Granskningar och kommentarer

Very mixed collection of short stories and novellas, ranging from sublime magic realism (The Transparent Carrot) to brilliant political satire (A Long Distance Race 30 Years Ago) to village stories that are likable enough but seem more like fragments that never found a novel to fit into.

Considering how much he's been criticized for not being sufficiently political - and thereby, in a political climate, the wrong kind of political - it's perhaps telling how many of his stories involve characters that are mute or at least silent by choice.

I got this somewhere and have been reading it off and on whenever I have five minutes to spare. It's only when I read him that I realise how much I miss Roger Ebert as a reviewer. I never read him religiously, but whenever I did, I was struck by how he, as few other movie critics could, combined dry, somewhat snobby intelligence with a deep love of the medium. Yes, he was brilliant at writing scathing, vicious putdowns, as he does occasionally in this collection as well (I can imagine seeing this many movies in a year, I could never imagine having anything worthwhile to say about all of them). But even his most dismissive hatchet jobs always came with a side of we-can-do-better; as if he knew that even the stupidest action movie could be the greatest movie in the world for 90 minutes, and felt almost betrayed if a movie promised its audience something it didn't deliver. I don't know much about Ebert himself, but I like to think it had something to do with coming into his own right about the time modern, more rock'n'roll criticism became the norm, but before movies were forever divided into blockbusters and arthouse. In this, he praises Salt and eviscerates Transformers, speculates on what would happen if he appeared in public with Edward Cullen's eyebrows, and snarks beautifully at fans of Thor ("I know aliens from other worlds are required to arrive in New Mexico, but why stay there?").

Nobody needs to agree with a critic; but we need critics who provide something worth listening to, and perhaps arguing with.

I guess the word is "verve", not just because it sounds like "verb" and both Lövestam and one of her lead characters are fascinated with grammar. But because even despite having a cast of characters that's not your typical cookie-cutter romcom cast (it's a triangle drama between a butch lesbian high school teacher who can't spell "commitment", a repressed male store manager with an amputee fetish, and a paraplegic academic whose attitude towards romance is that she doesn't want to attract the sort of people who find a woman without legs attractive) there are times when the plot gets painfully clichéd. Right up to the bit where it turns out everyone knows each other without knowing it. Yet what makes it remarkable is Lövestam's attitude: it's the good sort of debut novel, the one where the author goes "Fuck it, let's just do this", mixes up some familiar ingredients, sneaks in some rather clever thoughts on language and identity between the lines, finds her voice, and plows full steam ahead. It's not always revelatory, but it's never less than entertaining and in some aspects kinda great.

3.5

“There are poems that would’ve been much better off written as essays,” Omid said as he stretched his arm out behind her on the back of the seat and placed his warm palm on her shoulder. “If it’s anything that can easily be articulated in an article, then it’s an insult to put the same thoughts and ideas into the language of poetry. It sullies its essence, because poetry is there to say what cannot be said. It is there to speak of the hidden, the secret, the sacred.”

I don't necessarily agree, but it does speak to a problem with Children of the Jacaranda Tree. Towards the end, one of the many lead characters tells her lover all about her family history as a child born in prison to Iranian dissidents, and later realises that he didn't want to know - that his own family was on the other side, and that knowing what she and her parents had been through was the last thing he needed. To some extent, I can relate; knowing that this is largely based on Delijani's own experiences (and those of her parents) I can't help but feel like an asshole for sitting here in 200 years of peace and 100 years of democracy and critiquing how another person expresses pain over something I could never imagine. How can I tell a person, as opposed to an author, that I give their life and their country 3 (or 2.5 rounded up) stars? "Yeah, you and your mother went through hell, but you need to make me believe it."

But then, it does present itself as a novel - as poetry, so to speak - and as such, as heartfelt as it is and as admirable as its aim is, it simply falls a bit short. The themes it addresses (the alienation of the emigrant, the forced conflict between generations, how violence and silence poisons everything, the power and insufficiency of love, the panic of a government whose power must lie in policing not only actions but thoughts), fine... but even as she jumps from decade to decade and character to character the author's voice remains the same, the characters become mouthpieces, the prose gets way overwritten... It never becomes a bad novel, it just continuously falls a little bit short of what it seems to want to be.

(Originally reviewed 2006)

One thing I loved about this book was the running theme of... call it "neither/nor". The protagonists, over several generations, keep falling between the cracks in a society hell-bent on either/or. (Of course, there's the title too - MIDDLEsex.) Cal is neither man nor woman. His/her family is neither European nor Asian, since they come from a part of Europe that has since become Turkish. (Take for instance the part where Cal's grandmother is accepted to work for Muslims, since she can be assumed to be at least part Muslims, as much as that irks her...) His/Her grandparents are siblings, and a married couple - two states which contradict each other, so they can't quite be either. They move to America and become neither Europeans nor Americans, working in the most typical businesses (cars, bars, booze) but never becoming completely assimilated. Too black to be white, too white to be black, too well-to-do to be poor, to non-WASP to be your typical suburbans. Everyone is constantly both and neither.

