Sweetness by Torgny Lindgren
My rating: 3/5 cats
the above has very little to do with this book, but it sets a mood that i felt when i was reading this, and there is a trav’ling lady and some snow, so it can’t hurt to listen to it while you read the review. it also features prominently in the movie mccabe and mrs. miller, which i also like. so.
this book is like the vivisection of a fairy tale. it starts out beautiful and quiet and cold, and goes into some unexpectedly dark places, places i think are more interesting than a lot of other, more popular swedish books (koff, what??)
on tuesday, the girl who kicked the hornet’s nest came out in this country. and the crowd went wild. the book companion to the sex and the city 2 movie also came out and we sold about a million of those, too. i do not understand the appeal of either.
i read girl with the dragon tattoo, and it was fine, but i don’t understand the fucking raving infatuation. it is a semi-solid piece of crime fiction, but why it is elevated above the genre almost universally is beyond my ken.
so i decided to make a new endcap of scandinavian lit that i felt was a better representation of the scope of the region’s offerings (and i am in no way an expert, i just noticed that in the last month, i have read a book from denmark, one from finland, and one from sweden, and i have plenty more in my have-read-backstock.) and it is a lovely endcap, indeed. indirect r/a at its finest.
this book is out of print, or i would have included it on the display, because i think it tells a beautiful story, and it tells it very simply and well. maybe i will finally get to the point in this review, maybe not.
the story is small and simple in its scope and props—a trav’ling female writer giving a reading to an uninterested crowd in a remote town lodges in the evening with a man dying of a cancer that is eating him away into nothingness. a snowstorm strands her in his house, and while she stays (and stays and stays), she befriends the only other inhabitant of the area, the man’s estranged brother, who is being killed by his own corpulence, his body oozing sweet liquid from pustules as he lolls around on a sofa all day eating sugar cubes, both of them staying alive simply to have the satisfaction of outliving the other. eventually, she learns the root of their estrangement, from both sides, and becomes a sort of confessor/ spiritual figure to them in their feud.
and that’s it. but it is beautifully told—i will add some quotes tomorrow—the book is not at hand this very minute. wait here, i will return.
here is a nice one:
She had never found conversation appealing or enticing. In conversation thoughts are always being forced into unpredictable feints or digressions, they are twisted and distorted to please or annoy, they can be villainously treacherous. Solitary thought, on the other hand, is sovereign, it stays confined within and doesn’t have to make compromises. Even when you’re in two minds, you remain whole. She wanted to be left in peace with her thoughts.
i figure, when i get really old, and am slapped in a nursing home, there will be many copies of the remaining two books in larsson’s trilogy, along with harry potter and twilight and all the books that were overbought and then donated to the nursing home by grandchildren for whom “books” will be relics, and if i kick off in the middle of one of ’em—no biggie.
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