Book review: Avsminkat about a dad's deadly life choice

Eric rosén's father was twenty-one when he discovered amphetamines. He takes a long nocturnal walk out on the island of Djurgården, filled with the joy of a great night good luck. ”He decides that night that this is his music, this is the meaning of life and he can consider himself lucky that got the discover it'.

the Episode is taken from Eric rosén's autobiographical book, ”I regret with all my heart it is there that I may have done”. Despite the fact that the father drogande will characterize the whole of his own life moraliserar he does not, but follows his father, Sven all the way, through the imprisonment of eight years for a manslaughter he did not even remember, until the predictable death in leverkoma in a hospital bed.

a straight story about growing up with a drogande father and a mother who is driven into burnout and depression. Maybe hanging it up, even if the parents have been divorced since he was a year old. The father stops in a cocktail of controlled drugs was morning, the mother is long teetotaler. Their relationship is characterized after the divorce by mutual respect. But the book revolves around the father and the child. Rosén shows all other persons duly into account, both siblings and old friends. He wants above all to understand the multifaceted, destructive and sometimes very happy fadersrelation that shaped his life. It goes a long way.

the Ties between the troubled father out of a stable överklassbakgrund, educated and förtidspensionerad, and both his sons to grow up in nyfattigdom is all the time strong. Rosen says in an idyllic location on bike rides and trips to the lake with a peaceful and safe father, high on dolozene, stesolid, sobril and little else. It is dad's ”medications”. It is probably thanks to the mother that Eric and his brother manage to maintain a good contact with his father – the same mother who one day goes into the wall because of the large sole responsibility, demanding work and the continually bad economy.

the love between father and son is, after all, a contingent of loyalty. Dad's ”life project”, to find the only true happiness in pillerburken, must not and can not be challenged. Rosén moraliserar't give a damn, ”Dad feel love for their close, but he never feel any love for life... Had he been himself without being a junkie? I doubt it.” He spares neither himself in the text and reported its strulighet in adolescence, where poverty sets the framework for the life, where the risk to be sucked in right-wing extremism is a reality, and where the early stages children are constantly testing their lethality and destructiveness. (Twenty-three years older than Rosén hisnar, I recognize so much, as if nothing changed: still a young generation is rising into the arena to be slaughtered, as Francois Mauriac said.) Rosén is upfront that he is testing about the same drugs as his father – without giving any lingering allure, or exemption. Himself, he wants something else and more.

In the centre of the depiction is the actual slaying. Sven has after a suicide attempt gone on to enroll in a twelve-step program. Nykterheten does not last long, but at the Kolmården residential care, he becomes friend with the Stig. They keep in touch, even if both may return. But when Sven visting Path it ends up very bad. A few days later finds the Path on his kitchen floor with forty stab wounds in the body. Sven can't remember anything at all – even if his footprint can be found in the intorkade the blood.

When that happens, Eric Rosén seventeen years old and has just moved to Uppsala in order to read medialinjen in high school, and it is probably no exaggeration to say that what has happened pushes the son out of the track again. Soon, he has dropped out of the training. He spends a lot of time, too much, to wonder whether the father in spite of everything it's still not innocent. He has all of the drugs, despite never previously shown any aggressive tendencies.

the Text is deviously simple, but captures something very complex and multilayered: true love between father and son that one must be free from in order to live.

loyal, loyal. He corresponds with his father in prison, and in the long quotations we also get a good picture of Sven rosén's personality: funny, likable, just self ironic, well-read and constantly self-pitying. And without lifting a single pointer succeeds, the text is becoming increasingly clear to show how insidious this – real – love is. Why do the young Eric always from the trail that leads to where he wants, to writing as a profession (where he finally arrives)? He broods over the class, heritage and environment. Slowly distancing himself from what must be described as a classic co-dependent.

There is a moment of black and skuldbelagd freedom towards the end of the book, when the father after his call to borrow money. He has never done before. And where the shortcomings it once and for all. ”That was no longer my dad who called... it was just the drug addict as anything that happened to get my number”. Soon Sven's death.

Yes, this is a strong and straight story. The text is deviously simple, but captures something very complex and multilayered: true love between father and son that one must be free from in order to live. The story is also a story about Sweden, about the poverty we never liberated us from. And a loving minnesporträtt of the father. But a perfect avsminkat such.

Eric Rosén: It took me several years to understand that my father was guilty of murder