Granskningar och kommentarer

There's a certain symmetry to the fact that this book, much like any given AC/DC concert, pretty much acknowledges that the band stopped being interesting with the release of Back In Black and only fleetingly mentions that they kept touring and putting out records after that. Apart from a lot of detail about everything that happened before 1983, your main impression will be that Mick Wall really doesn't like that the Young brothers won't talk to him. That said, if all you're looking for is a straight-up biography of the band, no frills, no fills, just straight-ahead 4/4 details about Bon Scott drinking himself to death and the band occasionally recording an album, it'll do.

Six teenagers go off to a cabin in the woods for the weekend. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

"The most fucked up book you'll ever" etc says the blurb, and most readers seem only too happy to repeat it. I wish I could. I wish the story and the gore and Mellick's admittedly enviable imagination when it comes to coming up with new ways to squick the reader out could overcome the fact that this is less a novel than it is a screenplay quickly rewritten in prose form. But...

OK, I get academic when I talk about horror. Sorry. I've seen just about every variation on this plot. Inbred hillbillies? Rape trees? Hockey masks? Nazi zombies? Flesh-eating viruses? Secret organisations with hidden cameras? The old plot has seen a lot of variations, and Apeshit doesn't even try to do anything new - it just piles on supposedly outrageous ideas. And yes, they are, and for a little while it's very entertaining. I mean, you have to admire a story in which a guy finds himself fucking the actual brain of the headshot victim forcing herself on him. But either I'm so jaded that even abortion porn doesn't faze me, or violence stops becoming disturbing when there's so much of it and none of it has any actual consequences, which it doesn't when the characters clearly only exist to be victims or suppliers of it, and you know that whatever happens, the writer is going to try to do something even worse on the next page. A couple of these ideas, milked for all they're worth, could have made it fucked up. As it is, it just gets boring; like listening to someone rattle off punchlines to jokes without telling a single one of them.

What starts out as a straight tale (and yes, there's an in-story storyteller telling us that they're telling us a tale) of a bunch of knights in one of Charlemagne's campaigns against the muslims gets thrown off its track when it turns out that one of the knights, the wisest, fairest, chastest, most analytically-minded of them all, doesn't actually exist; he's just an empty suit of armour held together by the idea of his own existence. So Charlemagne, in his wisdom, gives him a Sancho Panza-style squire in the shape of a madman who exists, but isn't aware of it, expecting them to get on well with each other. And off we go.

As with most of Calvino's books, it's hard to describe it without killing what makes it come alive. We have a group of characters who are really just philosophical concepts dressed up as knights and taken so far to their respective extremes that they barely work, blundering through the plots of Candide and Monty Python's Holy Grail, trying to work out whether they exist or not. And since they're philosophical concepts, it gets meta as fuck... but it never gets annoyingly, preciously so, partly because at just over 100 pages it never has time to, but also because he knows how to riff on tales we've heard before (and does so far better than in Castle of Crossed Destinies IMO). And somehow, after all these high concept modernist ideas fighting each other, he comes out with a rather beautiful ending in praise of the possibilities of fiction, of everything that doesn't exist.

But now, o future, I'm in the saddle and riding your horse. What new flags do you raise at me from the towers in a city yet to be founded? What fires will you let ravage the castles and gardens I've loved? What unforeseen golden ages do you have lined up for me, you unbending, you bearer of treasures to be dearly paid for, you my country to be conquered, you future...

FINALLY managed to slug my way through vol 6 of Knausgård's My Struggle. All 1130 pages of it. And I hate that it became a chore, because when it's good, it's really good, and the final 200 pages are among the best of the entire megadump, dealing with the reactions to the previous parts of the novel cast against his wife's mental illness... but at the same time, there's that 430-page essay on Hitler and the mechanics of deindividualisation stuck in the middle like a huge, self-important weight (yes, Knausgård oddly seems more self-indulgent when he writes about Hitler than when he spends 4000 pages writing about himself) dragging the book down.

He's done with it, I'm done with it. For all its ups and downs, it was definitely a ride.

Longer and in Swedish: dagensbok.com/2013/10/08/en-arelos-javel/

Now THAT is more fucking like it than the so-so Travesti (and not just because it turns out that Travesti is essentially a remix of one of the stories in Nostalgia). Funny, devastating, creepy, the storyteller trapped as God within his own story. Damn, I'm going to have to read the diaries too, aren't I?

Fun, respectfully (though occasionally a little to respectfully) irreverent, reasonably clever. If you only want to read one book in which Jesus learns kung fu, I'd recommend this over the shooting script for Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter. I especially like how Moore has, in essence, made Jesus' teachings not the product of some divine inspiration but from, in his own words, "logical and moral conclusions that any person in search of what is right would come to", and having Jesus pick up bits and pieces from Greek philosophy, taoism, buddhism, hinduism and other ideas floating about at the time. And the relationship between Levi, Yeshua and Mary, once you peel back the worst fratboyisms that poor Biff gets stuck with when he's given "the gift of tongues" and then locked up with a dim angel and American TV for his only inspirations, is really nicely done. The rushed ending lets it down, though.

All in all, not my favourite Bible rewrite, but ... fun.