Aris Fioretos

The Skulls

Two essays
Original title: Skallarna
With Katarina Frostenson
Stockholm: Bonniers, 2001, 45 + 47 pages
Cover: Bo Berling
ISBN: 91-0-057690-5

Towards the end of the last millennium, KF confessed that she often thought of beheadings. From the other side of the Atlantic, AF sent her a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. Thereafter, a conversation ensued between the old and the new continent that was taken up again with irregular intervals in the course of the next years — always a little more awkwardly, always a little less self-evidently, until AF moved back to Sweden and the tête-à-tête lost its direction entirely. Probably, both writers were relieved by the interruption, even though the topic of discussion did not leave their thoughts. Thus it happened that, one day, when they had recuperated enough courage, they decided to write one last rejoinder each. It was a matter of making common cause in order to have the worries leave the world once and for all. They have termed their collaboration The Skulls.

“As a writer, you spend your life alone at a desk. The sole company are memories, whims, and mistakes, obscure fantasies and forlorn hopes. . . In short: a skull. Is it so odd that you dream of sharing your impasse? At least that is what I did after a period of embarrassment. At last, I turned to Katarina. Thus we decided to trade some last thoughts concerning the container of bone in which writers store their experiences. Different skulls, same worries.” — Aris Fioretos

“The idea came in the middle of the winter: Aris proposed a shared book, an essay each about the points of departure of one’s own writing. The skulls — the word gave echoes, during a few months images rose from their underworld. The space in which the poem begins, the contour of rhythm, the enigmatic ‘speaker,’ and the eternal dream of shining edges and vacant fields . . . It was an adventure to trace one’s own meandering line, in order to cross that of another; to listen to the reverberations of skulls —” — Katarina Frostenson