tykytys

"Hohaj," Elizabeth Rynell

This novel was very hard to come by when I was in school. I seem to remember that our instructor had only a photocopy and so we students were kind of out of luck during the discussion. I lucked upon a copy during my travels overseas and picked up a paperback years ago.

The title refers to a place, but a place which no longer exists except in silence. Or, perhaps, in the pain of living life after the death of a loved one. The work opens with a one-sided conversation, where a spouse's death is related. I'll post more as I read further.

"Spök-sonaten" [The Ghost Sonata], August Strindberg

Yep I decided to rifle through my library and read a few works that I haven't touched since my student days. This short play (less than sixty pages), falls into the "chamber play" genre. There are few scene changes and the action takes place in and around a single house, often a single room.

Strindberg himself was a singularly unsavory fellow, accusing his wives (married four times, if memory serves) of betraying him and taking lesbian lovers. Scandalous for us poly folk, I know, but Strindberg devoted a LOT of energy to belittling these "tribades" and other "third sex" women (those who cut their hair short, smoked, drank liquor, wore pants).

Strindberg gives us here a play populated by undead, including a vampire cook who sucks the life out of any food she serves. The "hero" is touched by this: "nu känner jag vampyren i köket börja suga mig [I feel like the vampire in the kitchen is beginning to suck on me]" and it's strongly intimated that he causes the death of his new love (generously named "the girl"). We also see a mummy ("girl"'s Mom), and several ghosts who wander around on stage repeating the mistakes of decades past.

As an Expressionist work, there are violent and strong emotions portrayed on stage with little preparation or resolution, jangling music, strong color associations (Strindberg loves green), disjunct sets, and other elements which take the viewer out of his/her comfort zone. Something I've always appreciated about Strindberg is that his stage directions seem written as much for the reader as for the actors. A direction "[v]id ridåns uppgång ringes i fjärran från flera kyrkor [as the curtain rises, bells from several churches are heard in the distance]" is virtually impossible to reproduce on the stage, but quite easy for the viewer/reader to _imagine_.

Thus Strindberg does his part to tear down the fourth wall by forcing the viewer to be the director, to interpret stage directions and produce the play in her/his own mind.

"The Last Man on Earth," ed. Isaac Asimov et al.

A collection of post-apocalyptic short stories. Very uneven in quality. Has the worst back cover text ever. Example: "William F. Nolan tells his version of the last human survivor- trapped under ground in the San Francisco sewer system." Well, the first page of William F. Nolan's story tells us: "In the waiting, windless dark, Lewis Stillman pressed into the building-front shadows along Wiltshire Boulevard...[t]he city of Los Angeles, painted in cold moonlight, was an immense graveyard." Awesome reading comprehension there.

So, Mr. Back Cover copy editor, Frederic Brown's story _actually_ reveals the cause of man's extinction as aliens who used sonic energy to disintegrate all life except for matched pairs of a few animal species, NOT (as you write on the back cover) "man himself." Man Himself actually outwitted the aliens and returned to Earth to repopulate the species.

Additionally, Poul Anderson's protagonist actually has a travelling companion with him almost the entire trip, first his cohort from 1973 Earth, and then an alien from the far-flung future who escapes his own death by coming along in the time machine. I don't know how "he may find himself alone," as the very last scene features the man reunited with his wife and friends after time itself "wraps around."

"Bernard Foys tredje rockad" [Bernard Foy's Third Castling], by Lars Gustafsson

Yet another novel that I'd owned for years, tried to get through several times, only to be stopped by the obscure language and plot. Gustafsson is a Swedish expat and lived in Texas during the novel's composition.

The title refers to the special chess move called "castling," wherein the king and a rook's position are exchanged, subject to several rules. No, you can't castle three times in a game. The novel is three interlinked works. The entity "Bernard Foy" appears in different guises throughout the novel, alternately a rabbinical student, a secret agent, an octogenarian poet, and a teenaged boy.

I'll just say that I'm a big fan of experimental literature. Reading it in a foreign language adds a couple levels of complexity, though. For an example of the sort of stuff I had to write as a grad student at UCB, take a peek at this excerpt: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28698917_ITM. The article was written by a fellow Scandinavian Studies student who's since moved on to teach at BYU. In my humble opinion, the stuff I wrote was no more or less obscure- I was simply too frightened to try publishing. Reason #645 why I wasn't cut out for the life of a scholar.

