Malte Persson - The narrator makes contact with the discarded film project’s director, writer, principal cast members and producer, but the chief focus appears to be on deconstructing the somewhat-dubious distinction between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’, by demonstrating that the various characters each inhabit their own distorted version of reality.

 

Malte Persson, Fantasy, Trans. by Saskia Vogel,

Readux Books, 2013.

In shadowy Stockholm bars and apartments, a charismatic artist tracks down the cast and producers of a failed fantasy film. She seduces the Sorrowful Prince, lets the tech-savvy Dwarf bore her on the subject of linguistics, and muses on the Witch Master s grisly fate. Her casually acerbic account of her interviews rambles over the tropes of genre literature and the problems of modern society: greed, narcissism, corruption. Fantasy is a sexy, troubling glimpse into the vacuum created when a fantasy collapses.

Fantasy (Fantasy, 2013. translated by Saskia Vogel) is a short story (or novelette: I can’t be completely sure which side of the 7.5K word boundary it falls on) in a broadly-similar vein to Amanda Svensson’s Where the Hollyhocks Come From, which I reviewed recently—at least, the two have been published as parts of the same series. Fantasy is, however, a distinctly more metafictional work than Hollyhocks, presented as the narrations of a young yet already jaded documentary-maker who is ostensibly concerned with investigating the reasons for the failure of an ambitious Swedish fantasy movie to survive production. The narrator makes contact with the discarded project’s director, writer, principal cast members and producer, a sequence that constitutes what plot the story has, but the chief focus appears to be on deconstructing the somewhat-dubious distinction between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’, by demonstrating that the various characters each inhabit their own distorted version of reality. The narrator’s view of each of these characters—which, naturally, is itself a distortion—is generally unflattering, stopping just short of curmudgeonly; and yet enough of the narrator’s own character leaks through to convey the strong impression that she is also a target (perhaps even the main one) of the overlying authorial character assessment. (It’s perhaps telling that, just as the mooted movie is abandoned before completion, so too is the subsequent documentary about that abandonment.) The story makes some interesting (and amusing) points—though not, for the most part, on ‘Fantasy’ as practitioners of the genre would understand it, except in the most mass-market sense—but in toto I found it somewhat too distant and cerebral in tone to be truly rewarding. - Simon Petrie

https://simonpetrie.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/book-review-fantasy-by-malte-persson/

Malte Persson , born 1976 in Mora, Sweden, is among the most significant Swedish authors of his generation. He works as an author, critic, and translator. His debut novel, Life on This Planet, appeared in 2002. His second novel, Edelcrantz, was nominated for the prestigious August Prize. He has published three volumes of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Underworld, a sonnet cycle about the Stockholm subway. He has won a number of awards, both for his work as an author and as a critic, including the Gothenburg Post s 2011 prize for literature, whose jury praised him for authorship that demonstrates the playfulness of a trickster, and elegant craftsmanship that reveals new worlds between earth, moon, and underworld. His most recent work is the children s book The Journey to the World s Most Dangerous Country. After living for many years in Stockholm, Persson now makes his home in Berlin.