I love this somewhat creepy letter to readers from Åsa Larsson, former tax lawyer and author of several chilling thrillers set in rural Sweden, explaining how she came up with the victim for her first book, The Savage Altar, which was published by Penguin in the UK by for the first time.
NEVER trust an author. He or she is perfectly capable of taking everything you say or do and making it into a lovely soup to serve up to his or her readers. Never let an author into your house.
Then I caught sight of some photographs standing on a cupboard there in her kitchen. They were pictures of Lena’s children and her nieces and nephews. And in one of the photographs was her eldest son, Fredrik. It was as if an electric shock ran through me when I looked at the picture of him. He’d grown up so much. When I lived in Kiruna, he was just a little boy. But this picture showed a young man.
He’s so good looking, I thought, experiencing a real jolt at how quickly time passes, and the fact that nothing lasts forever.
He had long, fair hair. And I knew he played the violin.
He looks like a saint, I thought.
Then I thought:
He’d make such a beautiful corpse.
Her friend’s response upon reading the finished manuscript and being asked permission:
“Fine,” she said in her terse Kiruna way when she’d finished reading it. “You can publish it. But you’re not spending any time alone with our children from now on.”
The Savage Altar was published in the United States in 2006 as Sun Storm. Åsa Larsson’s newest book, The Black Path, was published in August.
One of my favorite Swedish bands ever. Their International Harvester stage came between the even more jammed out there (and mind blowing) Parson Sound and the slightly more focused Harvester. International Harvester melded traditional folk, droning ragas, free rock, and classical influences into a very unique combination. They released their sole album, entitled Sov Gott Rose Marie (“Sleep Tight Rose Marie”), in 1969.
Later on they would morph again, this time into the more successful rock band Trad Gras och Stenar, though they still maintained their long psychedelic excursions.
Never thought that much footage of the International Harvester collective performing would pop up, but the interweb (and youtube) delivers yet again.
During a party in Rågsved, a working-class suburb of Stockholm, in 1977, Thåström, Gurra and Fjodor formed a band called The Haters…One of the first songs performed by Ebba Grön was the controversial Skjut en snut (Shoot a cop), which was never officially recorded. They released their first single Antirock on April 21, 1978. The band bought all the 500 copies…In 1978, the time had come for their album debut We’re Only In It For The Drugs…the lyrics of one song, Beväpna er, (Take up arms) about taking up arms against the government, the bourgeoisie and the Swedish royal family, could not be printed on the cover…The band also started to get a reputation of having troublesome gigs, with vandalism and fights. At one gig when the band was attacked by Neo-Nazis, Fjodor used his bass to fight them off.
…
In 1980, Ebba Grön released a single that would become their most famous song, a cover of Blå Tåget’s Den ena handen vet vad den andra gör, re-named Staten och kapitalet, with very Marxist political lyrics…The single Scheisse was released in 1981…
As you might imagine, it goes on, there’s a sellout phase, etc.
