“Lars Noréns blackness has become a style” – Expressen

Lars Noréns contemporary production moves increasingly concentrated to a dark datum.

Victor Ore see a monotonous deadpan authors get caught up in their mannerisms.

No one writes idylls longer, stories, or poems without any form of conflict, where all the signs clearly pointing towards reconciliation and happiness.

Maybe it’s not strange – maybe it is now not even possible to imagine life in those terms, yes, even fantasize about it entirely. Conflict and kvalfriheten is simply difficult, or impossible, to reconcile themselves with. And tellingly distinguishes a kind of idyllens opposed the latest halvseklets literature: the helvetesvandrande text, where the conflicts and the pangs already lost, and every word points to the death, and the emptiness.

Neither the poem, novel or story

Lars Noréns "Left", a continuation of the "Philosophy night" from 2012 and “No" from 2014, is just such a book. Neither the poem, novel or story but a broken prosamonolog, designed around repetitions and shifts, unsafe and violent memories, which grinds on with no other goal than to provide the total resignation textlig figure.

In the centre stands a, I, and the book’s material consists of his attempt to invoke their memories, make them clear. It is a case of a bruised and but palpable childhood, mental illness, violence, the long silent hours that he remained in the mental – or care, hard beds and the people that, in all cases almost, have been parts of his life. Dying people, the crippled, the perpetrators of violence – against the background of the Swedish welfare vårdapparat.

Pratigt and okoncentrerat

anyone who has ever read a line Norén recognize straight away. Memories form each other, are displaced and taken, in a chatty and deliberately unfocused prose.

Time and space are porous, nothing is developed, nothing is set in explanatory relation to something else: "I understand that you have difficult to imagine who I am and how I look I have That too", writes Norén towards the book’s end.

And there it is: the "Left" does not aim to tell a story about a special and special person, but to mould a state – the feeling of being dead, despite the fact that you are still alive.

Similar imitation

Above all, Samuel Beckett, but also a writer who Thomas Bernhard, employed for quite a few decades ago with similar literary projects, as well as in the two previously mentioned prosaböckerna is Noréns depending of these so large that the text, as soon as similar to imitation.

But where the forerunners of writing with rhythm and självhånande humor, writing Norén in a monotonous business, which gets the "Left" to feel like a rather tedious exercise in the writer’s long-established motivkretsar.

Involuntary självparodi

Apart from last year’s collection of poems "Dust" – which really gave my writing a new page – soon said the entire Noréns contemporary production to describe as a single movement against the same datum point – a large, all-encompassing darkness. The problem, is clearer than ever in the "Left", is that it simply is not very interesting. Not anymore. Norén feels like stuck in a style likely to turn over in involuntary självparodi: the atrocious has become the coquette, the darkness of a style.

As rigidly and unambiguously defined, is predictable, as in an idyll, though on the contrary.

Victor Malm is a critic on the Swedish newspaper Expressen kultursidor.

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