Love is one of those countries perpetually stuck in the third world. A republic subject to dictatorships and financial crack ups and revolutions and droughts and epidemics. A kingdom where sooner or later there’s an earthquake, where someone will always come walking out of the blazing ruins unable to understand what’s happened - wondering Why me? [...]
Love as a scientific property and an element we could alchemically distil would be a much more powerful weapon than any splitting of atoms. The mystery of love, revealed and synthesizable, would turn our planet into an even more terrible place than it is, because it would put love on the same level as the brutal, simple, functional logic of hate. The mystery of what ultimately brings a couple together - taking into account the scientific advances closing in on the genome that relegate us to the almost extraterrestrial loneliness of our body in a dead universe, refused an invitation to the big invisible party that everything would seem to indicate we don’t’ deserve - is the only mystery we have left, a mystery that, once solved, will bring us face to face with a reality where literature, film, art, music - and love, of course - will no longer be necessary or make sense.
Rodrigo Fresán: Kensington Gardens
Oversatt av Natasha Wimmer
Boka handler forøvrig om J.M. Barrie (han med Peter Pan) og forholdet hans til familien Llewelyn Davies (det var sønnene i denne familien som inspirerte ham til historien om Peter Pan, og han traff dem første gang på en spasertur i Kensington Gardens, derav bokens tittel). "A complex, gripping narrative about lost childhoods, phantom parents, and the resulting tragic adult lives." En god artikkel om J.M. Barrie finner du
her, skrevet av ingen ringere enn A.S. Byatt.
Fresán er så ukjent i Norge at det ikke kommer et eneste treff når man gugler på ham, til tross for at han, ifølge en anmelder i den britiske avisen The Guardian "must be reckoned among the most notable of young Latin American writers".) Her er en kort Wikipedia-artikkel på engelsk. Spanskkyndige vil nok finne mer stoff på nettet om denne argentinske forfatteren, nå bosatt i Spania.
Jeg har som kjent en teori om at all litteratur handler om kjærlighet. Kanskje all kunst gjør det, slik Fresán indikerer. Eller for å gjøre et tankeeksperiment: Hva ville bli tilbake hvis vi fjernet kjærligheten som tema fra litteraturen og kunsten forøvrig?
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