I don’t know if our time is more absurd than all the others, but it is easy to get. The temptation for the writer who want to portray it is, therefore, to burn with absurd details, or even if he or she has a hint of the farcical – to construct novels that just consists of such absurdity.
The temptation, the british author Ali Smith has made himself rid of after the Oscar Wilde’s recipe, by falling for it. Her novel ”Winter” contains the library called ”idea lab”, personal investment, and a whole host of other of the modern-day western existence curiosities.
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otherwise, by a person who is working to track copyrightöverträdelser on the network and, for example, inserting ”a movie by any artist in Portugal, which consisted of close-ups of things that are in the spaces between the paving stones”. The same man runs a ”naturskildrande” blog called Art in Nature (as he himself named the Species), and where he, in lyrical terms, describes the scenes of nature which he in fact tracked down on Google Earth.
However, the kidnapped his twitter account of his unhappy girlfriend (who has also written a doctoral dissertation on ”Language, semiotics and representation in Gilbert O’sullivan’s lyrics”), which is in his name put out false sightings of extremely rare birds and thus fooling busloads of devout scottish birders make a pilgrimage through the land…
This is only a small fraction of the plot. ”Winter” is in other words a really turned up samtidsfars, but with the kind of översmart referenshumor which is usually appreciated by critics (contemporary, cross-border: it blinkas as often to Elvis Presley and Gilbert O’Sullivan as Keats, Blake and Shakespeare), and packaged in the kind of prose which the last hundred years have been bold and innovative.
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the tricks of the trade, the sudden leap from fiction to comment on Brexit, the refugee crisis in Greece or other samtidsaktualiteter, dialogues in which one of the party lines without obvious reason stated before the others, lyrical exkurser, abrupt jumps between time and personnivåer and apostrophes to the reader. And somewhere behind all this lurks a small family drama of feelgoodkaraktär whose persons involved, in spite of all the stylistic intensity of the massaged with, never become more than caricatures.
All of this could be seen as a comment to a confusing, ironic texts, the novel feels definitely very keen to be perceived that way. It is smart, it is clever and it is quite tiring.