Granskningar och kommentarer

4.5. Possibly longer review to come. Tokarczuk goes into more detail than you knew you wanted to know about 18th century Poland, lecturing with the light touch of Eco while occasionally going full Pynchon on us with all the interweaving characters, ideas and (of course) songs. There's a lot of weight in this, and not just physically, but she never makes any parallels or metaphors too overbearing, letting the reader choose how deeply they want to delve into what it all means.

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

Then again, what is the messiah but a naughty boy?

Good interview with Tokarczuk here.

It's a 3.5, really, edging on 4. Lots to like here; the language, the way he captures the idea of Something Older ("There are places around here where nobody's set their foot since the vikings..."), makes it clash and dance with catholicism and wraps it all in one gothic robe of mist, rain and rooks. As far as houses surrounded by the tide go, it beats The Woman In Black like a redheaded stepchild.

There's something annoyingly vague about it. As if every time he's about to show us something, he just... doesn't. Hurley has learned a fair bit from the likes of King, and that's not a bad thing even if I'm pretty sure he's a better writer than King, but in the end I feel a bit cheated out of something. I'm not sure quite what. But as an early holiday read, The Loney really hits the spot most of the time.

Jag blev helt rädd i kroppen, mitt rum blev mörkare och det blev svårare att hålla mina tårar. Mina kinder kunde inte bära dem. Jag kände hur ont det gör i hans mamma när hon får veta att hennes ende son inte lever längre.

Ali är 17 år och bor i Alby, han har talat svenska i 15 månader. Ängeln och sparven är kort men effektiv, sättet han sätter ihop sitt nya språk, blandar hoppfulla vardagsglimtar med drömmar och ögonblick av nattsvart förtvivlan. Han skriver till en mamma som han inte kommer att få träffa på många år, om någonsin, berättar om sitt nya liv i det kalla landet, de nya människor han lärt känna och dem som gått förlorade, om hur han själv kämpar.

Vi väntar på tåget medan vi inte vet om det kommer eller inte, och varje stund som det händer fel i trafiken blir det svårare för tåget att komma.

Vi - och redan det där "vi"-et säger något - pratar knappt om annat än Flyktingkrisen (tja, det och att vi inte pratar om Flyktingkrisen i det här jävla landet) nuförtiden. Varför låter vi inte fler som Ali komma fram till mikrofonen också? Var är ni, Bonniers, Norstedts?

At the end, we have to return to the beginning; that's what she set up all those pages ago before I went on this long trip of genius (not hers, her subject's) with her. Two dolls thrown into a dark cellar in a violent town built on an ancient garbage heap, next to a volcano that can blow up any time.

The Lost Child (as with all the books, a fairly straight-forward double meaning) takes its sweet time, the thickest of all four of the books, and as much as I love reading Ferrante there are stretches that feel padded, unedited. Of course, that might be deliberate; Elena-the-narrator is only a decent-to-good author, after all. And she still largely ignores the bits that would have made for a more conventional story - the Solaras and Pelusos, who might have made for a more riveting story of crime and terrorism and a better mirror for Society, stay on the outskirts of the story, while Elena-the-narrator remains as obsessed with Lila her whole life. We get hints that others have a completely different story to tell, but that just makes Elena-the-narrator defend her story of her even harder.

If there's a hell it's in her unsatisfied brain, I wouldn't want to be in it even for a few seconds.

She nods and winks at the debate around the book itself, how much of it is TRUE and how much is FICTION, and yet somehow Elena-the-author does what Elena-the-narrator thinks she's failed to do: where the latter consciously puts her ideas and theories front and centre in her books, Ferrante just lets them be. As if earthquakes, divorces, murders, none of it can touch the tragedy of having to live with and remember it all in detail and wanting it all to validate.

I'm glad I'm finished with this series, and I'm really going to miss it. After all those details, I'm still full of questions about it, which I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to formulate fully until the inevitable re-read some years from now.