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OK, disclosure: I'm a fan of the podcast. Welcome to Night Vale, as delivered in half-hour installments twice a month, is (or at least was for a very long time) exceedingly clever and enjoyable: brief little glimpses into a town where "normal" doesn't have its normal definition, where Lovecraftian terrors and government conspiracies and alien incursions and ghosts and yougetthepicture are all a part of everyday life, all of it delivered by the unfailingly cheerful local radio host. It's not only fun (and at times creepy), but also a show with pathos, and the Buffy fan in me always loved how the whole little city becomes a playground to hash out various social issues without ever having to comment on them directly.

But what works over 30 minutes doesn't necessarily work over 400 pages, even if delivered as an audiobook. There are a couple of reasons for this; first of all, of course, the novel can't actually interfere too much with the main plot of the podcast, so aside from a few cameos most of the regular characters are reduced to background characters while the novel develops a standalone plot that's... not bad, just not nearly complex enough to warrant the running time when the show regularly resolves similar plots over a music break. There's also the narration; on the show, the whole thing is narrated by Cecil, who's a bit of an odd character. The book follows the same narrative style, even though Cecil himself only pops up occasionally.

But above all, the main problem is that issue of "normalcy", whatever that means. 3+ years into Welcome to Night Vale, we know all the jokes, we know all the usual twists, we know all the weird places in town. The novel could have told us something new about them, turned a few things inside out; instead it plays it safe, mostly just repeats things that its core audience has already heard a hundred times. It's not that those are bad; there's just very little reason to read the novel rather than just go back and listen to an episode or two. If you do, though, get the audiobook.

Inom zenbuddhismen betyder ”mu” ungefär ”inte”. Det är det perfekta svaret på frågor som måste besvaras ja eller nej, men där ingetdera alternativet besvarar frågan. Till exempel ”Har en ko en mänsklig själ, ja eller nej?”

Det kanske inte har något med saken att göra; det här är ju en så enkel historia. Kon står i båset och det är ytterligare en dag som alla andra i en kos liv.

Vaknade. Åt lite hö. Två strån som fanns kvar. Tittade på Majros. Hon stod kvar på sitt gamla ställe. Tittade på Örsvart. Hon stod kvar på sitt gamla ställe. Regnar ute. Blev mjölkad.

Givetvis är det ju för en människa i det spännande rafflande 2000-talet svårt att relatera till hur det måste vara att göra samma sak varenda dag, men ändå. Det här är ju 70-tal.

Så en dag äter kon lite svampar. Sen ger den sig iväg. På äventyr, nerför floder, till Stockholm, Paris, New York, blir popstjärna, ordnar fred i världen, reser till stjärnorna. Vaknar.

Åt två höstrån. Tittade på Majros. Hon stod kvar på sitt gamla ställe. Det regnar.

Ur en kos dagbok tar fem minuter att läsa. Det är fem minuter som verkar kunna sträcka ut sig hur långt som helst. Ett kliv ut ur rutinen till oändliga möjligheter, där det inte spelar så stor roll vad som är verkligt och vad som är fantasi. Jag tror Bill Hicks hade gillat den här boken.

Men snälla nån, säger ni. Är det en barnbok eller en flumfilosofisk traktat, ja eller nej?

Mu.

Which Moped With Chrome-plated Handlebars At The Back Of The Yard?
Early novella, and it shows, which isn't necessarily bad; this is Perec just finding his voice after his debut Things, taking a simple story of a soldier trying to get out of going to Alger and bombarding it with rhetorical and narrative devices until the story groans, creaks and gasps for breath. A bit too in love with its own quirkiness at times - it's not just the plot that reminds me of Alice's Restaurant - but good fun.

The Exeter Text
Yep, the novella written using no other vowels than all the E:s left over after he finished A Void. I was almost prepared to dismiss this as unreadable, on first glance I just saw eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee all over every page, but it's actually not bad. Yes, the story is far more of a dancing bear (ie you don't expect the bear to dance well, but it's impressive that he dances at all) than A Void, there are bits that are sillier than others and I obviously can't vouch for how faithful the translation or even the concept of it is, but it's intriguing to see how far Perec (& transl) can stretch the rules of grammar and pronunciation to werk, and I have to love that Perec starts out with such a perverse (hmmm...?) high concept and then actually has it turn into pure pernegrephee by the end.

A Gallery Portrait
Brilliant little slight of hand, which may or may not be a companion piece to Life: A User's Manual but stands (or rather hangs) fine on its own. A private art collector holds a show of all his collected paintings, centered around a newly commissioned painting of himself sitting among the same paintings hung on the other walls... then that painting is destroyed, the others removed from the public eye to not suffer the same fate, and over the years their reputation and possibly value climb as a result, and the story increasingly takes the form of a catalogue... but wait, was that really what happened? Perec the forger is in perfect form, playing with images and ascribed meanings before pulling the other one.

