Jonas Ferry’s blog

There are books that you know you should read. Someone mentions a book and you make a mental note of it. Or you stumble on a review on a blog, or it’s considered one of the classics. This book was one of the former, mentioned to me long ago, but not really as a suggestion.

My friend Sven Holmström used the internet handle Mac Tracbac for a while in the late 90s. He said it was from a book about a clown, so when I found Jac the Clown in the library I picked it up because I recognized the main character’s last name Tracbac. But Jac isn’t Mac, so I thought Sven was wrong. It turned out I was.

Jac the Clown was written in 1930 by the Swedish author Hjalmar Bergman. He was a troubled man that died alone in a hotel room in Berlin on New Year’s day of 1931. He was 47 years old and burnt out on alcohol and stimulants. Jac the Clown was his last work, originally presented as a radio theater. The book is very funny, with a quick dialogue and witty remarks from the author. The characters are all interesting and are given enough space to each have their own storylines. The story switches between kafkaesque situations and realistic studies of happiness and guilt. In my version from 1985 it says that all Swedish plural verb forms have been updated to singular, which makes the text seem more modern. The text feels surprisingly modern, and the themes of guilt, responsibility and relationships explored are timeless.

It tells the tale of Benjamin “Benbé” Borck, a young Swede, that goes to America to meet his wealthy relative Jonathan Borck, or Jac the Clown. Jac is an incredibly famous and influential clown. Each of his performances is sold out as soon as it’s announced. His trademark is anxiety and fear; the more scared he is on stage the more people laugh at and love him. Benbé brings a gift from mutual relatives in Sweden that makes the clown confess he has an illegitimate child back in Sweden. He tries to reconnect with his child, while he prepares for his next tour where he wants to come clean on why he’s famous and what really happened to his clown partner Mac.

You see, as Jac started in the clown business he partnered up with a man called Mac Tracbac. Mac was the best acrobat of the two, and used to walk on tightropes without a safety net. The two partners didn’t like each other, but put work before personal feelings. But Jac was anxious and afraid that Mac would fall and hurt himself, so he constructed a safety rope for Mac to wear. Mac thought Jac wanted to make his act less frightening to get the audience’s attention himself, but with the help of the police Jac forced Mac to wear the safety rope.

Something went wrong. The first time Mac tried it and was jumping between two platforms in the roof of the circus tent the safety rope wound itself around his neck. He fell and was promptly hanged, before his body fell to the ground. The audience was shocked, Jac also, but the circus director forced Jac to go on as nothing had happened. Circus workmen removed the body. As Jac ran with terror in his eyes, jumping around like a monkey, clawing in the air, people began to think it was all part of the act. Finally Jac collapsed and the workmen carried him out as well.

From that day terror was Jac’s way of getting laughter from the audience. Until his final tour when has grown tired of it all. He wants to redeem his dead partner, the dead clown Mac Tracbac, that my friend Sven borrowed his handle from. No more fear for Jac, until the child he’s never met arrives from Sweden.

The Trial (original title: Der Prozeß) (Franz Kafka, 1925). One morning Josef K. is arrested by two men without being told the charges against him. This is the beginning of a large process against him. It’s not conducted by a formal court of law, but by friends, relatives and co-workers. This court is characterized by the impossible bureaucratic methods required to do something, methods that usually end up doing nothing to further K’s case.

The way I read the book it’s not about an actual trial, but the common human feeling of being trapped and of feeling guilty over things without an actual cause. He’s forced to defend himself without knowing the formal charges against him, by soul searching for mistakes he has done. The way the court works when it arrests K. without accusing him of doing anything wrong is a good description of how the human conscience works. Josef K. seeks help from a defence attorney, an artist and a priest, without success. The court is divided between the lower court that the people he meet know about, and the higher court that is unknown to all. The lower court can only temporarily remove the charges against people, and only the higher court can make the final decision on whether a person is innocent or not. That’s a symbolic view of how people can live with their bad conscience, but only after death can God make the final ruling of innocence according to Kafka.

Kafka wanted the book to be destroyed after his death, but a friend instead saved it and published it. I’m glad he did. This is the first time I read the whole book, having started two or three times. I have seen the film The Trial (David Hugh Jones, 1993) with Kyle MacLachlan and Anthony Hopkins before, and thought it was really good. As far as I remember it follows the book closely, so if you’re not up for the novel you should at least catch the film.

Men Without Women (Ernest Hemingway, 1927). A collection of 14 short stories from early in Hemingway’s career. I bought it because I wanted to see the trademarked Hemingway prose and because I wanted to read some good short stories. I was not disappointed in any way.

Hemingway was absolutely fascinated in different ways of hurting animals, something that doesn’t appeal to me at all. He tells stories of bull fighting, big game hunting and fishing, and doesn’t manage to make any of them beautiful to me in the way he intends. His stories also focus on tough men and the human condition, stoically meeting whatever life throws at them. This focus is a lot more interesting, and the dialogues between these tough-guys are wonderful.

Hemingway’s literary style is usually described as being sparse and simple, and sometimes it’s almost ridiculously so. Here’s the first couple of sentences from the first short story, “The Undefeated”:

“Manuel Garcia climbed the stairs to Don Miguel Retana’s office. He set down his suitcase and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Manuel, standing in the hallway felt there was someone in the room. He felt it through the door.”

And so on. Really simple, but in a great way it describes these simple men. A lot is left unsaid, and when you read the dialogue a lot is left to the reader. The context in which things are said matters a lot, and is usually the only way you have of reading the inner life of the characters.

I feel inspired to imitate the style when I’m writing now, which is stupid because everyone else is already doing it.

I’m reading the children’s book Karlsson-on-the-Roof by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. It’s from 1955 and a real classic, and for good reasons. Again and again I’m amazed by the language; Astrid had a very effective language that conveys the scenes in as few words as possible. The dialogue is fun as well.

As an example, the main character Lillebror (Little Brother) comes home with a bump on his head and meets his mother in the kitchen. I’m translating from Swedish:

- Krister has thrown stones at me, Little Brother said angrily.
- Oh, my, said mother, such a bad boy! Why didn’t you come in and tell me?
Little Brother shrugged.
- To what use? You don’t know how to throw stones. You couldn’t even hit the wall of a barn.
- Oh, silly, said mother. You don’t think I would have thrown stones at Krister, do you?
- What else would you throw, wondered Little Brother.

Karlsson is a little man with a propeller on his back and a tendency to lie and exaggerate. When Little Brother complains, he just flips his hand and says “that’s a worldly thing”. As a kid I used to get really mad at the constantly cheating Karlsson, but now I can see through the rhetorical tricks he uses. I still get mad, and impressed by the language and the fun situations.

Astrid was a really cool person in real life as well. In 1987 the government gave her a animale care law as a present on her 80th birthday, which she later called “farty” because they didn’t keep what it promised. In 1976 she noticed she had paid 102% in taxes and wrote the story Pomperipossa in Monismania about the event. The finance minister mocked her in a government debate and said that she were better at stories than math. When she was proved right she replied that maybe they should trade jobs, since he was the better one at telling stories.