Customer Reviews

Funeral Music for Freemasons

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Lars Gustafsson is a treasure in American writing, but many of his books were written in Swedish first and we have to go through different translators to get to the meat of what he's saying and doing. Yvonna Sandstroem doesn't do him many favors, either here nor in the poetry she's done, everything sounds really weird, almost the way the members of ABBA pronounce English, as though at a distance.

In Funeral Music the narrator tells a kind of ABBA tale (think of "The Winner Takes It All") about the melancholia of having once been young, and now the freshness of youth, its dreams and hopes, is all swept away. Set in prison in a dingy African cell in Senegal, the narrator remembers how once he had a wonderfully talented soprano girlfriend, Ann Marie (as well as a number of more sexual adventures with white and black men and boys) -- women are theology, he says, men are philosophy. Their youth together was filled with promise, and now their lives have fallen apart--cue up the ABBA tune, "Knowing Me, Knowing You." I really enjoyed the book, but it isn't half as original as some of Lars' other titles.