Books, books, books

Thank God for Hjalmar Söderberg.

After reading who the winners of Augustpriset are this year, I must sigh. Congratulations however! Well done!

After being polite I can continue to discuss something else. It's clearly too predictable which kind of books which will win awards. Books written about minorities, and books about being a minority, or being oppressed. Be black, be a woman, be jewish, be whatever, and write a book about it, you're bound to win an award. Just a tip.

Anyway there's a certain kind of inflation in it, how many holocaust books do we have to read? How much kitchen realism? How many books about overthrowing racist ideas and laws? I'm hardly saying it's not important, but, what kind of favor are we really doing? If we are going to be equals shouldn't we do it on equal terms. Is the art of a book about a middle class man less art that that of a black working class woman? Shouldn't it really be about the way the writer uses the tool of language to compose something? All rhetorical questions, but that's besides the point.

In a way this is what I was trying to get at in my "on the other side of feminism" post, highlighting other groups is great, for a while, at one point in time it has to be normalized instead of marginalized, and the compensation has to stop.

I want to be good at what I do as a person, not as a woman. Perhaps the winners of awards should ask themselves why they won, is it because of literary talent, the subject of the work, the composition, or their place in the sliding scale of society?

I do not want the days back where writing was for the male upper classes alone, and I'm looking forward to the day where art is able to stand on it's own two feet instead of being a political beet.