Saturday, April 04, 2009

Scandinavian Misanthropy

"Scandinavian Misanthropy" is a trilogy written by Norwegian author Matias Faldbakken. As is becoming familiar to readers of translated crime fiction, the third part of the trilogy, Unfun, is coming in English before the rest, From Publishing News archive:
James Garbutt of Harvill Secker and Beth Coates of Vintage have bought UK/Commonwealth rights to a novel that has caused a good deal of controversy in Norway, where it was published by Cappelen. Unfun is “the challenging story of the violent online slasher game 'Deathbox' and follows Lucy, 'the final girl', as she exacts revenge on her boyfriend Slaktus, a self-styled violent intellectual and the game's creator”. Garbutt believes the novel is “potent and exhilarating”. The author is Matias Faldbakken, whose work has earned comparisons with Brett Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq.
From the Salomonsson Agency, the synopsis for Unfun:
Five years after Macht und Rebel, Matias Faldbakken returns with Unfun - Scandinavian Misanthropy III, drawing his Scandinavian Misanthropy trilogy to an explosive close through a discussion on violence and its utmost consequence – death. Using the dramaturgy of the rape/revenge flicks of the Seventies as a framework for his narrative, Faldbakken cooks up a grotesquely hilarious and challenging story about the crew around the online slasher game ”Deathbox”, at the center of which are the ’violence intellectual’ Slaktus and his former girlfriend and victim Lucy, an anarchist who embodies the horror film’s Final Girl trope. Problematizing concepts of oppression, freedom, and power in different contexts, Faldbakken lets Lucy meet out revenge on her oppressors in a narrative littered with references to popular culture, which bears Faldbakken’s trademark of being at once seriously disturbing and highly entertaining.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sounds good - I'd like to read it but will wait until the first one is translated - will give me the chance to catch up a bit on my unread books. (Do you think that's likely?!)