You've got the scene in which Cal's grandmother dangles a spoon over her daughter's belly, swinging back and forth to determine the sex of her baby. The whole book is a pendulum, going back and forth and never quite stopping.

Freudbeschädigt.

Schade, because when it's good, it's really good, and makes me want to underline every other section. But I'm more interested when they focus on analysis of Hamlet than on, to quote a phrase, hamletization of analysis.

Yes, it's a gimmick - a haunted house novel (though more inspired by the likes of The Amityville Horror and Paranormal Activity than, say, Shirley Jackson) set in an IKEA ORSK furniture megastore, and the low-wage employees (sorry, "partners") forced to investigate it at the risk of their lives or lose their jobs. Cue a bunch of fairly obvious jokes about silly product names (often actually Norwegian insults) and corporate doublespeak - designing the whole thing as an almost perfect knockoff of an IKEA catalogue is just the tip of the iceberg.

But here's what Hendrix gets right, apart from actually being funny: He does what a good horror story should do and finds a pain point, the bit where he's not just trying to scare readers by going "BOO!" but actually taps into a real-life fear that anyone who's ever worked the so-called service industry can relate to. Where hard work is praised and demanded, but not actually valued in the currency we use to measure everything; where companies use words like "family" and "values" (and in some cases even "family values") until their employees aspire to furnish their own homes with their company's products (if they can afford them); where dreams of stardom and success are dangled carrot-like over a treadmill that just speeds up the faster you move. Basically, this is Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed left to rot in an Indian burial ground.

The hard work makes Orsk your family, and the hard work is free.

I put down the book, I look about my largely IKEA-furnished home, and a chill creeps up my spine. Not only did they make me want to buy it, they made me put it together myself. As if my time (and the occasional cut) cost nothing. How did they do that?

But, y'know, then you get our heroine triumphantly wielding an Allen key too. So 'sall good.

In the immortal words of Sonic Youth, "Satan is boring". As is de Sade when you cut him down to an extended argument about how people try to free themselves from God. And fuck GK Chesterton.

You poor, poor Anglophones who don't get to read Sara Stridsberg. You should do something about that.

Beckomberga har mycket av det jag älskat i hennes tidigare romaner - medkänslan med de mest befuckade (är det ett ord? Vi behöver ett ord för uppfuckad som inte lägger hela ansvaret på den fuckade, utan att frikänna hen för allt), den förundrat lyriska prosan, personporträtten som säger bara precis så mycket som man behöver veta, berättarna som nästan blir lite för förtjusta i sina egna metaforer i jakten på ett sätt att motivera sina handlingar... Samtidigt är det också en av hennes egnaste berättelser, verklighetsbaserad men utan de tydliga kopplingarna till kända personer eller kända romaner som Drömfakulteten och Darling River någon gång kanske lutade sig aningen för tydligt emot. På Dagensbok.com beskrev Tone den som en modern Bergtagen, och det ligger någonting i det - symboliken för världen i stort ligger tydlig i bakgrunden och ibland i förgrunden; hon säger uttryckligen att Beckomberga mentalsjukhus liv (1932-1995) sammanfaller med den svenska välfärdsstaten, urbaniseringen, en förklaringsmodell på något vis. När Per Albin talade om folkhem blev det plötsligt också möjligt att behandla de sjuka, och att därmed definiera dem som sjuka, som något att stänga in och aldrig förvänta sig se igen. Jimmy Darling åker in på Beckomberga när Tjernobyl exploderar, understruket av mordet på Palme. (Jag tänker på vad Teju Cole skrev i Open City, att det moderna samhället har förlorat alla sätt att hantera trauma, inte kan spjälka katastrofer.)

Samtidigt är det ändå i det lilla hon arbetar, i beröringen, i vägran att döma ens för det hemskaste. Life is no way to treat an animal, som det står på en annan metaförfattares gravsten. Men det blir bara viktigare för det.

Alltså, jag vill verkligen gilla detta. Dieselpunk med tågkrascher och luftskepp, uppblandat med svensk sagovärld med troll och skogsrån - och på något vis satt i nutiden dessutom. Långa sträckor är det också riktigt bra - inte minst har Hård en härlig känsla för just trollspråk. Zeppelinare svävar över ett Stockholm där mörka tvåbenta figurer smyger allt närmare runt knutarna utanför all officiell statistik.

Det den brister i, och som tar den från en stark trea ner till en stark tvåa, är dels att det sällan känns som om jag får grepp om exakt hur den här världen fungerar. Hon gräver gärna ner sig i backstoryn, men det lätt annorlunda Sverige hon beskriver skymtar mest förbi som kuliss till nattliga bilresor. Och sen då detta slut. Jag har inget emot trilogier, men det ska då vara just trilogier, inte en roman upphackad i tre delar, så att den slutar på en cliffhanger mitt i handlingen. Om jag måste vänta ett år till på att läsa fortsättningen behöver de första 250 sidorna vara väldigt starka, och det är de tyvärr inte riktigt här. Synd, för jag gillar vad hon vill göra och kanske tar upp den igen när samlingsvolymen kommer.