Thursday, October 2, 2014

Östergren “Twist” – thriller with soul deep – Swedish Dagbladet

Hardly any living Swedish writers have been provided with so many epithets JARGONISTIC. It gets a little strange sometimes: gentleman, brilliant, brilliant stylist’s penchant for old-fashioned word (who forgets luguber) and so on. In most cases they are quite in order. Gentleman, yeah, who’s that Ostergren could teach its readers how to tie a tie? It is, I would like to tell, not least our politicians and directors, an art form in its own right.

JARGONISTIC well at least in part what is called a “much loved” writer, whatever it really is for a Skvader. But he has never skrävlat about where people who love one another and are usually, but have garnered enough points through their lågmäldhet and unobtrusive appearance behind the tie. However, he is extremely small aristocrat nonetheless, raised in Little Essingen in working-class family. I remember once how we are at a bar compared expensive watches, his IWC, my a Longines. He won.

Sometimes you can find it a tad strange with people on charity, Ostergren is a highly advanced novelist, with the intrigue out of the ordinary. Happily, it shows that there are still qualified readers in Sweden.

And when it comes to advanced so goes undeniably the new novel “Twist” (yes, the Beatles), not of the picks. It is brilliant and virtuoso composer, with many layers and twists time in now and then, which makes it important to read carefully and thoughtfully. The style is as always östergrensk, to take a cliche, elegant and polished, usually a pure pleasure. Yet this style is seemingly so simple

We literally transported in time and space, and I’ll readily admit that it is not always easy as a reader to go on the trip.

The Narrator , an author and writer, are in Karlskrona for writing a sort of biography of the theater director and the actor Johan Peter Lewenhagen once in the 1800s lived a skandalomsusat life (yes, he has actually existed in reality) and that the author’s mother claimed to be a relative.

From here tracks in different directions. In the center stands a the outset dead woman, Anne-Marie with several nicknames. She has had a relationship with several of the novel’s characters, also with the narrator. We are brought to the 60′s and the incipient boom years, it is social democracy all the way and the welfare state and all that. However, too lugubrious and shady business where the characters constantly seem to cross each other’s tracks. As always, Ostergren formidable when it comes time markers, clothing, Stockholm destruction or ever-present cigarette. And so on.

Everything smells and the spirit of the times that are a few years older than the author recognizes everything. Had it really such there pants? Well, unfortunately. But the refined plot moves on several levels, and the idea is therefore to read with a clear eye.

Between the figures is the wires, and we enter into a thriller world of shady. How is the relationship between Anne-Marie’s father and the Russian mobster and “entrepreneur” Jeff, involved in the gas business across the Baltic Sea? Who is the incredibly wealthy American on the narrator’s family’s archipelago (here’s the other sovereign fish stories), apparently cartoon after Fitzgerald’s Gatsby? And what has the narrator’s youth friends Tommy and Nina, old SKP-ers and residents in Karlskrona, with the GDR and its security service to do? And What did Anne-Marie’s father in East Germany? What is the thing you learn when the wall falls, what can the narrator read about herself in their agendas

Calm only after much entanglement clears it eventually, but I can not reveal more to not spoil the reader. For this is a suspense novel, one that Le Carré had was proud.

And what else? A story of love that never really dies and soundings in people’s emotional lives, soul’s meanderings, greedy nature, the corrupt society in the welfare polished surface. And much more besides.

There is much to ponder. How was it? How is it now? Just sink into the reading, which is not always thus so easy but provides rich recompense.


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