The stories of Soviet children during WWII. Really just want to stare at the wall for a few hours now.

What gets you isn't just the stories themselves, which range from bittersweet to hair-whiteningly horriffic, but that basically the only thing she tells us about their current lives is their profession. All these traumatized children grew - had to grow - up into functioning adults, "ordinary" members of society, carrying all this with them for decades, burying it, normalizing it.

Now I've told you. (Pause) Is that all? Is that all that's left of something that terrible? A few dozen words...?

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is one of those albums that, to those of us who love it, is so much more than just some great music collected on a piece of plastic. Both the album itself - so personal, so horriffically beautifully cracked and warm - and the mythology surrounding it and the subsequent disappearance of Jeff Mangum from the music world is too much to collect in one short book. You'd need both a poet and a tabloid journalist to get to grips with all of it, and you'd probably still never capture it; don't explain the Kafkaesque joke, don't drag up the personal details the singer spends so much effort transforming into something that means something to others. That old quote about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture is a copout, but as producer Robert Schneider explains at one point, a recording of music isn't the music itself but just what it sounds like, and...

I digress, which is easy with this album. Cooper, to her credit, doesn't try to overplay her hand; she settles for a mostly fairly objective description, touching on the eccentricities of both Mangum and others surrounding the band without getting too personal, touching on the themes of the album without getting too deeply into analysis (no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means, to quote another singer) etc. It's a competent and obviously loving portrait of both the band and the album, recommended to those who want to know more without having their personal experiences with it encrouched upon.

And yet afterwards, I put on the album itself, and as usual I wind up crying ugly cleansing tears by the end as Jeff's voice gets to the sober-mo(u)rning-after of the last chorus, and this book seems like a well-written, well-meaning footnote. Which is not criticism; I'm glad it's there, it just doesn't change much about my personal copy of the album.

Pleasant enough read (despite a very sloppy Swedish translation), though pales next to what someone like Peter Ackroyd has done for the other burg across the channel; Deutsch is too hung up on buildings and kings to ever write much about life in the city itself, and at times feels almost as dismissive towards the ordinary parisians as the noblemen whose lives he finds much more interesting. That my edition completely lacks illustrations and maps doesn't help. But sure, it gets the job done, acts as a guide both to the city and how history has left its marks in the present, and teases enough anecdotes and stories to make you want to dig deeper.

Personal aside: The next time someone over here mumbles "You know, in France they wouldn't stand for this, they'd take to the streets and build barricades" I'll just shrug and reply that I'm fairly happy about living somewhere where it's not a given that every conflict is resolved through violence.

"Cyber" i "cyberpunk" betyder "rörelse". "Punk" betyder "ta tillbaka".

Vem är vems stalker.
Konsonantkollission. För helvete.

"Langoljär" som adjektiv. Den rörelse, de möjligheter som ligger frusna, outsagda, osynliga i tingens Ordning, men som finns där.

Vem delade ut rätten till Mr Hyde-zoner?

Den ökända hästen från Troja; Natascha Kampusch och Chelsea Manning som Burroughska virus. Ta över cellerna inifrån, maskera, vänd utåt.

Låt oss kröka!

Kontrollen Berg har över språket.

Det är bara att luta sig tillbaka och åka med.

Recently, a screencap from a Swedish high schooler's Facebook made the rounds on social media. It pictured her and her friends on a school trip to Auschwitz, dancing under the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign, captioned with "Refuse to be PC, lol!"

In The Devil's Workshop, a young Swedish woman comes to Theresienstadt looking for her family history, winds up staying and masterminding the campaign to turn what's left of the city into a tourist attraction, complete with slogans like "If Franz Kafka had survived, they would have killed him here". Unlike the moronic brats in the example above, it's done for the best of reasons; to make sure this is remembered. She's horrified at the cavalier attitude towards atrocities in the so-called "East" (to which everyone, all the way to Vladivostok, responds "What do you mean, East? This is Central Europe!"). Concentration camps turned into pig farms, goats grazing in the ruins of Theresienstadt, etc. In the West, we've learned to compartmentalize, to turn monuments into safe Never Again-Lands. In the parts of the world where millions died at their neighbours' hands, it all got hushed up by the next tyrant.

The fact that it's Theresienstadt - constructed by the Nazis as the "nice" face of concentration camps - is not coincidental. The fact that I, as a Swede, have spent much of the review talking about a minor character in the book probably isn't either. Our hero, of course, is the guy who grew up in what's left of the city, with a mother traumatized by literally being fished out of a pile of corpses and a father who represented the new oppressors. How do you make a memorial to something that's ongoing? Well, he's not sure, but there's always demand for it, especially with the likes of Lukashenko and Putin working for political points... Conscripting the dead to fight ideological battles for you has rarely not worked. Once we've picked the martyrs, we can point them at any villain we want. At the same time, we need to remember, don't we? How can we promise "never again" if we don't know what happened - how can we promise it if we define it as ONE event, safely stored away behind glass? If we only honour the dead, how do we rate the living?

