Cancer-Treblinka-Love-Fuck-Death: “The Summer of Kim Novak” by Håkan Nesser

"After my father had suggested that we might spend the summer together, I realized I didn't actually know anything about him. I knew what everyone knew: his father read girlie mags, and he was born with six toes on each foot.”

In “The Summer of Kim Novak” by Håkan Nesser

The first time I discovered Scandinavian Crime Fiction was when I bought 3 books in German (that’s why I always associate Scandinavian fiction with German) at an airport book-stand. What did I buy? 3 novels by Mankell, Nesser and Indridason (see pictures above and below regarding my German library; mind you, it's just a taste...). Those were my first loves. Before that I’d only read Hamsun in English (“Hunger”). I still remember a very heated discussion at the British Council with a fellow student concerning Hamsun and his Nazi sympathies. I read Hunger when I was very young and going through my existentialist phase in life. I thought at the time it was quite a brilliant book, the translation was masterful and I thoroughly enjoyed it at the time. It still is. 

In my book, the integrity, identity and attitude of a writer has exactly no bearing on the work whatsoever. It isn't ambiguous, it’s black and white. The fact that Hamsun was a Nazi sympathiser is completely pointless. “Hunger” is a masterpiece. If you were to decide what to look at, listen to, or read based upon whether you happen to agree with the actions or opinions of the writer behind them I’d probably have to cut myself off from most works of any significance. If I were to go down that road, I’d have to wipe from the literature landscape writers such as Wagner (a disturbing, at least for me, massive anti-semite, T. S. Eliot (an anti-Semite as well), Ezra Pound (fascist), Jimi Hendrix  (beat the shit out of his girlfriends), Charles Dickens (called for the wipeout of what he called “inferior races”), Sartre (a Communist who knew what was happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin), Roman Polanski (a rapist), Oscar Wilde (a pederast), Caravaggio (a murderer), not to mention pretty much every Greek and Roman figure of note  (slave owners). 

I’m not able (even if I wanted to) to cast aside every figure or work of art from our cultural history that didn't fit in with my notions of modern liberalism. A la Hamsun, and having read Scandinavian (crime) fiction for many years, the overall defining theme is the inclusion of social and political comment, well beyond the requirements of plot and character. It's as if in some ways there's a tradition of obliquely addressing issues within stories of detection that would otherwise be too awkward to write about, or read about. It reminds me of how Science Fiction in the US in the 50's and 60's was cover for a great deal of very radical social comment - aimed at institutions and attitudes in the US that couldn't be commented upon or criticised in those days, except by the sleight of hand of removing them to other planets and recasting the religious, racial and political problems of American society as issues between right thinking protagonists and a host of bug-eyed monsters.

“The Summer of Kim Novak” is a very sad, sad, and gloomy book, the way only the Scandinavians are able to write. I’m not one for humour in the stuff I like to read. “Funny” and “humour” are good if I want people to join my team. By this I don’t want to imply that it is necessarily easy to write funny books. But do we really only want the kind of literature that appeals to fluffy emotions? It's like your Autocorrect insisting you make a happy face instead every time you want to put in a closed parenthesis. But using brackets or parenthesis might give you the nuances or different shades you want in a text, just as you need those nuances to understand things in life that do not make sense.

“The Summer of Kim Novak” is a book with a ton of different shades, but they’re all shades just the same. No sunlight ever gets through…

Libidinal Art-Form: "The Magic Lantern" by Ingmar Bergman, Joan Tate (Trans.)

(Original Review, 2007)

Bergman devotes a number of pages to his experience as a 16 year old schoolboy on an exchange visit to a German family who were all ardent Nazis. He recalls attending a rally in Weimar, at which Hitler delivered a short speech, and being entirely caught up in “the eruption of immense energy”. When he left to return to Sweden the family gave him a present of a photograph of Hitler.

While I’m sure that Bergman’s account of his experiences is entirely self-serving, the things that strike me are:

Firstly, that many middle-class Swedes in the 1930s and into the 1940s did think that the Nazis, vulgar and prone to regrettable excesses as they were, were infinitely preferable to the godless Bolshevik hordes in the east, and that geopolitical reality meant that it really was a choice between one or the other.

Secondly, I can easily imagine my sheltered 16 year old self, given the same situation as Bergman, having the same reaction. We all like to imagine that we would have been heroes of resistance in the Nazi era. Reality suggests this is a comforting illusion we afford ourselves (even if we’re lucky enough to write for the Socialist Review).

Bergman goes on to note that when the truth of the holocaust came out he went through denial and into ‘despair and self-contempt’. Is that an apology? It doesn’t seem like an attempt to avoid self-criticism. He also notes that it left him with a conviction never again to get involved in politics – which links up with the generation of ’68 dismissing him as a bourgeois individualist dilettante.

Whatever. I’m still left with ‘The Seventh Seal’ and ‘Wild Strawberries’ being two of the most astonishing films I’ve ever seen (the former having gifted cinema one of the great character images of the last 100 years, imitated and parodied by everyone from Woody Allen to Bill and Ted). And with ‘Fanny and Alexander’, one of the few films to be genuinely Shakespearean in its embrace of the complications of what it means to be human. (Complications that seem to be entirely beyond the comprehension of our modern puritanical film-goers).

Dig up the corpse, put him on the scaffold, and ban all the films forever. It is about time to burn all those Caravaggios, a truly bad man by 2007 standards. Never mind that his art is unbeatable. Cinema is a voyeuristic, libidinal art-form inherent exploitative in exploiting the ecstatic potential of simulating a dream. This is why the wide screen is inherently myth-making for its ideals of human beauty and the dangers attached to it. In this sense, actors and actresses sign a pact with the devil for their immortality, whether this be the bad behaviour of an obsessive Hitchcock or a hyper bisexual avant-gardist like Fassbinder. A Hollywood that draws a line under the decadent power of cinema will soon let the American industry die out in favour of television and the field will be left to Asian auteurs or even the odd European in the guise of aesthetes like Sorrentino or Guadagnino. What I mean is please stop the cultural revisionism according to which titanic artistic figures are dragged through the mire of contemporary philistinism. It debases both the artists and the issues. The only cause it serves is the proliferation of idiocy, anti-intellectualism and an already far-advanced bout of puritanism. At the end of the day, well, women are mysterious, any woman will tell you that. Photography is problematic isn't it? And? Easy to finger point at people who explore life through a lens, branding them predatory and controlling rather than creative and honest. Isn't all cinema somewhat pornographic in the end? It's bloody weird whatever it is. Enjoyable though, often the more problematic the more enjoyable it is, though the days when directors were encouraged to use the medium in any authorial, creatively personal way really seems to have slowed to a dribble now.

Having said that, I just don't hero worship someone over directing a film, even if I like it. But I do like Bergman's films a lot.