Scatterbrainy

Maja Lundgren's book "Mosquitoes and Tigres" had been following me around for years.

Wanting read, but always ending up hidden among the rest of the appealing friends in the book shelf.

When published, it was caused quite a stir among Swedish authors,  unshamedly revealing intimate details about a number of famous intellectuals and their real or invented harassments of the author.

The cover displays Perseus presenting the head of Medusa, the Italian connotations that initially drew me in.

The back promises a blur of reality and fiction and an authontic depiction of the Neapolitan camorra.

But Lundgren's book is more than anything a personal vendetta, vindication and resentment.

Plagued by her chauvinistic male colleagues who both conspire against her and try to seduce her,

Lundgren flees to Naples to write a book.

Perhaps she thinks the obvious and open aggression and violece will free her.

It is the subtle acts of jealousy, narcissism and misoginy inte the intellectual circles she flees.

It reminds me of Hélène Cixous :

although we want to keep its awful treasure, its proof, its transfiguration.

Is this the case of Lundgren?

Even in the Spanish Quarters of Naples,surrounded by camorristi, corrupted police and desperate beauty,

she cannot escape the intrusive advances of her superior back in Sweden.

The reader cannot tell whether she is paranoid and megalomaniac (and neither can she),

or if one of Sweden's major newspapers are printing personal messages for her.

And Lundgren is maintaining the horror.

Without any real processing, she dwells on the past until it is almost untolerable to the reader.

But in between the shifts between the smug cultural spheres and the harsh neapolitan streets,

there is sharp insight, self-criticism and questioning of her mind's reliability.

Although Lundgren sees herself on the left end of the political spectra, she hates the popmpous leftist.

Calls them decadent poseurs, while she struggles hard to belong among them.

Resentment and condescendence are themes reoccuring throughout this 500-page book.

Maja Lundgren resents the establishment more than anything,

despises the Italian journalists seeking to make sense of faidas and the camorra-reality.

Most of all she hates people trying to understand Naples and its complexity and brutality,

even though her book is an attempt to do just that.

To me, the contradictions or Italy are manifested in each page of Lundgren's book.

Because it is a mirror of the intrinsic contradictions within the author herself,

or simply because that the destiny of every story describing Italy.

Inevitably.