As interesting each time: here is the Italian edition of my novel. I wish I could read Italian, but the month I spent in Lugano last year didn’t give me enough grasp of the language to attempt even my own novel. It looks beautiful, and I look forward to hearing how it will be received.
Time passes and nothing much gets done. The weather has turned cold and I realize the clothes I brought in July are both worn and insuffient. There are lots of things that need doing here in the apartment - people ask where I am when I call because of the strange hollow sound. My steps echo so I am mostly barefoot. The floors are always warm here. Strange how warm the indoors are, and how cold the outdoors. In Auckland it’s often the other way around.
I reread ‘Talking to Mr. K.’, a story I wrote some time ago. (more…)
Stanislaw Wyspianski, Planty Park
‘The consequence of silence’ is now out of my hands. I am relieved, but also a little sad. I find myself filled with the usual feelings of guilt when I sit down to watch TV or take a walk. Then I remember that there is nothing pressing for me to do… All I can do now is wait. This book has been painful to write, but also, occasionally, exceedingly satisfying. Very different from the first.
Finally! We have an apartment in Stockholm. I can’t express my feelings. It is simply… ah I don’t know. I looks like this from the outside. The second window from the bottom… or the top. It’s small. A little dark. No lift. But the Katarina church is right across the street… (more…)
The warmest May in 140 years is over and this morning winter moved in. But winters here are not like real winters. The winters that live in my memory are harsh and real, predictable and in a sense therefore easier to accept. Here, winter comes and goes, with surprising sprinklings of summer inbetween everlasting rains. They are brighter, warmer and shorter than Swedish winters, but I still find them more difficult to live with. I am not romantizing, I think, because I returned to the black northern winter a couple of years ago and stayed for the hardest months. And it was like rediscovering winters as they should be. The kind of winter that is ingrained in me. Who would have thought it would be the winters that would bring on my home sickness?
This very good Friday is slowly drawing into early eveningand the sun is about to set. Why is it called Good Friday in English? I vividly remember my Swedish Good Fridays as being called, very appropriately, Long Friday. To us children in the 50’s it was certainly the longest day of the year. Everything was closed, the radio transmitted only somber church music all day. My father rested. My mother was quietly unsettled, a little more than usual this quiet day. Nothing stirred. Usually, the weather was suited to the general feeling of despair: grey and cold and with a mean wind over half frozen dead lawns. A looming sense of slow death. As perhaps it should be.
But the day after we had our Easter eggs filled with sweets, and life began again.
