Book review: "White slà¶dder" by Carina Rydberg
-
Loading... - Turner Booth
- 08 Sep 2022
- 68 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
"Vitt slödder" is an unpleasant book that you cannot stop reading. Like everything Carina Rydberg writes. She leads the reader down into dark abysses. A spooky house with mirrors, dead ends and steps that move. A world that resists, although we recognize it – a gothic social realism.
Hierarchies and social and psychological power games are the phantoms she labors with, whether she writes horror thrillers or autofiction about her life. The feeling of society's movements within us, of how we rise and fall and fight not to fall.
She is best known for the scandalous success "The highest caste" from 1997, which started perhaps the most intense literary debate of the Swedish 20th century. It was rejected as defamation of the named, but also broke the taboo of writing about a woman's unrequited love. As a knife-throwing daughter of Dorothy Parker - who in the masculine American 1920s also dropped lemon on fragile people's hearts while death stood at the pub table.
Rydberg punctuates the authorship through the ugly duckling's struggle to become an independent swan, never trying to comfort us, his readers. She also now repeats that love is not for her.
But it's all about the path to writing. And "Vitt slödder" approaches even more chillingly. Writing, she says, only weak people do. And you become weak if you grew up like the girl in the Stockholm suburbs' merciless 70s - it was a world of fluorescent aunts and hello mathematics pedagogy, but also of unreflected racism, of violence and where school was a dangerous place. Read More…
