“Katarina Frostenson and Aris Fioretos speak up about the
premises of their writing. . . . Two rather different texts are
presented. That of the poet and that of the novelist. Fioretos’
text moves in all kinds of directions — yet there is a very
luminous red thread. He deals with the brain. With the infinite
complications of a brain. Beginning with reminiscences from childhood,
he discusses the dream of a special kind of prose able to keep and
enlarge individual moments. A form of prose for which the areas
of the brain are just as unknown as once the deserts of Mongolia:
‘After all, it was a question of no less than of showing that
the inside of a skull might be wider than a sky.’ This is
. . . a text that moves with nimble feet, sometimes levitating,
always with a light smile on its lips. There is friendly irony,
even well-meaning irony. But it would be a mistake to believe
that the demands on the reader are thus lowered. On the contrary.
Anybody who has discovered the interior expansion of his skull will
experience a hard time settling for less.” —
Jan Arnald, Göteborgs-Posten
“J’est un autre, ‘I is another,’
Rimbaud wrote. That might be the motto of the two-headed book
of essays that Aris Fioretos and Katarina Frostenson now published
. . . The feeling of estrangement — to be somebody else
when writing, of thought and word not being part of one’s
own body — permeate both texts. . . . They discuss how to
listen and to find one’s voice, and through this, how to
phrase an inner, almost mystical experience. . . . When you read
this book, you nod approvingly and think: Frostenson is Frostenson,
Fioretos is Fioretos. The apostle of female language meets the
unrivalled maestro of elegant writing.” —
Gabriella Håkansson, Dagens Nyheter
“Aris Fioretos’s essay is a sort of corollary to
his novel Stockholm Noir of last year. . . . With an
echo of Ernst Jünger’s psychonaut, he dresses up in
the role as ‘cranionaut,’ a mental traveller through
the obscure windings of the cortex, in search of the voice of
narration, that ‘brittle tone’ that keeps a work of
literature together, and an answer to Baudelaire’s parenthetical
but demanding query: ‘(Is my brain a magic mirror?)’
. . . This is an essay in the original, montaignesque meaning
of the word, a daring attempt for which travelling itself, lushly
accompanied by surprising and learned insights, is more important
than the final destination. This is a stimulating, well-phrased,
and really entertaining trip.” —
Fabian Kastner, Östgöta-Correspondenten
“The Skulls dramatize literature’s wrestling
[with that which it is not] in ways fascinating and idiosyncratic.
Also, the book provides perspectives on the poetic labor of two
of today’s more interesting writers.” —
Jesper Olsson, Svenska Dagbladet
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