"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov

After "Reading Lolita in Tehran," I knew that I had to re-read this novel. It had been years. As soon as I opened the book, that old elitist feeling kicked in: ah, _this_ is what a classic reads like. In this case, it's Nabokov's complete mastery of language.

"Deathnote 1," Tsugumi Ohba

This manga collection follows the awesome anime series pretty closely. That changes after about Volume 7, but this first book is reminiscent of what I saw on screen. Deathnote is the story of a kid who "finds" the eponymous book. By writing a person's name into the book (time and details are optional), that person's fate is sealed. This kid becomes, for lack of a better term, a mass murderer, killing off the world's "criminals" gradually.

The FBI becomes involved, even though the kid's determined early on to be in Japan, and a special investigator from a shadowy world organization is tasked with tracking the kid down.

"Twilight of the Superheroes," Deborah Eisenberg

I'd been intending to read this collection of short stories for years. Started, stopped, restarted...but this time I got through it. Ms. Eisenberg's characters are pretty damned moody. The title story is a dark, coming of age tale about a group of artists (well, yuppies really) who sublet a lovely apartment- an apartment with a great view of the Twin Towers. We work through our own feelings of fear and rage while sympathizing (or not) with the characters.

There's a lot more here, from post-colonial travelogue to post-modern psychology, and hopefully I'll come back and edit this post once I've caught up with my reading.

"Grisjakten," en roman av P. C. Jersild ("The Pig Hunt")

I'm still in the midst of reading this (short) novel by one of my favorite "popular" Swedish authors. I've already talked about Jersild in a previous review (see "Barnens ö). The current work is one that I wasn't familiar with and, well, it is a bit more preposterous than some of his other stuff. The premise is that a government agency has decided to cull the pig population in Sweden, starting on the island of Gotland. And naturally there's a career bureaucrat in charge of planning and executing the hunt.

I've only read a third or so of the book, so this isn't a complete "review." One quote stands out so far. The bureaucrat really enjoys having lunch on the government tab, although it doesn't always turn out as expected: "Hade räknat med en långlunch i matsalen, men allt som bjöds var en otrivsam mjölkbar. Skälla på staten kan vara befogat, men SJ:s färjor är bättre." ("I'd counted on a long lunch in the cafeteria, but the only thing that was provided was an unexceptional spread [a "mjölkbar" {lit. "milk bar"} is an old fashioned term for a place that serves junky Swedish-type fast food like "pytt i panna" and other "husmanskost"]. Abuse of the State can be justified, but the State Railways' food is better.")

Boy that's a lot less funny in translation. The fact that Jersild is writing in a mix of bureaucratic language (i.e. a language that no one speaks) and 60s-era slang is pretty odd.

"Sökarna" av Per Olof Sundman (i.e. "The Seekers")

By page 2 of this collection of short stories, I'd realized, "Hey I've read this before." And, in fact, I have. I own the collection already and read it a couple of years back. Instead of putting the book aside as I normally would have, I re-read the book and felt reasonably happy about getting reacquainted with a few old friends. Sundman's early work is considered "regional" because he focusses a lot on geography and people inhabiting it. In this case, the stories all revolve around the North- the northern fell (fjäll) region of Sweden where there are few trees.

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"Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi

Great book. Makes me want to read "Lolita" again and all of Nabokov's oeuvre. For some perverse reason, I've read _around_ Nabokov my entire life. I read the back covers of his novels. I read about them online. I read what Ms. Nafisi has to say about the protagonists in the works. But I've only ever read one novel of Nabokov's, and it was back in high school. For such a pseudo-intellectual, I'm truly an idiot.

Frankly, though, what I took most from the novel was how great the works of literature cited are, not how great "Reading Lolita" is. I think the work is important, documenting the loss of womanhood and independence in an Iran gone mad with revolution. But while I certainly sympathize with the plight of the author (and how condescending is _that_ phrase?) I'm not sure I needed to read a novel about it. I kinda know the general trajectory of the Islamic Revolution already and am completely aware of the stupid Saudi/Iranian model of having teenaged boys (and girls) drive around in pickup trucks acting as "morality police."

So I ended up being more conflicted than I cared to about the "usefulness" of the novel. As someone with a bit of literary training, I know that it's yet another battle in the eternal fight between fiction and non-fiction, between pleasure and didactic reading. A "memoir" is supposed to "teach" the reader something, either about the author, his family, or the culture at large. So when Mr. Knowitall thinks that he knows it all, he wonders, "What's the purpose of this memoir? I know it all. Just tell me more about frickin' Humbert Humbert and how he possesses Lolita utterly."

I think my navel needs to be pondered.