Granskningar och kommentarer

Trieste, 1943: A man is found with his head bashed in, almost dead, severely brain damaged, and completely amnesiac - even his language is completely forgotten. The only clue to his identity is a Finnish navy uniform and a name sewn onto it. He's taken on board a German ambulance ship, where the doctor just happens to be a Finnish expat, who takes it upon himself to save his unfortunate countryman. He starts re-teaching him Finnish, that weird language of dozens of cases and almost no prepositions, and eventually manages to have him sent to Helsinki to recuperate and rediscover his identity in his supposed home town. There, our hero keeps a diary (helpfully transcribed and improved by his rescuer) of his painful, slow reintegration into Finnish society, Finnish history, Finnish language, all while the Continuation War rages at the Russian border.

New Finnish Grammar is an odd little novel, often both beautiful and frighteningly subtle, that I can't help feel deserves better than the slightly hamfisted (though justified) ending. It's most definitely a story for Europe in the 21st century, the European as a character who's forgotten who he is, and who has to be taught why he's better than others, his origin stories, his archnemeses; who is too caught up in trying to figure out who he was in some mythical past to see who he is now. An Italian writing a story of Finland in WWII, with absolutely nobody acknowledging whose side they're on in the struggle against a common scary subhuman enemy. A story written by a Eurocrat, set outside but never in Trieste and Vyborg, two of the major multi-ethnic cities that completely changed their identity following the war. A story about how language and myth is used to create and prevent thought, possibilities, futures and pasts. All centered around a simple tale of a man without a past (yes, Kaurismäki could film this) trying to figure out who he is by using grammar and music (the Finnish word for "Bible" literally means "grammar", he notes - or rather, it's noted for him) to create a context, a continuity.

I like it. I just wish I was better read up on the Kalevala.

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books And The People Who Read Them is Elif Batuman's memoir of life as a Turkish-American postgraduate at Stanford, trying to figure out Russian literature, the Russian language, Russian (and Soviet) society, and of course other people who do the same. It's packed to the rafters with analyses of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tjechov and mediaeval Uzbek poetry.

And it's absolutely hilarious.

Sure, part of that is Batuman's writing, dry and incredibly quotable, often dipping into fond satire of literary criticism. But just as often it's the sheer absurdity of the situations she finds herself in. A dinner party for the daughters of the long-dead Isaak Babel, who are greeted as celebrities but turn out to have nothing new to offer about a writer nobody seems to know anything about. A summer-long excursion to Samarkand which ends up in complete chaos. An newly discovered plot to murder Tolstoy, the investigation of which gets thwarted by an excursion to Tjechov's home - not because it has anything to do with Tolstoy, it's just conveniently close. An attempt to understand why the hell Empress Anna built a palace of ice in St Petersburg and forced her jesters to have marital relations in it. How Dostoevsky's Demons is a lot like the complex interpersonal relationships at a university. And obviously, the similarity between King Kong and diaries from the Soviet-Polish war, but that goes without saying.

And the thing is, it works. Batuman is funny, but she also knows what she's talking about, and she comes up with a lot of fascinating insights. But above all, she captures the sheer joy of immersing yourself in reading, in needing to find out what makes it tick, chasing after the tangible bits - the houses, the writing desks, the writers - as a substitute for getting to the actual story. I love this. I just wish there was more of it.

OK, so let's say the Klondike rush happened a few decades earlier. Seattle swells from a little border trading post to a major metropolis a little earlier, and the influx of cash has a profound change on US history by enabling the South to continue the civil war indefinitely, using armed airships.

And then everything goes to hell when an inventor tests some new mining equipment in downtown Seattle; not only does he wreck the entire downtown, but he opens up a crack in the earth's crust that lets out volcanic gas from Mt Rainier. Within a week, Seattle has turned into a zombie-infested wasteland, around which the government (what government there is - Washington isn't a state yet, and the war is swallowing all the funds) erects a high wall. Outside, a few homeless stragglers hang on. Inside, death rules.

16 years later, in 1880, the young son of the inventor, who never met his father, goes inside the wall for some answers. And his mother has to get him out again, so she straps on an old gas mask and hitches a ride from a passing zeppelin into hell.

Yes, Boneshaker is western steampunk with zombies, female protagonists and mad inventors. Predictably, it's a lot of fun. At some point, though, it starts to tread water. Priest is a decent enough writer, but language-wise she can't seem to quite decide whether to write a modern novel or a 19th century pastiche, and the plot becomes a little too one-dimensional. When you have a set-up like this, why only focus on three characters running around in tunnels under Seattle? (Yes, there are sequels which apparently expand on the wider aspects of her alternate history.)

Still, y'know, it's western steampunk with zombies, female protagonists and mad inventors. Fun, fun, fun.

Where to start... well, I'll give it this: it's probably better than the original. Anastasia Steele is a far gutsier heroine than Bella Swann, even if her desire to work for a small independent publisher even though she's never read anything written after 1850 (and still manages to misquote Shakespeare whenever she tries) is a bit odd, and at least some of the fucked-upness of their relationship is actually commented on within the story; the man's stalking, violent, manipulative behaviour isn't just treated as something romantic (though his threat to "punish" her for almost getting herself raped is apparently supposed to be seen as such, which... yech). Which is something, I guess. And while it's certainly no Secretary, it's nice to see a relationship of this type given a portrayal that doesn't completely demonise it. Compared to Twilight's chastity it goes overboard in the other direction, but hey.

