Granskningar och kommentarer

I quite liked The Martian, but this is just dire. Weir the engineer gets to have a lot of fun, and his explanations of how a moonbase might actually work in real life - at least the technical parts of it - are actually fascinating. I'd love to have read a simple, dry, non-drama non-action 50-page history and explanation of Artemis.

Instead, he has to try and build a plot around it, and everything that was slightly off about The Martian gets to take centre stage while everything that worked gets thrown out the airlock. Instead of one person and a distant team vs the forces of nature, we now have a plucky outsider hero vs a not-very-mysterious villain. Weir tries to be 21st century by making the hero a woman of colour, which hey, points for effort, but his attempts at getting into the head of a 20-odd-year-old woman by way of tons of sex jokes get very tired very soon, and with no in-story reason for her to constantly be monologuing and throwing cheap jokes at the reader. The moonbase is an interesting construction, but where he could have got a lot of mileage out of exploring just who would choose to live in a place like that he just throws in a bunch of flat characters with Very Obvious Traits that are basically walking Chekov's Guns. Where The Martian had clever people solving impossible problems, here the stakes are a lot lower and consequently everyone has to be a technical genius but a functional idiot. The can-do optimism of The Martian gets turned into a dime-a-dozen caper plot, with very little to recommend it.

Very barely 2 stars, and that's just for the technical problem-solving aspects.

After Smith's last two (brilliant) autobiographical works I was really hoping to see something fictional from her. That Devotion is basically a 50/50 split between footnotes to M Train and an interesting, if not earth-shattering, novella feels like a bit of a disappointment; like neither neither nor nor rather than both.

Combines a few things that get me: Clueless Brits with 19th century tech stumbling into a world they don't understand, polar exploration stretching human endurance way beyond its limit, and monsters.

The Terror is far from perfect; the timeline and dramatic arc are messy, leaving a few narrative dead ends, and Simmons never uses one word where ten will suffice. But damn, he uses that large cast and the extreme circumstances to full effect. A book to be read with extra layers of socks, longjohns and undershirts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKOumtBCWbM

Utkanterna ligger bortom; utanför staden, utanför landet, utanför lagen. Dit förvisas de som inte längre hör till, som inte ens ges en teoretisk chans att släppas in igen; kvinnor och barn. Där får de sköta sig själva. Försöker de ta sig närmare staden för att äta är de fredlösa.

Boken handlar om en astronaut, en kvinna som skickas in i ett svart hål där hon långsamt sträcks ut tills hon slits itu, allt för vetenskapens och umbärlighetens skull. Det behandlas i förbigående, i bokens första halva. Resten är hennes historia, fångad i ett ständigt nedsaktande, bortom The Point Of No Return. Upproret, fångenskapen, tortyren, straffet, friheten, allt det ligger bortanför händelsehorisonten. Allt det ligger latent inom livet i Utkanterna. Tiden exiseterar inte bortom händelsehorisonten; ska hända, har hänt, händer.

en utandning

Torteraren kan aldrig förlåta den torterade att hen torterades. Nyfikenheten på varför hen är så arg vet inga gränser (sic!). Förorättningen över det likaså. Boken är inte för dem.

det är till er jag skriver
genom er vilja jag fortsätter att finnas till

Teju Cole is one of those authors who make me feel inadequate; what he does seems so simple that you think you could do it yourself (albeit not exactly the same, different lives and all that) but you know you couldn't. He's ridiculously well-read (-watched, -travelled, -listened) and uses it, putting it all together into patterns with the greatest of ease.

Known and Strange Things is divided into three headings: books, images, travel. As with all essay collections, the trouble is that he's going to be talking about books I haven't read, phootographers I'm not familiar with, places I haven't been... but that's only a problem if that's all he talks about, and he rarely does. He uses them as jumping-off points to discuss everything from race relations (as an African American as opposed to an African-American) to the narrative of Google Image Search, from awkward dinner parties with VS Naipaul to hilarious takedowns of modern journalism.

I miss Cole on Twitter, and I really hope he has another 20 novels or so in him. But for now, this'll do quite nicely.

Meh. Sutherland's annotations are pretty good, as a 20-minute primer into both Macbeth and Macbeth and the various historical elements that go into both. Crace's abbreviated version, though, is as hit-and-miss as the Guardian column that inspired it; he can never decide when to paraphrase and when to simply translate into modern vernacular, and in the end it's nowhere near as punchy as the original.

Erpenbeck writes short stories less like a writer than as a painter. She picks a motif (a moment, a feeling, a line of dialogue, a fundamental trauma) and then she spends 5-20 pages sketching it from different angles, until she arrives at that one brush stroke that sums up the reason she wrote the story in the first place.

It's not exactly fluffy fun reading, and like her debut there are times it feels a bit overly cerebral, but it's incredibly impressive in its sheer precision, and she hits that one pulse point often enough to make it sting.

The foreword argues that Brecht was "the perhaps most original and important German poet of his time". Even considering the time he worked in, I find that hard to believe. What he does do well is dark satire ("Legend of the dead soldier"), prescient political commentary ("Germany, 1938"; "How we learn to say yes to the world") and, in general, his poems feel like song lyrics in need of a Weill or monologues in need of a play. That's not to say they're bad (they're not) or that they have lost all their sting 100 years later (they haven't).

Snygga Stockholmsbilder, men Nilsson måste stressa igenom Trenters handling; mycket sammanträffanden blir'e.