(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"I write," I said. Are you a journalist? The first became sharp in the eye and frowned. "Not in that sense, I tried, I work with reports, not politically colored, I emphasized, I'm an independent, anarchist traveler who writes to hold on to certain moments."
This is the reason for the Danish author to write this book, a book that was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1999.
Life and literature
"He was so wise he didn't need to read. What should you do with books, when you can read nature, talk to it and exchange thoughts with it? ”
I become more than skeptical when writers on page seven already proclaim that life is more important than literature. Actually, you might just have to close the book and either throw it in the wall or take it back to the bookstore and demand the money back. But since I did not in principle throw books into the walls or buy the book myself, I tried to pretend nothing and read on.
But I asked myself the question: Does Boberg believe in such nonsense? Why then does he write a book of over 350 pages? Fortunately, it did not seem at all as he believed in his own words (writers do not always do that) where he starts up in a fresh language like a road movie in book form should. Here's a taste of the hike to New Orleans: 'Jump in, boy, if you want to go to New Orleans. His face was light brown with a cuddly beard, blond and well-groomed. His crimson silk shirt smelled of perfume. … Do you smoke pot, buddy? »
The horrifying realities of travel
The book is a text collection with travel memories from 1980 to 1999. Boberg obviously has a strong relationship with the American continent, especially the southern part of it. The lyrics are genre-related in terms of reporting, but still they are very different in tone and angling. However, they are written by a language-conscious writer (Boberg has ten collections of poems behind him) who show that beneath the form-filled language, the precise formulations, there is a real world, dirty and smelly, so the world is for most of the people on the American continent , especially south of Texas. Thomas Boberg has traveled, written and seen.
The description of a trip with a river boat in Peru, the author's / narrator's honeymoon, is good and beautiful literature. Poetry almost manages to displace the terrifying realities of the journey. Before the morning breaks forth «« in all its power, set the whole world on fire with its light and its sun and its flames, which made all living things rejoice and moan, laugh and jump, and then they truly began to move all around, all this menagerie of snoring passengers, and their fucking roosters went mad, and the flesh began to wag and bark, their fleas to bark, jump, and bounce.
South of the Rio Grande
poverty, child labor, corruption and a sea of various other atrocities are present on a completely different scale than in our idyllic corner of the world – to the extent that the world has corners, round as it is.
South America is also the place where hallucinogenic substances can be picked straight from nature. Boberg does it, and the prose he sometimes becomes. There will be a journey of that too, an inner journey.
But even though the author does not regard these texts as politically colored, they are much to me about the political situation in the other America, where regimes of questionable tendency are strikingly financially, morally and politically supported by the "real" America, the United States of God, has a long tradition of considering everything south of the Rio Grande as its own toilet paper.
And, of course, it is about the political despair of the South American countries: "Every time Fujimori is in crisis, it seems to happen something that can save him and his power play at the last minute. And it strikes me sometimes that the hard-pressed Peruvian people have a pretty bad memory. One would like to believe that there is a change on the way. And if the president can for a moment convince him that he is a hero, the poor will vote for him again the following week, the same as just a few days before he distanced himself from him.
There capital is God
Almost half of the travelogues in this book are from Peru, the country where the author lives today. "Peru, the eternal loser with the hidden riches, who can be praised in brackets, but who still falls short in the modern race where capital is God."
We meet many human destinies. This is often the benefit of reading travel descriptions of this type. We get to know the life stories of people we never met, we travel like ourselves without lifting our backs from the earplug.
But who says that now everything is going so much better or that the financial resources in the world are evenly distributed? In any case, not Boberg: “In the first month of 1998, material damage in Peru alone amounted to $ 800 million. An expense the English rock musician David Bowie would have been able to pay and still have $ 100 million left in the account. ”
Some of the texts in this book are small fictional short stories, such as the magnificent "The Dreamer".
Thomas Boberg usually travels alone as real globetrotters usually do. But sometimes his Peruvian wife Beatrix is also there. She's probably called that in the real world too, but I can not help but remember that the name is very similar to Beatrice, another traveler's great love, Dante's travel companion after he came out of hell and purgatory – on his way to paradise.
And apropos paradise: the author is exceptionally fond of serpents of various varieties. They bend forward completely according to the undulating text.
Cheap ticket
There is little doubt that Thomas Boberg has a distant and ironic relationship with the United States. In three of the thirty texts we are in Gods Own Country, in the first two and in the third last. The latter is very enjoyable. It is a report from Aberdeen, South Dakota, a look back to 1977 when the narrator was an exchange student and according to the rules had to call the host family's two adults Mom and Dad. The moral – shall we say double-moral – superpower can hardly be described much better on a micro level.
In interviews, Boberg has stated that he has a great sense of Latin American fiction, but that he is not a magical realist. In the Americas, he tells stories at his best about Indians and other naturalists in a way that is not far behind the most talented Latin American magical realists. At Boberg we meet curanderos, brujos, shamans, spirits – good and evil – and not least ayahuasca, the magic potion.
Americas is a readable book. For those with bad advice, it's a cheap ticket to the American continent. I have nothing to say on the translation except a small correction: it is not called the World Cup qualifier, but the World Cup qualifier.
My main objection to this book is that it should have been somewhat shorter. Towards the end I had had enough, then I wanted to go home. Here Boberg could use the eraser or delete key on the computer. But it is hereby proved – for those who should have been in doubt – that poets can also write prose. By the way, Boberg has now written prose before, namely the travelogues "The Silver Thread" (1996) and "Moroccan Motif" (1998).
However, the Americas were much better than the introduction of the commandment. But I still believe in healthy skepticism. And as Thomas Boberg himself writes in the book: Who, by the way, has said that you should believe everything you read?
