Review: Isabella Nilsson’s « Emptiness and tenderness » is outstanding

One hundred texts are combined in this book. Or gather; Maybe rather trampled, frame, are slipped? Playful and serious. Tender and hard. The words hooks into each other and build sentences where there is no sense, but maybe arise?

Certainly, meaning buildings stand up, new spaces for the reader to spanulate big -eyed. For a little while. A few verse lines only. The linguistic reversals make dangerous conditions safer. The horrible entrance to hell disappears, if you write about the conditions. Cut off the past just, so becomes abyss – foundation. A better position to stand on. Not so durable in the long run maybe, but frankly, what is really sustainable?

All the teachings of wisdom worth the name have come to the same thing: everything is emptiness, idle emptiness and self a fiction.

It says below the number 5. The text continues pedagogically:

And there is, if I understand the matter correctly, two methods for an enlightened person to relate to and reconcile himself with the painful insight. One method is to simply stop playing, stop maintaining fiction and become an existential slacker. This is called cynism. (—) Since the cynics are primarily known for sloping with hygiene, living in barrels and being generally dangled, I have so far felt more urged to try the aesthetic attitude. A large part of the estate’s mission is to transform weight into ease.

When it comes to the transformation work, Isabella Nilsson is masterful. Her lyrics are light as cobwebs, but the phrases flutter over a bottomless darkness.

Many learned Know her through « Nonsense Princess’s diary », with the sub -heading: « A sick leave ». It is « about the happiness of being able to change sweaty, blue hospital sheets with clean and cut nonsense. » She has also translated Dorothy Parker, Emily Brontë, Mervyn Peake and more. And wrote a « Lewis Caroll-Ecyclopedia », with Jonas Ellerström and « Our Need for Verse », with himself. And the literature is understood. As well as written a bundle of other books.

To be in life, she is still good productive. I also think that her books can lift others who wander around in meaninglessness. Like herself in « emptiness and tenderness » tells me that she sleeps with Michel Houellebecq’s little poetics book « Stay alive » in her arms: « It is probably a close reading method as good as someone ».

Some readers will hold hard in « emptiness and tenderness » and say that here, here my fucking void is advanced. Here is loneliness, writing, reading and impossible reality clearly realized. Others will say that it is a self -absorbed, world -wide, fragmented tram series. With regard to politics, the economy and all the living conditions that characterize people’s everyday lives. Both phalanges are right. But, and it is and will always be Isabella Nilsson’s trump card regardless of other value scales, her linguistic hearing is outstanding. It is wonderful to read.

Sexet is well like the reading, a lovely deadline from the hard self

Whatever man Enjoy her various lovers. Because it’s not just the books that come to bed. Now a lot of men are also falling in: « I only lie with literary critics, literature editors and literary scientists. Not by principle, but in principle. » And sex is well like the reading, a lovely deadline from the hard self. But it is not possible to stop. Nowhere is it possible to rest, then only reality and death come with its usual nagging. Thus, movement, transformation, verse and twisting remains. Samuel Beckett, who is already mentioned on the first page, returns as a ally in the existential paradoxes: « ‘I Can’t Go On. Il Go On’ as Beckett’s old hit goes. »

So « emptiness and tenderness » moves between incompatible extremes, which individually flash their lonely stars in the night sky. The gift to the reader is that, in her constant search for meaning and context, she will read all points into a compound whole. Where it is easy with the heaviest, the grief of laughter, the loneliness of love, the dead speak with the living. It is the magic of literature. That it works. Still. Completely empty, yes. An imaginary creation between letters and brains. Yet the tenderness is true.

There is one Insert. One, the book tells.

Very dangerous and very difficult. Nonsense reading is considerably safer.

It is presented in the very last paragraph, the hundred text:

The mode of travel is called eye contact. You travel in a tunnel called the love tunnel. It is a very dangerous company. If any of the travelers turn their eyes away before the community is reached, the tunnel risks collapsing. Travelers cannot then reach the destination, nor do not get back the same way they came. They get stuck in each dark shaft that smells strongly of soil and sorrow.

Read more:

Isabella Nilsson: « Making art of suffering can help, but it can also be fatal »