The Red Room

Reason read: This was April's botm by reading 1001. The Red Room is included in the 1001 books you must read before you die because it is considered the first modern Swedish novel. It is strongly satirical, exposing hypocrisy across Stockholm society. The plot is loose as it is told with episodic vignettes and character sketches. It follows a young idealistic people colliding with the materialistic world. The action revolves around a bohemian gathering place called the Red Room (a red walled room where artists, writers and intellectuals meet). The tone is realistic, ironic, and humorous. Romantic ideaism is ground down by the young and idealist. The themes are the gap between ideal and reality, hypocrisy, the treatment of art, theater, show more and journalism as objects to be sold, and the difficulty of maintaining integrity in a corrupt system. The idealist settles for the ordinary life, while society continues unchanged. Institutions and social pressures wear down individual integrity. I would ask, does it really, or does the idealist finally come down to reality and gets on with it. show less

Burocrazia levantina, stratificazione sociale di stampo vittoriano, ipocrisia, religiosità di facciata, furberie e malaffare.
Dove è riunito un simile coacervo di brutture? Nella Svezia di fine '800 che assomiglia a un girone dantesco, e dove uno spirito libero può solo scegliere la morte volontaria o l'omologazione.
Nonostante la traduzione ignobilmente arcaica si riesce a intuire la potente vena di satira sociale che Strindberg ha profuso in questo romanzo degno di Victor Hugo.

Röda rummet (or in translation The red room; I read this in Swedish) is one of the biggest classics of Swedish literature.

A funny, satirical look at 19thC bourgeois attitudes, The red room presents a loosely-connected group of counter-cultural artistic types and has them confront their counter-cultural and progressive ideals with those of conservative, mainstream society. Most of them are poor (well, poor bourgeois types), making ends meet by pawning each other’s possessions and taking on hack work that’s beneath their dignity. Their goal is to be recognized as master-level artists by the stodgy mainstream, without having to give up their anti-mainstream ideals.

Strindberg wrote funny observations of people and attitudes, and the show more situations he throws at his characters are frequently entertainingly absurd. Unfortunately, The red room will go no further: the book is more a loose collection of scenes featuring one or more of the main characters than a plotted novel, and I found its satire had a hard time rising above the level of the individual scene. Early chapters are great, but the lack of a solid central plot makes its flightiness annoying.

And then there’s the fact that the book is now (in 2017) almost 140 years old (it appeared in 1879): I found myself unable to appreciate it as a satire, but could only read it as poking fun at the mores of a society that no longer exists -- a historical artefact more than a novel.

So yeah. I’m glad I read this, but I won’t be reading it again. show less

Neobično iskustvo s ovom knjigom. Pola sam je pročitala a pola odslušala. To ne bi bio problem da je prevoditelj bio isti. Ali sve u svemu ovo je odlična knjiga. Iako je napisana 1879. godine može se slobodno primjeniti i na današnje društvo.
Glavni lik je Arvid Falk, mladi intelektualac koji se ne snalazi najbolje u svijetu prevara, fiktivnih poduzeća, lažnih dobroćinitelja, kvaziintelektualaca.
Likovi su blago karikirani. Podjeća me na Branislava Nušića.

Jedan od interesantih citata:
"U ono vrijeme koje se sada smatra dobrim, iako je bilo za mnoge zapravo veoma loše, izvršeno je velikop otkriće-najveće u stoljeću: da je jeftinije i prijatnije živjeti od tuđeg novca nego od svog vlastitog rada."

Neobično iskustvo s ovom knjigom. Pola sam je pročitala a pola odslušala. To ne bi bio problem da je prevoditelj bio isti. Ali sve u svemu ovo je odlična knjiga. Iako je napisana 1879. godine može se slobodno primjeniti i na današnje društvo.
Glavni lik je Arvid Falk, mladi intelektualac koji se ne snalazi najbolje u svijetu prevara, fiktivnih poduzeća, lažnih dobroćinitelja, kvaziintelektualaca.
Likovi su blago karikirani. Podjeća me na Branislava Nušića.

Jedan od interesantih citata:
"U ono vrijeme koje se sada smatra dobrim, iako je bilo za mnoge zapravo veoma loše, izvršeno je velikop otkriće-najveće u stoljeću: da je jeftinije i prijatnije živjeti od tuđeg novca nego od svog vlastitog rada."

real good. very nice analytical irony and sarcasm. great language! fun. firery.

I absolutely did not like this book.
For reading, I switched to audio, which was okay in the beginning. But, the further I got in the book, the more confusing it got. I seem to have completely missed the subject, and why the characters did the things they did.
Happy to cross this one off to ever return to it!