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🇸🇪 Sweden /Culture & Society

Book List, Week 36: Aviation, Rumors, Book Piles and the Player in the Top Corner

From Dagens Nyheter · () Swedish

Translated from Swedish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Opinion Sources not specified Context piece
  • Dagens Nyheter’s weekly book column reviews new additions to its critics’ list, including Peter Englund’s long essay “On Failing.”
  • The column discusses the cover image of Franz Reichelt, who died in 1912 after jumping from the Eiffel Tower in an experimental flying suit.
  • It also criticizes the volume of new books released ahead of the Göteborg Book Fair and reflects on Isabella Nilsson’s sharp observations about literature and criticism.

Peter Englund’s new book, “On Failing,” arrives with a cover showing a man about to make a fatal leap from the Eiffel Tower. It is a familiar image of failure: serious gentlemen trying to fly before the Wright brothers, collapsing like tangled crows into heaps of balsa wood and canvas.

The man on Englund’s cover is Franz Reichelt, a tailor wearing a flying suit of his own invention. On February 4, 1912, he used it to jump from the Eiffel Tower’s first platform, a drop of 57 metres. Reichelt was 33. Because the experiment was filmed, he became the first person whose death was captured on moving images.

There are authors whose greatest benefit is that they generate such beautiful literary criticism.

· Isabella NilssonNilsson’s observation about writers whose work gives critics material for elegant reviews.

One rumor has it that Englund added Reichelt to the book only after the publisher presented the cover concept. The column calls this a telling, and rather beautiful, example of how the sometimes stage-managed cooperation between authors and publishers can work at its best.

Creating texts that primarily serve as pencil sharpeners for literary critics’ pencils is truly no small thing. A kind of literature of the assist, where the author provides the pass and the critic scores into the top corner.

· Isabella NilssonHer football metaphor for the relationship between authors and literary critics.

The writer says that cooperation with authors and publishers is currently working less well. Too many books are being published, apparently to get them out before the Book Fair at the end of the month. No one wants to stand there discussing a book that has not yet arrived from the printer in Estonia, but the flood makes it harder for the critic to keep up.

Isabella Nilsson’s first three books have now appeared in a collected paperback, “Collected Aches.” She writes that some authors are most valuable because they generate beautiful literary criticism, describing literature as a team play in which the author provides the assist and the critic scores into the top corner. The column finds the image witty, but says the problem comes when 22,000 players crowd onto a field built for 22. In that crush, the spectacular finish ends up in an embarrassing corner, if such a corner can still be found. Nilsson also writes: “People who work hard not to hit the roof often hit the wall.”

People who work hard not to hit the roof often hit the wall.

· Isabella NilssonA concise observation quoted in the column about effort, frustration and self-pity.
About this summary

Originally published by Dagens Nyheter in Swedish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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