That said, no, it's really not a good novel. On any level. Plotwise, the mere knowledge that it's a Twilight rewrite is pretty obvious from the start, with the slightly offensive Native American Jacob replaced with the slightly offensive Mexican José (who can't go two sentences without blurting out "O Dios Mio!"), with the same wish-fulfillment fantasy of a sexual supergod who'll lavish her with gifts and in turn be tamed by her true love, and the same poor writing. The fact that it's badly edited (the usual stuff - "your"/"you're" mix-ups, etc) and that the prose is sometimes unbelievably clunky (personally I laughed the most at "[the orgasm balls] make me needy, needy for sex.") isn't really the worst. Nor is it the narrator's endless fascination with pointless details, the way the novel is obviously sponsored by Apple, Audi and Blackberry (seriously, EVERY CAR here is an Audi, and all of them described with more eroticism than most of the sex) or her habit of describing her emotions as a constant debate with her conscience and her "inner goddess" that mostly makes it sound as if she's suffering from DID. No, the worst thing is the repetition. See, our narrator only knows a handful of phrases, and she really likes using them. So basically, the stretches of supposed story novel she's put in to pad out the sex scenes all read like this:

Rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience rolled my eyes bit my lip eat something my inner goddess smirked sexily tousled hair conscience and on and on and on for three hundred and fifty pages. If you made a drinking game of this book, people would die of acute alcohol poisoning by the thousands. After a while you start looking forward to the sex scenes, not because the sex is all that hot, but because at least it'll break up the monotony.

As for the actual sex scenes, well... yes, they are numerous and pretty explicit for those who wonder, though oddly puss... sorry, vaginafooting around using any r-rated words apart from the liberally used "fuck". And I will say that as porn goes, I've read both better and worse. Hell, I've read far worse in properly published novels by "real" authors (Haruki Murakami, I'm glancing in your direction while keeping an eye on the exit). BDSM isn't really my thing, but if you're into that, you'll get that too even if it's mostly pretty mild. However, just like the rest of the novel, the sex scenes get repetitive very quickly and you soon lose count of the

it takes no time at all for me to fall over the edge, spiraling into a delicious, violent, exhausting, orgasm. As I clench around him, it ignites his release, and he slides into me, stilling, gasping out my name in desperate wonder.

In the end, it's not an awful novel; a bad one, a dull one, but not a catastrophically bad one. I think I would probably have enjoyed this far more if it had been worse; there are moments of so-bad-it's-good comedy (especially if you teach your inner voice to read it like Gilbert Gottfried) and bits where you cringe at how James clearly thinks she's writing one thing and it comes out as quite another. But even those bits get tiresome after the sixtythird repetition and the whole thing becomes one long slog of... well, grey, I suppose.

When Joyce's Ulysses was given a new translation to Swedish last year, the translator Erik Andersson also put out this short book about the translation process, which is pure translation porn. He starts out with a sigh of relief that he's finally done with his translation of Lord of the Rings, which ate his brain for a long time; now he can relax and translate a book he's read lots of times, knows inside out, let's get this party started: "Stately plump Buck Mulligan - "

Uh, is that "Stately" the adjective or the adverb? "Plump" as in chubby or rude? ...Damnit, it's both. And both are specific to English. Fuck. He's stuck on the opening sentence for two weeks. And it doesn't get any easier, the puns and the double meanings the least of his problems. How do you translate the difference between Irish and British English to another language? What about all the untranslated Latin that made sense to early 20th century catholic Irishmen, but is all Greek to 21st century Swedes?

At one point, he takes up this question: 1) Why do we do re-translations, apart from the vague clichés of the old translation not feeling "fresh" ("Finally we have a Dostoevsky for our times!" Excellent. But what's he doing in our time? Aren't we supposed to be visiting his?) and 2) if we regularly put out new translations of foreign works to keep them up to date, why don't we do the same thing for books written in our own language that have become... if not unreadable, then at least reader-unfriendly with age? If the life expectancy of a translation is roughly 50 years, why shouldn't the same hold true for original works?

Note the "why"

He argues, hesitantly, that the best argument for a re-translation is to be true to the author's original intention (so much for the author being dead). So then the question becomes, did the author really intend to come across as archaic and confusing? Probably not.

In Swedish, this gets complicated since Swedish was "modernised" fairly recently. "Classic" Swedish literature begins in the early 19th century, but we had our latest major spelling and grammar reforms in the early-to-mid 20th century, which means that a lot of the older works that were still popular then were edited to "correct" archaic spelling and verb forms that no longer existed. You can think what you want about that, but the fact remains that almost every printing those books have gone through since are not the original text but a modernised one. (Part of the reason why August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf are still very popular in Sweden was that they were among the first authors to embrace this, so they automatically feel more "modern" than other writers working at the same time.) Still, for the most part, they only changed spelling and verb endings - word choices, social situations and forms of address that have gone out of style, etc remain and, much like Shakespeare for the English, occasionally make the text confusing without extensive footnotes.

This isn't to say that I necessarily think old texts should be modernised, but it's an interesting question... for the moment, I'll stick with Erik Andersson's conclusion:

But as with all translations, you can take comfort in the fact that the original isn't annihilated but remains for those who prefer it. There's nothing to stop us from adding another category to the translators' workload; once they've finished translating and retranslating all foreign literature ever written, they can deal with the Swedish one, from 1962 and backwards.

And for what it's worth, the translation itself is brilliant.