Thursday, August 25, 2016

Lars Norén’s diary gives eternity literary form – Swedish Dagbladet

Author
Genre
Pros
Publisher
Albert Bonniers
ISBN
9789100151768

1600 pp

L ars Noréns “a playwright diary” has now reached its third part, a brick like the previous, strictly designed by Nina Ulmaja. 1 September 2013, he writes: “My diary is not a project.” It is reasonable that he says so, the project targets and any target with Noréns amalgam of everything imaginable is hard to find. Has Eternity, a literary form, I think, is this diary. Thousands of pages all at the same time standing still, going round in endless repetitions, and constantly renewed, becomes fresh and never seen or said. And it is only in writing, in a special way to handle the scripture, that such a paradox of time and non-time can take shape. The secret of Norén’s diary seems to be that everything is written without flashbacks, everything is fresh start, and without a plan, “I start over,” he wrote Dec. 21, 2013.

Yet he plans looking back – how do you avoid a man there? – And we now have provisional names for the volumes in the series: the first is called “Work”, the second “Farewell” and the new for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015 called “Old age”. The fourth, well written precisely as I write this, to be called “Death” or simply “dead”. In the “old” indicates the possibility that it is posthumous. Though based philosopher Heraclitus, one of Norén’s guiding principles in the new diary part where philosophical reflections are the main track, it can be said that even the existing diaries is posthumous; the moment and Lars their impressions of the already destroyed in the flow of time, freed were well-author say.

Very involves Norén’s own imminent death: the diary as an exercise in die, a “Thanatografi” with his own term. On April 14, 2013, he writes, “I will miss writing when I was not here when I’m dead.” Here are the correct Noren dispute, his vital death humor, so important in his dramatic style. But he also wants to escape a style, be unaffected (also an art) and avoid routine artifice. He notes his captivity in them, April 15, 2013, he speaks of “misery rhetoric” and says “I’m hänfallen it.” And April 8, 2013, he looks at the French essayist Cioran “an ethos of coquettish atrocity”.

It is on-dot-description of his own book, “No”; I read it in SvD in February 2014. But the book is not synonymous with Noren in general – he is infinitely richer – more kameleontisk – than that. And the words do not match the “A playwright diary”, it is full of affirmation and love, to everyday life, to light, to friends, to the books, and above all to his daughter Sasha, five, six years in a diary and his significant other . Lars has shared custody of Sasha, his days are radically different when he takes care of her, he was forced out of himself. Sasha also works actively as a bridge between Lars and others, it is often she who takes the initiative to contact, which I myself can testify at my only meeting with Lars and his daughter (Diary 23 September 2014).

on January 15, 2014, he mildly defense against my criticism of “No” and I get to experience something I never met as a critic: a writer who agrees with his critics that he strengthens his own authorship. Such is worthy of a literary arena that often are marking time-rebuttal restricting the intellectual climate. Noren says: “Weil makes me sensible. Cioran depletes me. “I could write:” No “impoverish me. “A playwright Diary” makes me sensible.

The diary is also aphoristic art of living. “Stick to their critical fury, even where it seems both unreasonable and humiliating. It is perhaps the only way not to be a parody of what makes a powerless “, named, as at 16 May 2013. His tirade against the media, the cultural climate in Sweden and single people there -” Swedish critics mediocre equality reflex “- is not mild. Though the new diary is a distance, as if Noren increasingly pulling away from public view. That does not prevent many of his blows are both amusing and possible to join in.

You can of course ask why this never-ending flow of the text? Well, not least for the text to be able to realize their many brilliant highlights require an idle words that also will lecture recovery. There reminiscent Noréns method of Proust, how I imagine that Proust wrote: not to Flaubert through the discerning search for le mot juste , the exact expression, but by being in writing flow – with its unexpected replipunkter, its amazing bargain.

I do not now writing Swedish has Noréns speed of the associations, in parcels between trivial, ridiculous, self-critical, self-assertive, elevated, sublime. The lightweight gears with the unforgettable – and it gives enormous freedom to the reader. It is not important if it’s written is true, sober, logical, clear, beautiful, understandable – Noren is a Proust on speed, I could write, if it were to fall into the critic jargon.

How to characterize this surging of text with no paragraph division or pagina, with just a day’s date? Perhaps it is a allmaktsdröm, the desire to cover everything and everybody, though not in the world but in the words, the world’s antithesis. Bringing the world into itself by incessantly writing, do word of it, is to destroy it. The writing is everything. “I also write when I do not write,” the one of the few places where Noren touches Marguerite Duras, a problematic writer for him. For it is clear: Norén’s diary is written, not speech. What is the difference? Well, the speech is an addressee, the diary has not. It is not addressed to the reader, had made it the text would have the shoulder, sovrats, was elegant as a dinner party that you want to be nice and cozy for guests. Nor is it addresses the author himself, it had done so would the stern Creator have taken power over the text to which a god to regard his work as well.

For whom is then diary? Well, the page itself, the white that can accommodate just about anything without ever tiring, garbage and treasure trove in one, the reader must decide what is the one and the other, the author leaves it at that. Much – most? – Is about reading, of Heraclitus, Beckett, Schelling, Simone Weil, Adorno, Hölderlin and infinitely many more. It is instructive and especially attractive to itself read. Sometimes it’s annoying. His enthusiasm for Heidegger, I find it difficult to share as well as his disgust for Wagner. Though here also opens unexpected windows, as when he praises Stephen Fry in a television program “an exposition of the English language that is not Heidegger after” (13 May 2013) and looks Freezer Wagner Love as an eye-opener, an argument against his self-loathing.

Where wonderful living poetry. He can write: “Last night I read Adorno late, and had difficulty falling asleep, intoxicated by his intelligence and stylistics and formation. This morning and last night I lay and listened to the rain. It was a long time since I heard it. Birds morning, chaffinches, perhaps. Winter Fragments, a title, for what. “But there is also brutally mind stuff, like:” Paul psychotic experience of hearing the voice of Jesus as he walked through the desert created Christianity and its inexhaustible death drive. / … / To escape from the Absolute, in whatever form it appears, whether Hegel or Paul or Goebbels writes his name in it. No, not escape. To enter in it and understand its narrow-mindedness. “Is something Norén’s essence is his desire for confrontation but also his total lack of fundamentalism.

This third part of” A playwright diary “is crystal clear prose at a level since a while is unparalleled in Sweden. How do you read this monster? It is suggested that when looking shells on a seabed that is constantly clouded by waves. One does not know if there is movement of the waves or the discovery of the worm that makes one so happy.

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