or is it the other way around, or is fact and fiction a feedback loop that reenforces itself?
- As a novel, of course, it's a mess, so much so that I consider dropping it after 100 pages. Not bad, just messy. There's no doubt that Bergman was a great writer - there are 50+ films, very few of which are outright bad, to attest to that. The Good Intentions, however, reads like a first draft that can be turned into either a novel or a screenplay (it would, of course, be used for both). Bergman is very much an active narrator in this, which I suspect he's not in the film (seen it once, almost 30 years ago, remember next to nothing); if you've heard him speak, you recognize his voice immediately. But both the form, breaking into script form whenever he hits dialogue, and the conversational, repetitive tone of it reads like something that's supposed to be handed over to a director and his actors to work out. (He's nothing if not professional: The book is the basis for a 4x90min miniseries, and each chapter is almost exactly 96 pages.)
It's a fascinating but frustrating book. But I suppose he meant well.
It's all locker room talk until... Your friends will stick by you until... You're almost a proper German until... Present company obviously excepted until... That lot are just harmless thugs nobody takes seriously until... Your money's good until... Your vote counts until... You're free to travel anywhere you want until... Other countries are happy to welcome you until... You can be an individual on your own merits until... Upstanding citizens will refuse to be silent until... The laws still apply to you until... Your service to your country counts until... Concentration camps are just prisons until...
Written in a few weeks after Kristallnacht. Otto Silbermann dodges the SA as they bust down his door and gets out of Berlin with a briefcase full of money after selling his company for scrap. Spends days travelling back and …
It's all locker room talk until... Your friends will stick by you until... You're almost a proper German until... Present company obviously excepted until... That lot are just harmless thugs nobody takes seriously until... Your money's good until... Your vote counts until... You're free to travel anywhere you want until... Other countries are happy to welcome you until... You can be an individual on your own merits until... Upstanding citizens will refuse to be silent until... The laws still apply to you until... Your service to your country counts until... Concentration camps are just prisons until...
Written in a few weeks after Kristallnacht. Otto Silbermann dodges the SA as they bust down his door and gets out of Berlin with a briefcase full of money after selling his company for scrap. Spends days travelling back and forth on the train, trying to figure out where he can go when suddenly everything goes from until to NOW. Feverish, panicked, clear-eyed, ridiculously modern in its feel. I'm told only commies who'd call anyone a Nazi just because they speak their mind about The Others would draw comparisons between 1930s Germany and today's political climate, so just to be clear, it's obviously, completely irrelevant to anything.
Förensligandet i egentliga Västerbotten, eller hur var det? Smirnoff skriver en historia som känns både urnorrländsk och som en skitig countryballad från någonstans i Appalacherna.
Och att läsa denna direkt efter Osebol var ett väldigt bra beslut.
Vet inte om jag behöver läsa mer om jana och bror, men jag lär nog läsa nästa bok också vad det lider. Skiten är svår att tvätta av sig, och Smirnoffs språk sjunger.
Hör ni det också? sa jag och gick ut för vi hade elmätaren på en stolpe med massor av luftledningar och grejor.
Så till slut kom jag på... det är tystnaden jag hör som jag inte hade hört på tjugo år i Stockholm.
En liten by i Värmland, med folk från hela Europa, både de som bott där i hundratals år och de som hamnat där nyligen. Nästan Aleksijevitjskt; Kaplan bara låter deras monologer och dialoger stå där de står, medan tystnaden fyller i runt ikring. Där finns ingen katastrof, bara ett utdraget frågetecken; vad blir kvar...?
Önskar bara att hon inte översatt så mycket till rikssvenska, men dä ä itnô å häng ôpp sä på.
Men jag fick anmärkan på att jag nyttjade sprit och att jag tjoade och stampade i bakcen när jag dansade för det stod inte i böcker …
Jag hade ett hum i öronen hela tiden.
Hör ni det också? sa jag och gick ut för vi hade elmätaren på en stolpe med massor av luftledningar och grejor.
Så till slut kom jag på... det är tystnaden jag hör som jag inte hade hört på tjugo år i Stockholm.
En liten by i Värmland, med folk från hela Europa, både de som bott där i hundratals år och de som hamnat där nyligen. Nästan Aleksijevitjskt; Kaplan bara låter deras monologer och dialoger stå där de står, medan tystnaden fyller i runt ikring. Där finns ingen katastrof, bara ett utdraget frågetecken; vad blir kvar...?
Önskar bara att hon inte översatt så mycket till rikssvenska, men dä ä itnô å häng ôpp sä på.
Men jag fick anmärkan på att jag nyttjade sprit och att jag tjoade och stampade i bakcen när jag dansade för det stod inte i böcker att de gjorde det.
