Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 2

RK: In the Action Books catalog description of Remainland (a selection of Aase Berg's first 4 book, translated by you also) "With Deer" is described as a "wrecked fairy-tale-scape." I don't think Black Ocean has come up with a book description for their website and/or a Press Release yet, so in order to give us a bit more sense of the book, its nature and scope, could you in a brief paragraph or two tell us a bit more than "wrecked fairy-tale-scape" (which by the way is a very good 2 word characterization)?

JG: I think the reason we put "fairy-tale-scape" into the description was because a lot of this book take place in a kind of "scape" of fairytales and folktales: in the woods, with animals etc. In his introduction to Remainland, Swedish critic Daniel Sjolin argues that the book detourns the motif of the lost girl in the woods (here the girl gets rabies). Of course in an American context of cleaned-up Disney versions of fairytales, that might not make any sense. But in Sweden the fairytales tend to be very violent and grotesque. The gnome slaughters the barn, the naked woman is made of tree bark, young people always drown or get lost in the woods.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)