Eventide by Therese Bohman

Author:Therese Bohman [Bohman, Therese]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2018-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

She had mentoring sessions with two students the following day. The first was Olof Bodin, whose name always made her picture an elderly gentleman, but Olof was around thirty, tall and slim, screwing up his eyes as he peered through his glasses. He was the editor of Notos, an arts journal that hadn’t created much of a stir, but usually attracted a modicum of attention when a new edition was published and the daily papers needed a paragraph or two. She knew two young female poets helped out with the editing. From the very first time they met, Olof had made it clear that she had a standing invitation to get involved in Notos, which she had yet to take up. However, she liked to hear him talk about his work on the journal, because he always did so with an enthusiasm that he seemed to expect her to share, and she found that touching.

Olof was undertaking a reception study of Jim Månsson, the Swedish postmodernist who was both acclaimed and beloved during the 1980s. He had died of an overdose and was now regarded as something of a genius who had passed away far too young. The initial proposal had focused on romantic tendencies in Månsson’s work, which was presumably why Olof had been allocated to her, but he had soon changed his mind, citing a lack of a solid base on which to build, and instead had decided on a basic reception study, which was one of the most boring things Karolina could imagine.

She realized he was saying something about Žižek; she had lost concentration completely. Then she grasped that he was actually talking about a piece he was working on for Notos. He looked pleased as he explained that it was going to be a themed issue on psychoanalysis.

“Cool,” she murmured, although she knew perfectly well that it was the wrong word, because Notos wasn’t supposed to be cool.

Olof Bodin was the perfect representative of an attitude that was becoming increasingly common, in her opinion: undergraduate and postgraduate students who treated theories as truths rather than theories, and who found theories about art more interesting than the art itself. Which annoyed her. If she had had any say, her subject would still have been called the history of art, and she would have insisted that everyone who set foot in the department produce an essay in which they wrote in detail about a historical work of their choice, explaining exactly why they thought it was interesting or good or significant, or poor and overrated for that matter, anything, just as long as they expressed some kind of feeling for the work itself and not just the theories surrounding it.

“Con amore!” one of the professors who had taught the foundation course when she was a student had impressed upon them: with love, from the heart, that was the best basis for research, just as it was for anyone contemplating marriage.

“So what do you think of Jim Månsson?” she said abruptly.

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