New Swedish Books, Spring 2020 1
New Swedish Books 40 Isle of the Dead – Dreams fr
om The Other Side Knut Larsson Works Aniara, 2016 Krokodilstaden, 2008 Canimus, 2001 Awards The Swedish Academy of Comics’ Adamson Prize 2016 A charcoal-black express train with a locomotive shaped like a black swan rushes through a desolate tundra landscape. A young man in a loin cloth, with neatly slicked-back hair, wanders through a forest of swaying trees, with faceless dwarves in lederhosen and Baba Yaga’s cottage on hen’s feet. A merman in swimming goggles emerges from the sea and impregnates a young woman. Later she stands on the shore, and we see that her son has a sailor costume and octopus tentacles instead of arms. The tableaux in Knut Larsson’s Isle of the Dead are lined up like a surreal slide show. Sometimes they take the form of a story, at other times they depict a fragmentary composition of scenes. Some are done in ink, others are watercolours using reduced colour scales. The doll-like stiffness of the characters is reminiscent of a silent film from the 1920s and contributes to the dreamlike impression. As a reader, you can imagine Knut Larsson sleeping on a divan in fin de siecle Vienna while these comicbased stories pour straight from his subconscious onto the page. The reader bends over the mumbling figure, is pushed from behind, and falls helplessly into his inner landscape. 104 p. Knut Larsson (b. 1972) Publisher Kartago Förlag www.kartago.se Rights Kartago Förlag Rolf Classon rolf@kartago.se Photo: Martin Stenmark