Användarprofil

• A GENIUS MAIMED!!! Tragic! A tragic figure!
  - A tragic genius, yeah.
  - Yeah!
  - You haven't got that yet?
  
  You obviously need a certain interest in the man. 360 pages of unedited dialogue between Shane and his partner, with her trying to get him to talk about his life and him going on endless foulmouthed tangents that veer from the pathetic to the almost depressingly sharp - depressingly because this is post-career, this is after a ton of drink and drugs, and he's still in there but just... getting access to it can't be easy. She stayed with him. And he tries, past all the slurs and the slagging off of people he's supposed to mend fences with, he catches himself and checks himself constantly. And the way he describes music, the punk scene, growing up, the bitterness over career choices, the half-finished songs scrawled on the back of papers...
  
  And God is in his heaven, and Billy's down by the bay.

Woah. I'm glad I hadn't read up more on this before going into it. Leads off with an almost Studio Ghibli-style family vacation that then takes a very sharp turn into something both very dark and almost clinically furious. Murata isn't happy with the expectations on women in society, and that could easily have made it one of those books I find yourself agreeing with more than I actually like or get swept up in it. But Natsuki is such fascinatingly fractured POV character, looking at everything from a curious perspective where she almost brings us too close to the horror of both individual and societal violence while that slight dissociation makes the story both more bearable and, somehow, even worse.

If you're into Ottessa Moshfegh this isn't miles off. Or maybe it's the other way around.

"Som medborgare känner vi alla främlingskap även om vi vägrar erkänna det. Regimen har förstärkt den regionala isolationismen och lokalpatriotismen hos individerna, i väst såväl som i öst, nord och syd. Vi saknar direkta kommunikationskanaler medborgarna emellan, och ingen känner till någon annan berättelse än regimens som fragmenterar och förvrängar sanningen."

Much like with The Loney I love the mood and feel of this. A Place where The Past still lives... or rather doesn't. Of stories with their own lives and myths that still grow if you dig deep enough, and gods help you if you do. A very English horror, the things you've spent generations or even epochs trying to ignore.

I just wish there was more story to it. It feels like it's building to something it never really gets around to. It's all very tweedy and gothic, but... that's it?

Synd på en så kul idé. Henrikson "upptäcker" Pytheas egen skildring av resan till norra Europa på 300-talet f Kr och "översätter" den (med ett stort antal fotnötter). Det är ett upplägg som använts av andra författare och duger till både Swiftsk satir och postmodern lek med myter. Henrikson... gör, med enstaka undantag (trälhandel på Tosia Bonnadan, turister på Tintagel), ingetdera; han bara låter Pytheas ramla rakt in i nordeuropeisk sagotid (Arthur, ynglingaätten, Hamlet, Ragnar Lodbrok) och få historierna återberättade för sig utan att på något vis blandas in i dem. Och ja, tusen år för tidigt. Det är dålig historieskrivning, och det är fantasilös romankonst.

As long as you know what you're getting into - a book about the history and contemporary practice of Satanism specifically as written by a member of the Satanic Temple, with the last 20 pages basically being a sales pitch to join - this is both informative and interesting. I would have liked some better references (the book has a "selected bibliography", but no actual footnotes on the many claims of historic facts that would have been interesting to dig deeper in), perhaps a bit of self-criticism on the various kooky nutjobs who tend to float to the top in any new religion, and it would probably have been more thorough if an actual LaVeyan Satanist had been given equal time. But like the foreword admits, this is a "little book" that's basically just a "Hey come on, we're not bad people" pamphlet aimed at dispelling a lot of myths. As such it gets the job done.

So maybe I should have read the original first, but a) I've watched a ton of movies based on books without reading the book first, and b) I'm... kinda over mid-century novels about angsty young men ruining the lives of everyone so they can become even more self-obsessed. So maybe it's for the best that Ito (presumably) exaggerates the source material, turning it into a grotesque 600-page horrorshow that makes our self-pitying asshole of a protagonist at least interesting to look at.

Listening to this as an audio book works just the way you'd expect it to: It's David Mitchell giving a 10-hour angry rant about how shit most kings were back in the good old days. A well-read, informative, funny angry rant, but a rant nonetheless. With numerous asides, obviously. Basic takeaway, which should be obvious but somehow seems refreshing: You can be fascinated by these people, but admiring them, let alone thinking living under them had any advantages whatsoever to living now, is... a choice most people wouldn't make.

Det var ett tag sedan jag läste JAL, vi tappade visst kontakten efter Himmelstrand. Så kanske är det lika mycket nostalgi i hur jag gillar den här boken som den han leker med i att placera en 70-talists påstådda minnen mitt i 1985 bland Stephen King-pocketar och Live Aid-blandband; den får mig att minnas inte bara då, utan också hur jag många år senare låg vaken en julnatt och plöjde dom sista 200 sidorna i Låt den rätte komma in. Det är som att komma hem(skt).

Och jag gillar hur öppen den här boken känns, hur tydligt den är återberättad av någon som försöker sätta ord på det långt senare. 14-åringar är kapabla till mycket, men - speciellt inte i en tid före internet - kanske inte nödvändigtvis djupare förståelse över vad det här kommer att innebära i det långa loppet. Du hittar en sjöjungfru, jaha, då har du en sjöjungfru nu då. Både JAL och berättarrösten håller sig till dom där veckorna, den där korta perioden, utan att det behöver betyda så mycket mer än så. (IT Part Two sög ju hursomhelst.) Det kan ändå betyda så mycket vad som händer i ögonblicket. Du ställs öga mot öga med det ofattbara och fattar inte, och när du måste leva vidare ändå är du någon annan.

Q: Are we not men?
A: No, thank god.

The Island of Doctor Moreau, like many of Wells' stories, lends itself to a lot of allegorical readings, especially as both society and technology marches forward. I should probably re-read it.

One of Daughter's most admirable strengths is that it's both rich enough in detail and distanced enough from the present day (set in the revolutionary 1870s) that it doesn't lend itself to ONE reading. Sure SMG has put some much-needed focus on the gender and colonial lenses, but at its heart it remains a story about people - whether fully Homo or not - grappling with power. Setting it deep in the jungles of Yucatán gives it some extra context and some more dimensions; we're not on a mystic isolated island, we're smack dab in the middle of history with all its complexities.

Sure you could have wished for some more character depth for one or two of the quite obvious villains. Then again, sometimes they really are that obvious. If old dogs can't learn new tricks, make better dogs, I guess.