Quick glimpses of many life stories – Swedish Dagbladet

Tom Alandh. Photo: Malin Hoelstad

The memory is a deceitful friend, says Tom Alandh in the introduction to his summer debut. He no longer remember the names of all the people whose lives he documented in his over a hundred films, but when he starts telling it turns out that he still has preserved a lot: snapshots from the Swedish journalistiks most productive professional life.

With its sympathetic willingness to weigh each destiny as heavily receive Alandh place with an extensive gallery of characters; with the same interest he talks about jailbird and childhood friends, Martina Schaub – whose life he portrayed during 35 years – Nacka Skoglund and Zarah Leander, to name a few. He plays Cornelis and Dinah Washington and share the journalistic lessons he received along the way, such as the importance of silence (in broadcasting, he has succeeded in 17 seconds, nine less than his colleague Gunnar Arvidsson’s unofficial record) and not himself stand in the way of his story.

Tom Alandhs first sommarprat is thus a good introduction to a rare prolific journalistic career that – despite Alandh had time to pass the seventy – continues unabated (“as long as I can remember what I ate for dinner the night before “).

The only problem may be that the mind works a little too well – Alandh reproduces so many life stories that he did not really have time to immerse themselves in any of them. Some meetings, such as that of Monica Zetterlund, had been happy to take up more space.