Marit Furns new novel begins with a nasty scene on a beach. Bathers laugh at a spectacle in the water’s edge, where a lifeguard and a bunch of guys beat up an elderly man and drive him away from the beach. It takes a while before you understand the context: it is a beach in south Africa during the apartheid and the old man is black.
It is the prologue. Then move the novel somewhere around the turn of the millennium. Cape town. A young american woman arrives at a hostel. She has just lost her father, arranged the funeral, but then the helter-skelter fled from all of it. At the same time as her father is buried is she in the hotel bed, high on cocaine, with a scuba diver she met. She says that she does not feel anything when she got dödsbeskedet. It does she still not.
and violence against the indigenous people. A parent dies and the child’s seemingly incomprehensible distortions of sensation. Of course it is Albert Camus’s classic ”the Stranger” which is haunting in Marit Furns second novel.
Her debut in 2016 called ”the Shadow” and focused on the strange pole, Zygmunt Pietziewzskoczky, who became Strindberg’s antagonist during his so-called Infernokris at the end of the 1800s. It was a subtle and sometimes really beautiful novel, which whetted the appetite.
Review by Marit Furns first novel, ”the Shadow”.
”Abalone” is something else entirely. It would even have been written by a completely different author.
It should say something about the novel’s title. An Abalone – informs the blurb about it – is a marine mollusk that lacks blodkoagulerande functions, which means that the animal dies, if it starts to bleed. It is called in Swedish for abalone. It is one of the many species that are threatened with extinction as a result of including the chinese potency problems.
on that we have to do with some sort of parable. And perhaps it. More concrete is the abalone which the diver in the novel tjuvfiskar after during night raids in the sea. It is this diver, we understand soon, who is the boy in the prologue cheering when the black man kicked out from the beach.
the Swedish Estonians and the diver Tom embarking on a relationship that revolves around drugs, drinks and danshak. Esther’s excuse for staying in south Africa is that she will write a frilansreportage, but she has it difficult to get up in the seedy city svåröverblickbara social system. When her inhemske photographer disappears, she gives completely.
Tom is a boer and then anfäktas of fury against the black and the manner in which they toppled south Africa in the gravel after apartheid. Esther is an early Swedish dismayed and upset when Tom goes an the worst, but the two still finds each other.
It turns out that Tom is separated and has a daughter who he hardly gets to meet. Thus, we have a polarized pair: a frustrated man who is raging in season and out of season, and a closed woman who is difficult to feel at all.
drag the around in bars and clubs, and pull sometimes out to the natural environments. Clouds rising in pace with kokainskyarna.
Marit rebels announced two elections; paints a vivid picture of the multifaceted city. She will find the correct details, write out the correct scents. But you want to try and understand, above all, förgrundsfiguren Ester. Who she is, where she thinks she is on the way. But which places itself ” in the way most of the time.
It is, of course, the problem with the high people while in reality: they are in the best of cases, not to be trusted and completely uninteresting. They are palimpsester that are hopeless to uncover. So how much Ester than swirling around in the lights or begeistras of the night sky so looking to pass my gaze away to something more interesting.
There will be a quick trip to the zero point of the Ester. So much can be revealed. Along the way, you certainly some worthwhile scenes, some simple analyses of everyday racism and a murder mystery. But I had hoped for much more of Marit rebels announced two elections;.