Subject: Astrid Lindgren
From: The Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@spray.se)
Date: Wed Jan 30 2002 - 17:31:33 GMT
I don’t know if the echo from our little kingdom has reached the distant corner of this world, but our grand old lady of children’s books, Astrid Lindgren, passed away a few days ago at the prominent age of 94. She’s been old for as long as I can remember (guess only Scottie, who attended the same kindergarten as ol’ Sigmund Freud, feels different), and not written for quite some time, but her classics like Pippi Longstocking, Emil in Lonnerberga (I do only direct translations here, they are probably called something entirely different in other countries), the Brothers Lionheart, Mio my Mio, Emma at Trouble-Making Street etc, are known by almost every kid in Sweden. Nangijala in The Brothers Lionheart is more alive to a Swedish kid than Narnia ever was, and Pippi is in every newborn girl.
Getting quite used to public figures dropping off, lately – Robert Nozick for example just the other day; not to mention a Beatle we talked about not long ago – I wasn’t prepared to the media attack that went off in Sweden.
She is enormous over here and since she passed away at such an impressing age, articles and TV-documentaries have been prepared for ages (I presume) and media is all over her, praising and analysing even those aspect that have been silenced over the years. Was she not unhappy in her marriage; what about that child she had when she was 19 and couldn’t take care of it; isn’t the fact that all girls in her stories are strong when the boys often are both strong and weak a psychological echo from feeling abandoned… The list is endless of the things we didn’t speak out of respect, but suddenly is exploding in our face. I find our need for iconizing and gossiping our public figure, especially the canonized ones, truly fascinating, if also somewhat depressing.
It made me wonder what will be going on when our own Grand Master passes on. (You didn’t think I would write a completely off topic post, did you? Not me, never. I haven’t got off that bike, never will, even if I never mention the name of the grumpy old fart or his books again). But in some respect, I guess you could say he already has, in the way that every gossipmonger in town may have his/her go at him already.
Cheers,
Emil
_________________________________________s_p_r_a_y_
Här börjar Internet!
Skaffa gratis e-mail och gratis Internet på http://www.spray.se
Nu kan du lagra dina filer och dokument på nätet. http://www.spray.se/sprayspace
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Mar 20 2002 - 09:27:54 GMT