The warmth of the north

The Norwegian writer Erlend Lu will probably never win the Nobel Prize because his work chronically lacks some, ah, for all kinds of official recognition. immortality so desirable "grandiosity": instead, Lou is simply an excellent, outstanding writer of "small" books. Two of these have already been translated into Serbian - thank Heaven and Geopoetics (Naive. Super i Doppler; c. "Time" no. 777), and now they are joined by Volvo trucks, the continuation of the adventures of the eponymous hero, a Norwegian outlaw from the charms and horrors of "civil life", and especially from what he calls with brilliance: from (re)pression - which imperceptibly grows into ours induced need - to always and in everything be good, better, the best, to be obedient, small, useful cogs of Society, proud players according to Pre-Set Rules, passionate climbers of the social vertical...

Having now really moved away from the house & garden, wandering through the Nordic forests, Doppler - accompanied by his son Gregus and the irresistible elk Bongo - will imperceptibly cross into neighboring Sweden. With this geographical-symbolic transfer of the action, Erlend Lu emphasizes his "point" even more - to forgive, and to take it with a grain of salt - since Sweden is, in principle, somehow an even more exemplary picture and situation of the face and the reverse of it. brilliance which the writer deals with. Doppler, at first unaware of where he ended up, will soon become entangled in a tangle of bizarre relationships, primarily old neighborly intolerances, beneath the layers of which lies a long-repressed love - preemptively liquidated by the Elders for "class" reasons - between a lucid, but psychedelic an old woman, a widow who in the old days became addicted to reggae, marijuana and every imaginable variety of nonconformity, and a reclusive aristocrat (von Boring!) who has spent his entire depressingly desolate and woody life watching birds and shunning people and their obsessive need to hurt and to bring down. Of course, all this is a fictional "entanglement" (seemingly almost in the manner of some kind of sitcom) just a pretext for Lu's endless - but, the fact: endlessly! – witty, ironic, charming and (ugh!) in the end still quite brilliant rethinking the rules and mechanisms of "normal life", which we either grumblingly obey as some kind of oxymoronic spoiled slaves, or we protest against them only childishly and superficially, struggling in a trap from which there seems to be (no longer) any real way out...

In the first novel about the simultaneously necessary and impossible Rebellion, Erlend Lew pretty consistently stuck to the classic novelistic narrative; in Volvo trucks, on the contrary, his storytelling manner is also completely different psychedelic as well as the experiences of his heroes. Each "classic" chapter is followed by a series of sometimes crazy digressions regarding something previously mentioned; also, the writer soon introduces himself into the action of the novel, constantly emphasizing that, well, exactly writes Doppler and the other heroes, that it's all just a novel, and the like... This is, clearly, an age-old "postmodernist" trick, canonized as far back as Calvin, imitated, developed, ruined or parodied by all sorts of connoisseurs and unconnoisseurs. but what impresses and spoils Erlend Lew is the way in which he uses it: it becomes just another additional element of the general "carnivalization", and it does not make it difficult at all reception, it by no means suffocates the reader, nor does it appear as a senseless and redundant Empty Walk arbitrarily and by the force of God flung in the middle of a regular "prose tissue".

As one, if I may say so, extraordinary philosophical treatise that looks like everything in the world but a "philosophical treatise", Volvo trucks are another holiday of pure reading joy: you won't find many books in the recent offer that will delight you this fall to warm up. Here's another proof that not only snow, winter and darkness come from the North, but also pure flashes knowledge, packaged in a non-series, apparently and, too prose packaging. You already know that one Mozart-syndrome: it all looks so "easy", but come on, dude, write something like that when you're so smart...