Author: Ann-Christine Snickars

Bodies and souls

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Åtta kroppar (‘Eight bodies’) contains eight stories: Susanne Ringell would really have liked to include the reader’s body in the title, but then the figure nine in the title would have perhaps been associated with the expression ‘nine lives’ – like the cat’s – and she did not want that.

Ringell is not one to fall for a cheerful, pedagogical optimism, and her consciousness of the physical is at the same time a consciousness of each person’s exposed vulnerability. Exposed in a literal sense is the ‘central character’ in Vara sten (‘Be stone’, 1996) which is a collection of statements by a stone which has lain in a cornfield since time immemorial. The stone has a fixed position, with a point of view that is given once and for all. The stone is also infertile; it has to make do with looking at the productive cornfield or with being a place for loving couples to lie. More…

Hard to swallow

Issue 1/1995 | Archives online, Authors

An unusually powerful but economically achieved – one might almost say 
minimalist – stylisation of the tension 
between inner and outer is typical of 
the short stories of Kjell Lindblad (born 
1951).

Catastrophe is close
 – or has already taken place. The 
disasters take many forms, but they 
always have a dramatic effect, stopping 
the individual dead in his or her ordinary life. ‘Det finns inga hundar längre’
 (‘There are no more dogs’), a short story 
from his first collection, Före sömnen
 (‘Before sleep’), describes some post-
catastrophic state in which keeping 
dogs is forbidden. The reader is left to
 decide the logic and nature of the 
situation. More…