The Devil's Workshop works partly exactly because it's a quick, picaresque romp, with a bleak sense of humour not miles away from Vonnegut or Hrabal. Our nameless hero is swept up in a story older and bigger than himself, one where nobody really has any say, but everyone tries to wrest control of the narrative to make it play along. Memory is a tricky beast, but so is The Devil's Workshop. That it works fine as a short, sharp companion piece to the equally excellent Museum of Abandoned Secrets doesn't hurt either.

As I write this, Europe is once again scuttling back towards the slogans and easy answers of the 30s, in many cases spearheaded by the very countries who grew up on rhetoric about the Soviet friends smashing fascism. Wasn't it a Czech who said "When you smash monuments, keep the pedestals - they'll come in handy"?

19-year-old Anne - old enough to take her pants off, old enough to go to jail, legally still a child - jumps off the 10-metre wall of the jail where she's serving a 7-year sentence. Smashes her ankle, crawls to the highway, is picked up by a small-time crook with a motorcycle who helps her hide with various acquaintances as she recuperates as well as she can, having to depend on others. This is love. This is freedom. This is never being able to walk right again.

Astragal is many things. Largely autobiographical, to take the most obvious, tragic (and in a way least interesting) fact: Sarrazin - orphan, mixed-race, abuse victim - wrote the book, as well as the follow-up, in jail, and eventually married the guy on the motorcycle before dying at age 29. One of those books you should read before age 25 for the best effect, probably. A product of its time, for sure: "To live outside the law you must be honest", Week-End, all that jazz; a dream of "freedom" that's already starting to look frayed at the edges, asking the question "...of what? To what? For how long?" The astragal of the title is the ankle bone (specifically the one called "leap bone" in Swedish). The novel is named for the price she pays for freedom: the ability to run, to dance, to drive a car, to walk barefoot, leaving her free to be tied to the same world that saw her end up in jail in the first place. As she limps from hiding place to hiding place, falling in what love is there, trying to unpause, to become.

Of course, none of this would matter much if it wasn't also another thing: Really fucking well-written. Anne narrates the whole thing in a style that never seems like it's trying to be either literary or "street", just is, a jumble of detailed, unflinching but never too deliberate impressions and thoughts and memories that keep the story tumbling along in one long breathless monologue, even during the long stretches where little actually happens beyond bones stitching themselves back together. (No wonder a young Patti Smith loved it and gushes about it in the foreword.) It's not a nice story about how love or freedom or cameraderie fixes everything, or even anything. It's just a book that, somehow, keeps getting lighter even as the things it bears try to weigh it down.

On a bus in Helsinki, a bearded man from the Middle East somewhere sits reading a book with Arabic lettering. After whispering amongst themselves, one of the passengers eventually works up the courage to ask him if he's reading the Quran. The presumed terrorist tries to look as friendly as he can when explains (yet again) that no, he's reading Kafka in Arabic translation.

This isn't an episode from The Iraqi Christ (though a similar one pops up), but something Blasim mentioned in a talk I saw him give this spring. But it captures some of the mood of this weird, mad, hilarious, agonizing, plainspoken, blood-drenched, heartfelt, surreal collection of stories. Not just because the spirit of Kafka soars all over (or rather, creeps right through) much of it, but because it's the sort of absurdity that shows up in every story - only, in Blasim's stories, the stakes tend to be much higher. The tales here are about people who try to just go on with their lives, the ones who have to fight for their lives, the ones who try to flee, the ones who make it and end up living in a country they're not allowed to call home.

Everyone staying at the refugee reception centre has two stories – the real one and the one for the record. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum, written down in the immigration department and preserved in their private files. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell the two stories apart. They merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them.

Reality is thin, blown apart by one too many torture sessions or wars or car bombs that scar the entire collective unconsciousness; magic can happen, you just don't have any control. In Blasim's stories, people compete on radio over who suffered the most during their time in Saddam's prisons; soldiers stumble into holes in the ground occupied by dead soldiers from other wars in other countries; immigrants find themselves trapped in their own bathroom in the middle of a big peaceful city while a wolf paces outside; refugees try to explain to immigration officers how they ended up starring in Youtube videos for dozens of different terrorist groups, alternately as terrorist and kidnap victim; etc etc etc.

We watched the adults’ wars on television and saw how the front ate up our elders. Our mothers baked bread in clay ovens and sat down in the sunset hour, afraid and with tears in their eyes. We would steal sweets from shops, climb trees and break our legs and arms. Life and death was a game of running, climbing and jumping, of watching, of secret dirty words, of sleep and nightmares.

