Peter Stjernström: The Best Book in the World

Enter The Author, stage left.

Titus Jensen is going to type the first sentence of his new novel. He has been thinking about the wording all morning.

Enter The Author, stage left.

Titus can see the man before him. The Great Author, with his salad days far behind him. He has been granted just a few more occasions to bask in the limelight. Why he has suddenly been given the chance to earn a few more kronor from a public reading, the Great Author hasn’t a clue. He hasn’t written a book in ages.

Regrettably, he will not be able to read from one of his own books. No, his only chance to gain appreciation and applause is to grab the book that someone hands him the very second he goes up onto the stage. He is placed in front of a microphone and hardly has time to announce the title before the public bursts out laughing.

They are taking the mickey – that he does know. But in a loving way, he convinces himself. He is close to their hearts and that, at least, is better than sitting at home alone in his pad in Stockholm’s trendy Söder district. Besides, the booze and the drugs are free. He used to be culture. Now he is just a cult.

Not only can Titus see the author before him: he can sense what the man is thinking, what makes him tick, how he feels and what he is going to say from one second to the next.

What name should he give to the man on the stage? Can he win anything by diluting the fiction with a touch of reality? Titus, who is always sincere and revealingly personal on paper, decides to go the whole way. He is going to lend his own name to the man. He must. He is going to show the readers that he has the courage to put his own name to a man with a harsh and rugged soul. Titus Jensen, that is me, that is him, that is us, Titus thinks. Everything that happens to him happens to me too, in my head. I am the man on the stage. The man with the noose of fate around his neck.

Titus’ fingers hover above the keyboard. He is facing one of his most important choices ever. The idea for the book is brilliant. A tripped-out study of hubris. A meta-novel about freedom and dependence. But how do you start an immortal masterpiece?

Enter The Author, stage left.

Does he really need to write more than that? Which ‘outside’ best describes his ‘inside’? Is it important to say that the man is wearing a black shirt, black leather trousers and a black jacket? That his face is marked by years of harsh weather in the Stockholm bars? That his scalp shines with sweat under a crew cut? That he is still fairly handsome, despite all the warning bells relentlessly announcing: ‘This is an unreliable addict, this is an unreliable addict!’?

Must he describe all appearances down to the tiniest detail? Or will that destroy the experience for the reader? Doesn’t the reader have the right to conjure up his own images?

I want to create as many images as there are readers, Titus thinks. It will be just as exclusive as a film that can only be seen by a single spectator, as a painting that can only be viewed by a single person, as a symphony for just one listener.

Enter The Author, stage left.

But nevertheless, the reviewer Adrian Throwup had ripped his latest book to pieces, just because the character descriptions were so brief. Which was an absurd criticism considering the almost poetic character of the work. He had written that the ‘artistic pretensions do not reach beyond the first page of the book’. What the hell did that creep know about the stringent demands he, Titus, made of himself? Of the sky-high artistic ambitions he had? He had worked for a whole year on the book. Every single day had been filled to the brim with ‘artistic ambitions’. That bastard of a reviewer, for his part, had only worked for a couple of hours to skim the book and produced that rotten review. Yet that hatchet job had more readers than Titus’ book ever will. It wasn’t that Titus’ books didn’t sell well. But the newspaper was bought by so horribly many more. Would he ever be able to upset the balance of power?

There is no justice, Titus thinks. I want to sell a lot too. I shall sell a lot. With or without a hatchet job from that serial killer Adrian Throwup.

But isn’t Adrian Throwup a part of the public too? What would he like to read?

Setting: a Swedish summer. A prematurely aged author in his fifties enters the stage under a marquee canopy at a legendary rock festival which takes place every year in an idyllic and rural setting in Värmland, in the west of Sweden. The author’s dilated pupils look out over the expectant public. There are about 700 people in the marquee, most of them in their twenties. An eccentric poet of about twenty-five years of age with blue and orange streaks in his hair hands over a leather-bound book to the author, who is dressed for the day in black from top to toe. A rather tipsy youth right up near the edge of the stage starts to cough uncontrollably. You can clearly see the remains of a kebab on his white T-shirt. A strong smell of garlic gusts across the stage.

No, it doesn’t work, Titus thinks. That isn’t my book, isn’t my story. I can’t go on like this. I can’t allow my life to be governed by reviews that stink. I’m an artist. I do what I want. I have absolute pitch. I am the one who chooses my details, not Adrian Throwup.

Many women have said that white suits him. Women who one moment have promised him eternal love, but the next have slammed the door in his face. So who can blame him now for only wearing black?

That’s got it just right.

Now Titus Jensen is going to be unleashed.

Enter The Author, stage left.

Many women have said that white suits him. Women who one moment have promised him eternal love, but the next have slammed the door in his face. So who can blame him now for only wearing black?

A furious bass drum tears at the public’s emotions. The spotlights flash on and off to the beat.

His entrance isn’t the most glamorous that mankind has witnessed. Titus Jensen is wheeled onto the middle of the stage on a luggage trolley. There he is tipped off and left erect in front of a microphone stand. The flashing light is turned off after a while but the drumming continues. The public’s boots and decrepit trainers create a subdued roar as they stamp rhythmically on the earthen floor.

It is dark for a few seconds before a chalk-white beam of light is turned on above Titus. It is narrow and seems to nail him to the stage. Applause and whistling. Everybody knows what is going to happen.

The young and beautiful romantic poet Eddie X is the host for the evening and amid growing cheers he glides up onto the stage in baby-blue silk pyjamas. Eddie is of Latin American extraction and his body language differs quite a lot from that of northern Europeans. It is perfectly natural for him to flash his smile three inches from somebody’s face without worrying about his own or the other person’s breath.

Eddie X caresses Titus Jensen with his dark velvety gaze and gives him, first, a rather too long hug and, then, a book. He slowly pulls a strand of orange hair back from his face and puts it in its proper place with the other coloured streaks among his otherwise long and dead straight black hair. He lowers the microphone down to Titus’ level, and bends over it.