Då frågade jag vad är ett danslag till för?
Ja, det är för att bevara bygdens kultur.
Ja, sa jag men då är jag inne på det rätta för i Ekshärad har vi söp och stamp i backen i alla tider.
Supposedly one of, if not the, first examples of cli-fi; dystopias set among the total collapse of the environment as a result of human interference. Ballard's cause may not seem completely believable, but the effects certainly are. The oceans stop evaporating, rain ceases, and humanity runs out of water within months. The rich, verdant lands of New England devolve into a frantic struggle for survival as millions make their way to the shore to try to survive.
(Again, the definition of dystopia: When something happens to rich white people that's been happening to others in real life for decades.)
Certainly influenced by Ballard's own experiences in WW2, the description of civilization falling apart, then society, then humanity itself as everyone becomes a climate refugee with nowhere to run to is the book's main strength, and it's a good one. The kooky cast of characters, perhaps somewhat less so.
Buy …
Supposedly one of, if not the, first examples of cli-fi; dystopias set among the total collapse of the environment as a result of human interference. Ballard's cause may not seem completely believable, but the effects certainly are. The oceans stop evaporating, rain ceases, and humanity runs out of water within months. The rich, verdant lands of New England devolve into a frantic struggle for survival as millions make their way to the shore to try to survive.
(Again, the definition of dystopia: When something happens to rich white people that's been happening to others in real life for decades.)
Certainly influenced by Ballard's own experiences in WW2, the description of civilization falling apart, then society, then humanity itself as everyone becomes a climate refugee with nowhere to run to is the book's main strength, and it's a good one. The kooky cast of characters, perhaps somewhat less so.
Buy stock in water, they tell me. Rich parts of the world will start running out before 2030.
Re-reading this after 30+ years, it feels eerily timely; I'd forgotten that the plot is essentially "children protest what capitalism is doing to the world, but the adults are too busy consuming to care, and instead choose to go after the kid who points out how unsustainable it all is. In the end, the ones who tried to steal the world fight each other to the death over the few resources that remain."
That said, while Ende's rose-tinted view of poverty leaves something to be desired (of course it's set in Italy, that charming southern cousin where people enjoy being poor), the central idea is still so strong, and the execution both so sharp and so likable that I find myself falling in love all over again. And I promise not to get annoyed the next time someone takes longer than they need to in line ahead of me.
Re-reading this after 30+ years, it feels eerily timely; I'd forgotten that the plot is essentially "children protest what capitalism is doing to the world, but the adults are too busy consuming to care, and instead choose to go after the kid who points out how unsustainable it all is. In the end, the ones who tried to steal the world fight each other to the death over the few resources that remain."
That said, while Ende's rose-tinted view of poverty leaves something to be desired (of course it's set in Italy, that charming southern cousin where people enjoy being poor), the central idea is still so strong, and the execution both so sharp and so likable that I find myself falling in love all over again. And I promise not to get annoyed the next time someone takes longer than they need to in line ahead of me.
Holy shit, what a book. I'd held off on Sebald because something told me he deserves to be read in German and ... holy shit. The way he builds sentences, nesting clauses and gerunds like a Rube Goldberg device, separating trennbare verbs by half a page, making every single sentence like a high-precision Rube Goldberg device where you never know where you'll land until you finally reach a full stop and get to to gaze back at that perfect creation.
That's the first thing that strikes me. But then the text itself, starting as a simple almost Pythonesque travelogue of walking around Suffolk, building from stumbled-upon remnants of initially fairly recent history and digging both outwards and inwards - into European wars and colonialism, into art and architecture, into various people he stumbles upon on his walks (alive and long dead) and into himself, into this weird, fragile hybrid of …
Holy shit, what a book. I'd held off on Sebald because something told me he deserves to be read in German and ... holy shit. The way he builds sentences, nesting clauses and gerunds like a Rube Goldberg device, separating trennbare verbs by half a page, making every single sentence like a high-precision Rube Goldberg device where you never know where you'll land until you finally reach a full stop and get to to gaze back at that perfect creation.
That's the first thing that strikes me. But then the text itself, starting as a simple almost Pythonesque travelogue of walking around Suffolk, building from stumbled-upon remnants of initially fairly recent history and digging both outwards and inwards - into European wars and colonialism, into art and architecture, into various people he stumbles upon on his walks (alive and long dead) and into himself, into this weird, fragile hybrid of palimpsests that 50 years of peace has brought to Western Europe. And all of it through those meandering, jenga-like sentences that can cover everything within one breath.
