Book Club 2025: Frestelsernas berg by Jonas Gardell

I bought this at a sale in the late 90s, and of course I never read it. Until now.

Jonas Gardell is a Swedish… er… stand up comic? Who perhaps pioneered that “stand up, but tells horrible stories” thing that became a bigger thing a few years back, so I guess he was a pioneer.

From what I remember from the 90s, his shows were pretty successful? I mean, I just saw a couple on TV…

And this book is written very much in the tenor I remember his shows used to utilise: Everything is cranked to 11 all the time. Not a single sentence passes by without Max Pathos.

And short sentences and short paragraphs.

But I don’t think it really works on paper. It reads almost like a parody of a really intense book: Everything is miserable, and one horrible thing after another happens. And also: Religious damage. I lasted until page 95, and then I decided that I wasn’t really interested in reading the rest, so I ditched the book.

But I mean, it’s not all bad — I liked the parts where the hateful relatives exchanged letters with each other. (The book deals with, among other things, a conflict filled inheritance.) It’s got nerve, but it’s just too much.

And… many parts just feels like bullshit. Like the evil, evil, evil (divorced) father that had to pay child support, but took out loans to do so, and saw to it that his estate had nothing but those loans in it when he died. So his children inherited just his debt, and had to pay it all. Mua ha ha ha *twists moustache* I just kinda doubt that’s something that can happen in Swedish inheritance law — that you can inherit debt if you don’t want to.

You can probably take over the estate, debts and all, but if there’s just debts (like it was in this case), it just seems unlikely. But I don’t know Swedish inheritance laws. Let’s see…

Yeah, it’s bullshit:

Nej, enligt svensk lag ärver du inte skulder.

Fristelsenes fjell (1995) by Jonas Gardell (3.39 on Goodreads)

A web duhsigner’s work is never done

kwakk.info (the web site for comics research) has always supported phrase searches, but it’s been really sloppy in how it marks the matches on the screen. (See above.) Because I’m lazy.

But today I finally pulled myself together and spent an hour on this, and tada:

So many details… And speaking of details, while I was at it, I also fixed marking of accented characters, which didn’t work before:

Oh, and contractions should also be marked correctly now:

The actual searches haven’t changed — they’ve always worked fine, I think. I’ve just changed how they’re displayed.

Most old magazines and fanzines on kwakk.info allow paging through the entire magazine, but I thought that wouldn’t be fair for magazines that are still a going concern. I mostly avoid carry them at all on kwakk.info, but a few are unavoidable, and those are marked as “limited”. Which means that when you click on the “next page” link, it just says “nope, you nerd” or however I phrased it (I forget). But I never actually stated what was going on anywhere, which perhaps makes things more mysterious than necessary, so I’ve now made the relevant magazines’ web pages say this:

And then that link takes you to where you can buy the magazines if you want to read them.

Let’s see… did I do anything else? Yes! I added a little box from the front page to the blog articles that talk about kwakk.info, if anybody is interested in keeping up what’s being tweaked:

A web duhsigner’s work is never done, as the philosophiser said.

Book Club 2025: A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I bought this a couple years ago — I was in New York and thought it’d be fun to go down to Coney Island and read this book. Such conceptual! So I went to the Strand and got a copy and then we went down there, and… I kinda forgot to read it.

And… reading it now, I’m not really that taken with it. I know, it’s sold more than a million copies, which has to be some kind of record, I guess. I do like the conscious “hipsterness” of it all — daddy-o and cats — but perhaps you had to be there or something? I can totally see how many of these could have felt very on point (and daring, perhaps) in the 50s.

But many of these are just pure cornball.

(Not that I’m in any way shape or form qualified to talk about poetry.) I did like a few of the poems, like this one:

Wistful. Or this one:

Funny, and it’s about Manhattan, which is always a plus.

I’ve read most of the beat poets by now (but it’s been a while with the rest), and either my tastes have changed, or this isn’t as strong as, say, Howl, to take a random example.

