Lars Noréns latest book is black, flat and completely without end or författarbild. The cover is adorned only by a blank black square. When you hold it up in front of your eyes, you see a distorted skuggspegling of his own face. It may seem trite but becomes rather emblematiskt: to stare back at this carnal, temporary, foreign, inevitable but still all of the time and evasive that even your own existence. Will be something left when you don’t exist anymore and can see it for yourself?
similar to The "No" from 2014 is "Left" a long, uninterrupted prosapoetisk monologue, but this has Norén skipped all the punctuation. The absence of commas and paragraphs makes the text more like speech, and it feels like stepping into an intimate, dimmed scene and listen to a svårplacerat diktjags grinding ordström about everything from statarhem to hospitalsvistelser. The self is rough in the mouth, and sometimes almost just a sick body amongst the homeless, and destroyed the people he meets and remembers, but every now and then a Latin phrase or a specific konstreferens that puts vulgariteten and the desperation in the midst of finkulturens the centre, or vice versa.
"Left" one of the most unpleasant books I have read, which makes it difficult to sort out on the good-or-bad scale. The darkness intrudes from all sides, both as the poignant images (dry, hard faeces that need to be drawn out of the anus of an old man, or the lovemaking with a woman with bone cancer, where "One heard how she broke a little bone in her body") and a creeping anxiety between the lines. Unlike many of the others wallowing in the dirt and cynicism feels Norén rarely that he koketterar with the darkness, even if some lines are not really berries (for example, "A bosom full of likmaskar").
Every day I drag me from hitting up the book again and sucked further down into the mess of hardness and desperation of Norén coalesce to a custom tone. Almost like it would be something genuinely evil of the poem that I don’t want to get in touch with. But if Hannah Arendt is correct in that evil is the banal indifference of the person who thinks, so is Noréns diktjag something else: this is a self-reflexivity that gets the poem’s darkness to touch upon goodness, or even faith, of the contours.
In several other Noréns texts, there is a compassion that makes the darkness vivid and almost tenderly. In the "Left" it is as if he wanted to drive the ugly grinding the arbitrary nature to its absolute center. It becomes a kind of hatred of a God, who is called a psychopath but at the same time, not at any price may be postulated. The contempt towards faith runs through the text as a black wire: "When there had not been hope have you tried to start do Not believe anything special, Just belief in general, A kind of recurrent bleeding /…/ But I can barely recall, Not without a shiver of discomfort That I dropped so deeply into my own eyes."
Might have Norén tried to write as close as you can get to a living corpse.
the Imagery is often are explicitly christian. Some of the sentences have a special dense beauty: "If you put your ear against the lamb’s body could certainly have heard the death"
Maybe have Norén tried to write as close as you can get to a living corpse. Diktjaget sometimes becomes so monstrous, socially and psychologically, there is a cutting tonnes of non-identification. The goal would not be to the awful images that are written up, but an invisible presence that goes beyond them. The philosopher Simone Weil, as Norén often returns to in his diaries, says that only when "the self is exhausted, know that it is something more" – but only if the humiliation is done straight through and without koketterier.
"Left" is where the and sway, between självgott wallow in the ugliness – and to bring the evil to penetrate the ego until it bursts apart. When the book is strongest becomes the narrator’s voice so grotesquely swollen from the accident that there is no longer anything left to identify with. When it is the worst braces itself bogged down in its own disgusting voice as an uncomfortable studies.
I turn up the covers again and look into the suddsvarta the contour of my own face. Maybe I’m not out with the book because I can’t stop searching for a light to recognize me in. As Weil writes: "A very beautiful woman who sees her image in the mirror can very well believe that it is she. An ugly woman knows that she is not."
Maybe the humiliation of Norén, in fact, on the eve of the exaltation. But then he must let go of the lingering självgodheten and take a little more unconditionally step out in the shit than this.
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