Jag läste Alice Munro när hon vann Nobelpriset.
Vilka spännande berättelser.
Jag tänkte: ingen svensk redaktör skulle ha accepterat detta. INGEN!
These dizzying stories that start in one place but never reach the end. All these words. Lots of words. Lots of details. Which seems irrelevant. And dents. Long folds, visits to people who are not really in the story, one might think, and other thought trips. Precise and hovering at the same time. Details. Shades in the observed, in the thought, in the seen.
WORDS. Lots of words.
I know of no Swedish editor who would have said that ” Bra!”
I can hear exactly what they had said.
What is this?
Why does it start here and end there? Where is ”the turning point”? Why so many details? What value do they have for the story? NOTHING AT ALL! Why these shades? decide! And what is it about? ???
Simplifies sentences for God's sake! ( rhythm? what rhythm? feeling? uh?) Delete all those words! Remove all details! Remove the folds and the strange visits of other people and remove the closed ones! Make an ending that is connected to the beginning. By the way, make an end that is connected with the CENTER! Which is connected with the beginning. Make a time that is connected to oneself. Here – take this model, we bought it at Pressbyrån, try for everything in the world to imprint your damn story in this form! We can do nothing else. We get tremors from everything else. We are provoked by everything else! Nobody wants that! For, näää, this is just how you can not write! YOU CANNOT WRITE THIS WAY! We can NOT publish this!
So they had said.
There may still be one or two wild and brave editors and publishers who perceive text and stories with other censors who would have said: bra. Let it be like this. I do not really understand it but I feel it. It grips me. It's stuck. It lingers on. Sometimes it's a little hard to read, sometimes I get confused, sometimes I get snooped but I get curious. I get no explanations. But something has happened when I have finished reading. I do not know what. But something is. And I long for it again, although I do not understand why.
Such wild brave and curious souls are endangered among those who have the power to make room for written art. And this desert is slowly killing our writers ( and playwrights) wild souls, the unexpected, searching and playful and clear but still beyond, found in the people who are drawn to the language's ability to touch secrets and great emotions and thoughts that so quickly flee past and so rarely allow themselves to be caught, so much so that they insist on writing, dag ut och dag in, in all storms that hit them, through all adversity, through mockery and misunderstanding. This strange genus.
A lot of words, strange twists and turns may catch something in their rhythm, their colors, their eruptions and detailed or not detailed shifts or not shifts and NOT molded beginnings, middle and end. Like life. Like art.
One must be happy that some in other countries have wider views and more courage. Then you can at least get to see ( film , tv) or read what is never given a place here today. We who recognize ourselves in that prose, that drama, gets tears in his eyes and smiles.
