The Blue Mother

By Christer Kihlman

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803277695
• ISBN13: 9780803277694
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.9" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

getting started

This is Kihlman's second novel (his first one "Se upp salige" caused a scandal in Swedish-Finnish circles in 1960), and like in the first book he deals with the terrors of a family that is perfect on the outside and quite empty and bored on the inside. The complex themes of this novel might be hard to appreciate for an American audience that wants more straighforward writing and I suggest that anyone who want to know more about the background should check out Henrik Tikkanen's masterpiece "Snobs' Island" (available through zshops). In an interview last year mr. Kihlman proclaimed himself to be a happily married but totally depraved person. Much respected in Finnish literary circles, Kihlman has a very charming humour and is known for downplaying his own literary achievements. Currently he is suffering from writer's block and hasn't published any novel since "The downfall of Bladh" in the middle 80's. Well, he rarely gives interviews either, but when he does, he usually says something very worthwhile on the current state of affairs of our country. This book is considered a classic in Scandinavian litetarure, but I wonder what the Americans will make of it...

A Literary Soap Opera Bombshell

The Blue Mother centers around the recollections of two brothers. Man, are these two screwed up fellas! Benno is a mentally ill basket case who's institutionalized for an attempted suicide due to several bizarre homosexual encounters. His brother Raf may be more intelligently aware, but he's a psycological basket-case as well as alcoholic & marital cheat. The book has a soap opera-like theme to it, but Kihlman is a brilliant writer and the novel is hallucinatorily surreal. Here's another amazing writer virtually unknown to American readers & it's a shame. He's a genius.