Peter Stjernström - The Best Book in the World

‘Hi, Titus! Great to see you!’

‘What are you doing, Eddie? What on earth are you doing?’

‘Haha,’ Eddie gives a friendly laugh. ‘Are you working for the police now, what’s got into you? You look stressed, Titus. You must take more care of yourself.’

Always this pleasant tone. It really gets on Titus’ nerves. Can’t you even get into a raging fury without that damn love poet starting to behave like a saint? But Eddie’s calm does its work. It always does, for everything and on everybody. Even on Titus – his pulse slows down a little.

‘Yes, well, I walked past here earlier. And then, after a long while, something clicked inside my head. It must have been Eddie sitting in there, I thought. So I went back, but then the door was locked.’

‘Oh, right, good thing you came back. It is really great to see you again!’

‘Er, yeah, same here…’

‘Are you here to borrow books?’

‘Yeah, right. That was the idea.’

‘Anything particular you’re looking for?’

‘No, not really, just scouting round a little…’

How do some people always have the ability to steer a conversation in the direction they want? Sometimes it doesn’t seem to make any difference however strong your intentions are. Sometimes there is a cat in hell’s chance of getting your way. Titus feels that the situation is running through his fingers. How can he confront Eddie with what he knows? Er… knows ? He doesn’t actually know anything. He hasn’t really got a clue as to what Eddie is doing. Perhaps the whole thing is just a figment of Titus’ imagination. A phantom image of a horrible crime that says ‘pop’ and goes up in smoke as soon as you turn the light on.

But nevertheless. No smoke without fire.

Damn it, I’m stone-cold sober and 100 per cent compos mentis, Titus thinks. Of course I must be able to rely on my intuition!

‘And you, Eddie, what are you doing?’

Eddie brushes away a blue lock of hair from his eyes and loosens his colourful silk scarf, which is wrapped several times around his neck. A very solemn look spreads across his face.

‘I’m writing.’

‘Oh, yeah…?’ says Titus, and wants to hear more.

‘I’m writing something I am forced to write.’

‘Umm… I can believe that,’ Titus mumbles to himself and sees that a confession is close. He knows Eddie and realises that he isn’t bad deep inside. The guy can’t keep a secret. If he is writing The Best Book in the World, he’s going to say so.

‘Yeah, well, I have been prowling around this project and not been able to take the plunge. I can’t wait any longer.’

‘No?’

‘It’s about my dad.’

‘What? Your dad?’

‘Yes, I’m trying to find out what actually happened when I was a child. You know, Titus, I regard myself as a fairly happy person. Yet there is an unpleasant darkness somewhere which sometimes drags me down. I suspect that it is my childhood that is behind it all.’

‘So now you’re going to write a book about your dad?’

‘No, no, I’m working on my summer programme. On the radio, you know. They’re broadcasting it next week, there’ll be millions of listeners. I’ve had to rethink it completely; at first I’d planned to do a programme of reminiscences interwoven with my favourite music, from when I was little up to the present day. A delightful document of the times, with lots of nostalgic touchdowns. First time I made out, the first festival, stuff like that. But then I got hooked on a Peter LeMarc song that I heard him play live long before his stage fright got the upper hand. Blue Light. Have you heard it?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘It goes something like this: “I was born under a blue light. Grew up in a blue house. Lived in a blue binge. But now I realise that there is another Sweden. I have seen that there are other colours.”’

‘Yeah, right, I think I’ve heard that.’

‘I started thinking about what the lyrics could mean to me. And then it struck me. I too grew up in a blue house. Metaphorically speaking. My dad was a nutter.’

‘A nutter?’

‘A paranoid schizophrenic,’ says Eddie. ‘He suffered from severe delusions and was often deeply depressed. He got the idea that evil people climbed into his soul and stole his goodness.’

‘Oh dear,’ says Titus. He can’t help wondering how he got here, in a heart-to-heart conversation about Eddie’s dad through a chink in the door at the City Library.

‘Sad pictures pop up out of my memory. But I don’t want to apportion guilt. I simply must find out more. So I have borrowed loads of books about this, other people’s stories about what it is like to live close to a mental illness. I have been forced to re-do the whole programme. There won’t be any laughing and kidding. I am going to turn my heart inside out instead. It will be a one-and-a-half-hour blue summer.’

Titus breathes out. In a sense, it is a relief to hear that Eddie had a rotten childhood. It means that he won’t have time to think about The Best Book in the World. I hope he’ll dig really deep into the shit, Titus thinks maliciously. After the light comes darkness. Eddie is on his way into a tunnel. Hope it will be long and narrow. Now I am the one who sees the light!

But, in that case, who the hell has borrowed all the books? Is there another rival? Or is it all just another figment of his imagination?

Titus realises that he has gone down the wrong track. It is ridiculous to try to follow other people’s recipes to create a bestseller. He could read all the bestselling books in the world without being able to find a pattern. No, he must find The Best Book in the World within himself.

Now he is the little boy at the woman’s bosom again. He licks away his milk moustache and waves goodbye to Eddie and his crazy dad.

Quick recap. What has he got?

He has an overweight and charismatic detective chief inspector who has cracked an important slimming code and will soon change the world’s view of leadership. On top of that, he has a polished serial killer, a frightfully tasty pizza and the best artist in the world throughout the ages, his soul mate Salvador Dali. Plus lots of good ideas and a synopsis that will soon overflow from his brain. Wonderful.

Time to go to work.

Serial Salvador. He had seen the name on the placards for several weeks now. It was repulsive. A way of simplifying and uglifying. His task was much more beautiful than that. His art would not fit on a newspaper placard. His art would not fit in a museum or an art hall. They would get to see. They would feel it.

Sure, there had been artists before him who had worked in his spirit. The American photographer Andres Serrano, for example: his photos of dead people in mortuaries were dazzlingly beautiful. Murdered gang members and innocent mugging victims. Naked, broken, bloody and seductive. Serrano’s pictures were hated by some, loved by others. But was it art? Wasn’t it simply documentation of the art works of others? Somebody had killed another person deliberately, perhaps for revenge or some other desire.

It must surely be the person who triggers the experience who is the artist, not the one who experiences it, looks at it or just consumes it? Serrano portrayed experiences, he didn’t create them. Did that make him an artist? Or was he just a tool in the service of the murderers? A paintbrush, a canvas, a palette with paint. Yes, it must have been the murderers who were the real originators.

Serial Salvador. He sniffed at the name. No, he would once and for all rub out the boundary between moral and immoral, between art and reality. When the crime-scene technicians from the police took pictures of his installations, those works of art became eternal. The police became Serrano-clones, obedient tools in his service. Without understanding it themselves, they became artists, public and critics at one and the same time. Shocked and in despair, they stood there and lit up his installations with their camera flashes. Dead and mutilated bodies hung up on weird crutches in the strangest of places. Men, women and children, nobody escaped. When the photos were subsequently spread between colleagues, prosecutors and media leaks, the whole world became his art hall. The guardians of morality became the foremost apostles of immorality. His art was spread at the speed of light via TV, radio, the Internet and newspapers.