Iraq has been one of the most reported-on countries in the world over the last 30 years. We count the dead by the hundreds of thousands, if we count them at all. Quick, name three Iraqi works of fiction that's not A Thousand And One Nights; hell, name three Iraqis known for anything un-war-related at all. Blasim gives voice to both suicide bombers and authors, thugs and lovers, football players and dogs, crossword makers and grieving mothers, all complex characters with their own stories, who fuck and drink and work and weep and kill and live and die and are all just as real as any angsting Franzen character. That shouldn't, in itself, be necessary - but we shouldn't need to see 3-year-olds washing ashore to get it either. But of course, in the end, that's not what makes this great, and neither are the dozens of literary references (from having a character jump out of a fifth-floor hospital window, to an Iraqi emigrant renaming himself Carlos Fuentes to pass as South American) which are both good fun and very deftly handed. This isn't literature to scratch off a check list of odd countries, or simple message fiction. These are stories that have come through both hell and heaven, been chiseled and knocked about and scarred and filigreed until they shine. Or, y'know, don't.

If there was a special search engine for dreams, like Google, all dreamers would find their dreams in works of art. The dreamer would put a word, or several words, from his dream into the Dream Search Engine, and thousands of results would appear. The more the search is narrowed down, the closer he gets to his dream and eventually he finds out it’s a painting or a piece of music or a sentence in a play. He would also find out which country his dream was in. Yes, you know. Maybe life... okay, fuck that.

In a way, of course, the title is a lie. Women without men is an impossibility as long as women are defined first and foremost by their relationships to men, which obviously is no less true given the setting of the novel, but hardly unique to it either.

Women Without Men tell the story of a half-dozen women circling this issue while rarely able to confront it head-on - even if they do, even if they kill or die or return from death with the power to read minds or turn into a tree (yes, it's that kind of novel) there's always invisible barriers both within and without, a limit to the world in which they're allowed to exist. And since they have to share it, as women, of course, they sometimes find it easier to turn on each other, to find (real) differences rather than similarities. Nothing breeds contempt better than seeing your own limits in a mirror. Nevertheless...

(The subtitle is interesting. The book is mostly set pre-revolution (I think), yet it's explicitly called "a novel of modern Iran". The characters live in a modern world, they compare themselves and others to US movie stars, they speak openly (within closed doors) about sex, they inhabit a modern world - one that's supposedly been swept away by revolution, yet from this POV, doesn't look much different. Like any writer working under state censorship, there's sadly only so much you can get away with by claiming "What? I'm writing about how bad the previous regime was.")

Parsipur's writing (in Farrokh's translation) is odd; at once highly symbolic and fairytale-like, and matter-of-factly furious, in a way that sometimes works wonders, and sometimes makes it feel as if I'm reading two novels at once. At least one of them is very good, though.

I'm not saying that this book on AI and the possibility of a future robocalypse was compiled by Skynet's PR algorithm after being fed Philosophy For Beginners, far from it. I'm just saying that if it were, it would be a lot more efficient.

Full review in Swedish: dagensbok.com/2015/09/06/du-levande/

The thing about travelling, of course, is that no matter how far you go you bring yourself along whether you want to or not. That sounds trite, I know. After reading these 12 short stories I'm not sure it's entirely true, though. Most of the stories here are based around travelling - whether it's people abandoning their lives, looking to leave everything behind as in the title story, people returning home after a long absence as in the darkly funny "The Woman Who Borrowed Memories", or just going for a walk with your son behind your house as in the heartrending "The Woods". She even takes a successful stab at post-apocalyptic science fiction in "Shopping".

There's a great passage in Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive on the subject of being alone as opposed to being lonesome. Lonesome's a whole other thing. Incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through. I think Jansson would have understood it, but not necessarily agreed; hell, Jansson was in a relationship with the woman who inspired Too-Ticky (and to whom the book is dedicated) for almost 50 years, she doesn't have a problem with self-sufficience.



So while her characters tend to fall more on the "lonesome" end of the scale - whether they're life-long loners, or in tight-knit groups or committed relationships where they suddenly see the limits of what you can share with someone ("The Gulls", dear god, "The Gulls") - and many of them are clearly hurting from it, there's also a sense of strength, of unexpected companionship, of of understated realisation. Travelling makes them see who they are more clearly, be more aware of what they've got in their knapsack. Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, da kann er was erzählen, even if you only tell yourself (or lie to yourself). Some of them, most likely, won't survive this realisation unharmed. Others will be stronger for it. Others will find a brand new set of self-delusions to lean on. Like all of Jansson's best works, the best stories here don't have a simple lesson or twist at the end; they just are, with a warmth and subtle humour that still knows when to be cruel.