Tiresome
2 stars
The book is a 100-page tirade against Sweden by a fictional self-exiled Swedish writer in response to a request to contribute to a brochure about Sweden by a German editor. It is occasionally funny, but is mostly focused on rather uninteresting and repetitive criticism of trifling questions such as the quality of literary criticism in Sweden and how it wrongly downplayed the writer's works. Otherwise they are criticisms that could be directed to pretty much any country, and perhaps more justifiably so than to Sweden. The tirade is itself testament to the possibility that the critics were right, given how repetitive and boring it is. There are references to events that I'm not familiar with, so I probably missed quite a bit of what would likely have been clear to Swedes reading it in the late '90s, when the book was published. I ended up skimming through long stretches, as …
The book is a 100-page tirade against Sweden by a fictional self-exiled Swedish writer in response to a request to contribute to a brochure about Sweden by a German editor. It is occasionally funny, but is mostly focused on rather uninteresting and repetitive criticism of trifling questions such as the quality of literary criticism in Sweden and how it wrongly downplayed the writer's works. Otherwise they are criticisms that could be directed to pretty much any country, and perhaps more justifiably so than to Sweden. The tirade is itself testament to the possibility that the critics were right, given how repetitive and boring it is. There are references to events that I'm not familiar with, so I probably missed quite a bit of what would likely have been clear to Swedes reading it in the late '90s, when the book was published. I ended up skimming through long stretches, as the interest that was there in the first 15-20 pages quickly evaporated as it became clear that the following 80 pages were just more of the same.