Goddag Mælkevej by Leif Ahm

A very thin cup of tea!

Rating 1 out of 10

I had to discipline myself to read through this book, it was not exactly painful but quite boring. I am the kind of person who always finnish reading a book I have started on. I wonder why? Anyway this book is written in the early 60's. A time when the greatest curse in second half 20.th century litterature arose. That is magical realism! So the book is about a young man and wimen. The book changes between passages which are described realistically, they are just ordinary scenes from his life, like riding the train, going to an examination at the highschool, meeting a girl at a bar, etc. Interspersed in this plain reality is then magical realism scenes, for example the young man is sailing in a boat on a lake, then he jumps into the water and it turns out to be milk. His girlfriend becomes a moviestar, he meets the president of the milkyway and so on. The book is poetic in nature, it has some beauty, lightness and innocense about it. It's written in a time, 1962, when everything was breaking up in northern Europe, the youth revolt was soon to sweep the western world. So in the young litterature at the time they wanted to do something new, so it became fashion to blow out some magical realism, trying to sophisticate their stale accounts. Also the book desribes sex, masturbation and even a visit to the toilet, things which must have appeared a little chocking to the elder generation at the time. But it is not a good read, it seems like the book is lacking a spine, a plot.