Granskningar och kommentarer

The white zone is for loading and unloading only.
If ya gotta load or unload, go to the white zone.
You'll love it.
It's a way of life.

Not the literary work that The Magic Lantern is, but possibly more useful. For a film maker notoriously reluctant to re-watch his own works and discuss them, here we basically get the closest we'll ever get to Bergman doing commentary tracks on his films, discussing (almost) every movie, the background, the creative process, and what he thinks of them now. Some (but not many) he finds himself liking more than he thought. Some he can only find faults in. Which is his prerogative even when I'd say he's wrong.

Every time I read Brothers Lionheart, I'm amazed at how good it is. How much better, braver, harsher it is than it truly needs to be; it's a children's book, after all, but a children's book that never pulls its punches. Sure there are some plot elements that stretch your suspension of disbelief (then again, given Astrid Lindgren's own explanation of the plot, they make perfect sense), but even so, the brothers and their fight remains not just a good children's version of the typical fantasy Evil Overlord plot but one of the best versions of it, period.

German translation: Good, and adds a certain something simply by having the (quite obviously Hitler-inspired) Tengil's troups shouting in German.

The World, as explained by a girl growing up in a sunny country. Her parents are from another country where there's snow. There was something that happened and they moved. Her father is an expert, knows exactly where to drop bodies into the sea so they don't wash up. At school, they tell fantasies of siblings shooting themselves. Women are dragged off buses. This is just life.

Slowly horrifying, yet marvellous in how it keeps just about everything just out of reach. Could stand next to Perec's W and not be ashamed.

If they were to ask him, why did you abuse Basini?, he could hardly answer them: because I was constantly interested in something happening in my mind, a something, which so far I know very little about and which makes everything I think about seem pointless.

Three boys at yer stereotypical turn-of-the-century boarding school get caught up in yer stereotypical turn-of-the-century philosophical quandaries, and take it out on a fourth boy by beating, harrassing and raping him. Yes, this was written in 1906. And besides, there's nothing gay about raping a boy; it's only when you start feeling something that you need to do something about it, when the disconnect between body and mind becomes too hard to handle, that you need to really victimize him to make sure you can tell yourself he deserves it.

If that sounds flippant, it's not meant to be. Much of what Musil would perfect (in an imperfect, meandering way) in The Man Without Qualities is already here, and even if Törless has his moments of whiny Holden Caulfieldity, those stereotypical proto-Nietzsche/Dostoevsky/etc ponderings are certainly worth reading again and Musil has a healthy distance to his protagonist.

I'm a keen cyclist, but I've always said that I don't get the point of competitive cycling. Putting yourself through the harshest training regimen of any elite sport, just to cycle past some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet too fast and too focused to even take the time to appreciate them.

Reading Krabbé, a chess player who suddenly decided to switch to amateur cycle championships at 30 years old, I'm still not convinced it's for me, but I get it. Much like Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running it's that rare beast, a book about sports written by someone who can actually write about something beyond split times and results, but where Murakami uses it as an excuse to write a memoir, Krabbé mostly sticks to that one race in 1977, kilometre by kilometre, with all the thoughts it brings along with it. He and his fellow cyclists - competitors but also colleagues, because nobody can run a race on their own - battle against each other and their own limits... Krabbé captures every inch of the pain, but also the elation, the physical and psychological limits that are left in the dust.

4.5/5.

Crevaison sur les pavés
Le vélo vite réparé
Le peloton est regroupé
Camarades et amitié