Bench Press by Sven Lindqvist

Author:Sven Lindqvist [Lindqvist, Sven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847086860
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

38

In the desert there are clumps of grass with roots 80 kilometres long.

39

The camel spider produces his sperm in a special capsule so it doesn’t dry out before its job of fertilization is done.

40

‘Beware the nonentity! The hopeless nonentity!’

All my life I’ve heard that warning cry from the depths of the well of childhood. But I didn’t know where it was coming from until I happened to be sitting here browsing through some early Swedish body-building books and suddenly came across ‘Letter to a Boy’: ‘Look at your fellow human beings! At that one on the street corner … Is that how you want to live? Is that where you want to end up? No! Beware the hopeless nonentity! Break free from your life of routine. Build yourself up!’

That’s what it says in Allan Hagberg’s Vitality and Strength, 1937, one of the first ‘real’ books I borrowed from the branch library in Älvsjö. I recognize every single picture, every letter of the alphabet in that book, the sparse, rounded, 1930s typography and the chunky headings:

Your lifestyle is wrong!

There is a choice and a way!

Do you want to be strong?

Getting started is worst.

Do not become a pedant.

Yet be strict.

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