A pretty woman once told me to read Strindberg, so I read Strindberg. Sometimes that’s all it takes. She was at the time reading “Ensam”, stolen from her father’s book collection if I remember correctly. Ensam or “Lonely”, sometimes wrongly translated as “alone”, describes August Strindberg’s “Inferno crisis”. A period of about a year in which the author decides to rid himself of his friends and live life in solitude. He hopes to achieve mental independence, as he feels that living together with other people forces a man to be untrue.It has later been said that perhaps the author experienced psychotic episodes in this period of his life. The book is, as my friend probably didn’t know at the time, part of a series that Strindberg wrote, starting with “Son of a servant” and ending with “Lonely”. So I later realised I started at the end. I don’t know if she ever read any other works of Strindberg, ‘but I bet she’d like “Married”.
While walking past a flee market recently I saw a copy of August Strindberg’s “Married ” lying around at one of the stalls. It had just started to rain and the unattended book fell victim to the drizzle. The scene pained me, while I remembered reading that other Strindberg book so long ago. So I bought it, from a friendly salesman with a big moustache, who took half of the price, before I even went for my wallet.
Most of the people I meet these days wouldn’t be able to tell you who August Strindberg is, but those that do usually tend to believe he hated women. I’m not so sure. In this particular book Strindberg describes some very interesting problems in marriages. Strindberg doesn’t so much seem to hate women as such, but the position that “cultured” women have taken or have been forced to take, in marriage. That of a lady sitting at home, letting others take care of the children and the household and spending the husband’s hard earned money. He seems to support the idea of women emancipation, if only so that enslaved men will be freed as well.
Above all the stories are funny and recogniseable even in this day and age. The beautiful thing with these kind of books is that when you find one on a flee market, the price has gone down, the cover may be ripped or colored, but the stories inside are still the same and bring the same enjoyment as they did years ago, if not more.