A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (buy new, buy used, 4.16 on Goodreads)

Record Label Samplers: A Christmas Record

OK, we’re getting towards the end of this blog series — and it’s a record label sampler that’s also a themed compilation, so including this album in this blog series is cheating a bit.

But! It has virtually everybody who was signed to Ze Records at the time, and it doesn’t have any “external” artists, so I think it counts as a record label sampler.

Ze Records was a late 70s/early 80s a label I discovered a few years back, and I’ve slowly been buying everything they released. I think I’m done now? They didn’t really last all that long — perhaps five years of actually doing stuff, but they were really productive years.

They were a New York Downtown sort of outfit — combining a post punk approach to disco, so you have stuff that’s free jazz adjacent along with slick soul music. I guess that sounds like a mess aesthetically, but it really coheres — and there’s a lot of humour in many of these bands, and that comes through on this Christmas album.

Which can be listened to as a joke, but it’s also just a really good album in itself. OK, there’s a couple of songs that are just downright annoying, and not in a good way, but who can resist Suicide doing a festive song? Or James White having a Christmas with Satan?

I also think it works well as a record label sampler — somebody stumbling onto this might well be intrigued by this and go out buying the albums of the different acts.

 04:30 Cristina - Things Fall Apart
 03:16 Suicide - Hey Lord
 03:26 Three Courgettes - Christmas Is Coming
 06:11 James White - Christmas With Satan
 05:17 The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping
 04:55 August Darnell - Christmas On Riverside Drive
 03:15 Material, Nona Hendryx - It's A Holiday
 02:54 Was (Not Was) - Christmas Time In The Motor City
 02:49 Davitt Sigerson - It's A Big Country

Full album:

And individual tracks:

Things Fall Apart (Remastered)

Suicide - Hey Lord (1981)

Christmas Is Coming (Bonus Track)

James White-Christmas With Satan

The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping (Music Video)

Christmas on Riverside Drive (Remastered)

Material with Nona Hendryx - It's A Holiday

Was (Not Was) - Christmas Time in Motor City

It's A Big Country

This blog post is part of the Record Label Samplers series.

Book Club 2025: Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Back in the 90s, Janet Frame had a real moment — Jane Campion made a successful movie (An Angel at My Table) based on Frame’s autobiography, and then Campion’s The Piano won a few Oscars, which together (I think) led to a rediscovery of Frame’s novels. I think I saw several of them being translated to Norwegian all of a sudden, for instance? And she was apparently shortlisted for the Nobel prize for literature:

Janet Frame was New Zealand’s best known but least public author. The originality and power of her fiction ensured that she was frequently spoken of as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature, most recently last year, when a journalistic leak from Stockholm revealed that she was once again on the shortlist.

But you don’t hear a lot about Janet Frame these days, do you? I mean, she died in 2004, which usually means that an author’s book fall out of the general public consciousness, but in Frame’s case it just seems so…

I mean, I don’t think I’ve seen her name mentioned once in the last couple of decades.

Anyway, I’ve read almost all her novels — I bought them all in the 90s, and I’ve slowly worked my way through the backlog. After this one, there’s only one more left.

I think Living in the Maniototo is some kind of masterpiece. I read her first novel, Owls Do Cry last year, and it er wasn’t, so I’m ever so slightly trepidatious about this one, because it’s her second.

*phew* I needn’t have worried — this is fantastic.

She has such a straightforward way of writing that’s nevertheless slippery. I mean, read the two pages above — there’s something beautiful and also heartbreaking in the way that it’s written.

And the book is just filled with little bits like this. It’s engrossing and moving — it’s very emotionally affecting, while the writing is calm and collected.

Janet Frame also has quite a sense of humour, so there’s laughter in between the crying. (For the reader, I mean.) In short: The book’s ace.

Faces in the Water (1961) by Janet Frame (buy new, buy used, 4.02 on Goodreads)