Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Allegations Tarnish Sweden’s ‘Perfect Monarch’

Books, Design, Film, History, Marketing, Media, Miscellaneous, National, Offbeat, Politics, Society, Sweden abroad, Tourism: November 15th, 2010 by VT

Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, which shot to fame late last year for its animated news clip of Elin Nordegren’s alleged attack against then-husband Tiger Woods, has turned its focus again to Sweden.

This time, it has targeted Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf following the publication of controversial biography “Carl XVI Gustaf – the reluctant monarch,” which details rumours of the king’s affairs.Just in case you missed it the first time around, here’s the Tiger video.

Hollywood Millennium’s Lisbeth spotted in Stockholm prepping for film

Books, Film, Marketing, Media, Miscellaneous, Opinion, Swedish Life, Tourism: September 9th, 2010 by VT

Rooney Mara was spotted on the streets of Stockholm on Wednesday going to a gym and heading to a language school, where she is reportedly learning to speak English with a Swedish accent, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

CNN hits the Millennium trail in Stockholm

Architecture, Books, Business, Film, History, Marketing, Media, Miscellaneous, Offbeat, Society, Swedish Life, Tourism: September 9th, 2010 by VT

CNN follows the flocks on tourists on the Millennium tour of Stockholm on Wednesday.

Sweden gets biblical…?

Books, Media, Offbeat, Society: February 15th, 2008 by DL

Back in the day, great novels were sometimes published over several months through installments appearing in popular periodicals. Swedish publisher Förlaget Illuminated has revived the trend with one of the most well-read books of all time.

The Wall Street Journal this week spilled some ink on the company’s serial publication of the Bible. Among other places, glossy, photo-enhanced books of the Bible started appearing last spring in places one usually doesn’t go hunting for spiritual guidance: news stand Pressbyrån.

According to WSJ,

The Swedish-language Bible marries the standard text to glossy magazine-style design. Full-color pages are illustrated with a striking combination of news and dramatized photographs: a homeless child wrapped in a sweater on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, illustrates the book of Job; a man who drowned trying to enter Europe, for Deuteronomy; and models posing in stylized scenes convey joy or despair. Bible passages are pulled out as captions.

What is one to make of the decision to hawk the Bible along side titles like Cosmopolitan, Elle, and weekly news magazines?

Of course, Sweden has always had a unique relationship with Christianity, even before attaining the status of one of the world’s most secularized countries. After all, the daughter of the great King Gustav II who died fighting for Protestantism in the Thirty Years’ War, Queen Christina, eventually abdicated her post and fled to Rome to convert to Catholicism.

She was the first (only?) Swede–and woman–to get a final resting place among the Popes buried at St. Peter’s.

According a bishop quoted in the piece, Swedes–just like everyone else–apparently still have some of life’s ‘big questions’ left to figure out.

Although Sweden is one of the most secularized countries in the world, we are seeing a growing interest in existential questions across the Western world, of which [Bible Illuminated] is a part,” says Antje Jackelén, the bishop of Lund, in southern Sweden. “As people travel, as they are presented with a growing multiculturalism at home, they are thinking harder about what it means to be from a culture that is formed by Christianity.

Modern Swedish classic in English translation

Books: September 20th, 2007 by PO

The New York Sun has a review of Klas Östergren’s ‘Gentlemen’, a novel regarded by many as a modern Swedish classic.

The novel’s narrator, a fictive Klas Östergren, befriends and lives with the bohemian artists Henry and Leo Morgan in their grand Stockholm apartment, and “Gentlemen” is his homage to them and to a time lost. Klas’s picaresque account of the brothers’ lives between 1948 and 1978 forms the novel’s core. In a style that brilliantly fuses light-hearted humor with the darkness and paranoia of imminent apocalypse, Klas examines the brothers’ ultimately futile struggles to exist as unfettered iconoclasts in the real world.

The book was first released 27 years ago but has just recently appeared in English translation.

Henning Mankell and the free market

Books: September 10th, 2007 by PO

Tibor R. Machan at the Orange Country Register enjoys his detective fiction as much as the next man. And time spent in the company of Henning Mankell’s moody Inspector Wallander is often time well spent.

But when it comes to the dynamics of the free market, Machan parts company with the Swedish author:

No one I have read commenting to Henning Mankell’s well-written and well-plotted crime novels has faulted him for injecting slipshod political-economic comments into his works. Somehow doing didactic, not to mention primitive, political economy seems to be OK by novelists if they oppose full human freedom, if they champion the welfare state (which Swedish Inspector Wallander supports wholeheartedly and whose inefficiencies and other faults he tends to blame on various vague cultural influences).

Female crime fiction writers trade blows with older men

Books: August 15th, 2007 by PO

Earth Times has published a review of the strange goings-on in the Swedish crime fiction world.

A war of words of extraordinary nastiness has erupted among Sweden’s internationally successful crime writers just as the summer holidays are getting into full swing. While innumerable bookworms on beaches, in hammocks or hotel beds are leafing through the new and virtually always weighty murder mysteries by Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund or Ake Edvardsson, the authors of the Scandinavian bestsellers are accusing each other of either not knowing how to write or of being miserable dogs in the manger.

The tit-for-tat name-calling may not have been constructive but it has certainly been amusing.

Novelist Ernst Brunner compared the recent flood of crime fiction with “the shit of the seagulls who ruin my island on the Stockholm archipelago.”

The anatomy of the Swedish crime novel

Books: June 19th, 2007 by PO

What do four of Sweden’s most celebrated crime novelists share, other than international success, a fistful of prizes, and a hectic tour schedule?

The Philadelphia Inquirer has some insight.