"Översatt från koreanskan av...", står det i början. Det är förstås en markering; Efter att först blivit kritikerälskling har Han också blivit kritiserad för sitt nära samarbete med sin engelska översättare, med argumentet att utländska läsare får läsa något helt annat än det Han ursprungligen skrev för sin koreanska publik, som om det alls vore möjligt att läsa originalverket på ett annat språk opåverkat av översättningen. (Spelar det också in att amerikaner, generellt, är ovana att alls läsa översatt litteratur och betraktar hela grejen med en viss skepsis? Inte omöjligt.) Men där hennes två förra översattes till svenska från engelska är vi alltså nu "rena" igen: direkt från koreanskan till svenskan, utan anglofona föroreningar.
Den vita boken handlar just om föroreningar, om översättningar, om hypotetiska opåverkade liv. Om hur "blank", "blanc" och "black" egentligen är samma ord. Om den vita snön som inte kan betraktas utan att förstöras. Men framför …
"Översatt från koreanskan av...", står det i början. Det är förstås en markering; Efter att först blivit kritikerälskling har Han också blivit kritiserad för sitt nära samarbete med sin engelska översättare, med argumentet att utländska läsare får läsa något helt annat än det Han ursprungligen skrev för sin koreanska publik, som om det alls vore möjligt att läsa originalverket på ett annat språk opåverkat av översättningen. (Spelar det också in att amerikaner, generellt, är ovana att alls läsa översatt litteratur och betraktar hela grejen med en viss skepsis? Inte omöjligt.) Men där hennes två förra översattes till svenska från engelska är vi alltså nu "rena" igen: direkt från koreanskan till svenskan, utan anglofona föroreningar.
Den vita boken handlar just om föroreningar, om översättningar, om hypotetiska opåverkade liv. Om hur "blank", "blanc" och "black" egentligen är samma ord. Om den vita snön som inte kan betraktas utan att förstöras. Men framför allt om en storasyster som dör, två timmar gammal, åratal innan berättaren själv föds, trots att hennes unga mor bönfaller henne att inte dö. I korta, poetiska kapitel som omväxlande påminner om både Tranströmer, Lispector och Paddy McAloon vandrar berättaren runt både i faktiska världar och i tänkta, betraktar Warszawas återuppbyggda centrum ovanpå ruinerna där staden utplånades 1944, och kommer slutligen in på systern - vem vore hon om hon levat? Vem vore berättaren om hennes syster levat? Låter henne konjunktiva runt i en tänkt värld, skåda hennes egna minnen ett antal år tidigare, fundera på livet, på det oförstörda som aldrig kan förbli oförstört...
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian …
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4 stjärnor
"We do bones, motherfucker."
Holy shit, what a climax.
4.5/5. Has moments where it becomes a little too much of Hunger Games meets And Then There Were None, but even then the sheer chutzpah of it makes it a blast.
"We do bones, motherfucker."
Holy shit, what a climax.
4.5/5. Has moments where it becomes a little too much of Hunger Games meets And Then There Were None, but even then the sheer chutzpah of it makes it a blast.
Man känner sig alltid yngre än man är. Inom mig bär jag mina tidigare ansikten, som ett träd har sina årsringar. Det är summan av dem som är "jag". Spegeln ser bara mitt senaste ansikte, jag känner av alla mina tidigare.
56 sidor bara, från de tidigaste minnena till ögonblicket i en latinlektion där han förstår kopplingen mellan modern poesi och Horatius, där tiden upphävs och diktaren Tomas Tranströmer föds utan någon stor fanfar (som allt han gjorde).
Genom formen (Formen!) kunde något lyftas.
Det är en enkel liten berättelse, en pojke som växer upp, utan stora trauman, den vuxne som i efterhand förstår vad han plockade ihop av insektssamlande, museibesök och krig. Prosaisten Tranströmer är inte lika koncentrerad som diktaren, och ändå lyckas han utan några trumpeter och fanfarer skapa små bilder som står upp och lyser.
Man känner sig alltid yngre än man är. Inom mig bär jag mina tidigare ansikten, som ett träd har sina årsringar. Det är summan av dem som är "jag". Spegeln ser bara mitt senaste ansikte, jag känner av alla mina tidigare.
56 sidor bara, från de tidigaste minnena till ögonblicket i en latinlektion där han förstår kopplingen mellan modern poesi och Horatius, där tiden upphävs och diktaren Tomas Tranströmer föds utan någon stor fanfar (som allt han gjorde).
Genom formen (Formen!) kunde något lyftas.
Det är en enkel liten berättelse, en pojke som växer upp, utan stora trauman, den vuxne som i efterhand förstår vad han plockade ihop av insektssamlande, museibesök och krig. Prosaisten Tranströmer är inte lika koncentrerad som diktaren, och ändå lyckas han utan några trumpeter och fanfarer skapa små bilder som står upp och lyser.
