Isabelle Ståhl

I've shelved this book as follows, i.e. tagged it like this, on Goodreads:

"2000s, 2010s, abuse, addiction, adventure, anarchy, boredom, bullshit, culture, currently-reading, dirty, drugs, fame, family, fiction, friendship, heterosexuality, life, love, materialism, money, secrets, sex, stream-of-consciousness, sweden, swedish, thoughts"

I just watched a video snippet of actor Tommy Wiseau, known for "bad acting", channelling The Joker, i.e. the character known from the Batman series. In that snippet, his regular cohort, Greg Sestero turns up. He drags a rubber Batman mask over his head and face, and does the deadpan Batman voice: "I'm Batman".

What strikes me as irritating about Sestero is his oft-deadpan delivery, seemingly without sentiment. It irritates me, as it makes me feel as though he doesn't act at all.

The reason for my writing about those actors in a book review is that they struck me as a metaphor for how this book hit me; while the main character is seemingly deadpan, out of it, a nonchalant druggie, possibly depressed, those are really notes for how I experience her. While most badly written fiction books are more like Wiseau's impression of The Joker—or anybody's delivery of The Joker, really—chock-filled with the author's will to impress via fireworks, Ståhl has kept her character low.

Still, the book has fireworks of its own; drugs are glorified in an indirect manner, and places from Stockholm, names of books, philosophers, artists, and popular-among-hipsters-in-mid-20s-Stockholm mind tricks are pimped-out much like the Facebook and Instagram flows that lull through the mind of the main character.

Her boyfriend-to-be acts the moral compass of sorts: he's a squeaky-clean do-gooder who is built to spill, built to hate, to circumvent; he does things while she is active on the Internet, throwing darts via Tinder, chatting away, avoiding work, constantly feeling as though she should be somewhere else.

I like the idea of this book: the main character is not an anti-hero to me, but an anarchic, truly melancholic character who wants to feel good, but is in a bad place. Her days float into one, while she is looking for change, however strange or bad it may seem.

Having said that, to me, the book is more Genet than Burroughs; there's more "this happens, then that, I think this, I don't say it, he could be saying what's on his mind, but I'm not really doing that" than substance; sure, one can state that this book is a navel-gaze into our self-obsessed now where "social media" and a glib hunt for likes permeates a lot of the bourgoisie, but I would have liked more taste thrown into the mix, rather than it leaving the smack of wet sock, even though I truly appreciate the effort - still, considering how this book has been written in the past by people like Per Hagman, Bret Easton Ellis, and even diarists, I'd have liked a bit more feel to it. And as such, we may have use for people like Sestero, acting in a lackadaisical manner, but we need our Frances McDormands, to us a metaphor that feeds into the gist of the dead conversations that this book serves up in a good way.… (más)