Friday, May 24, 2019

Reviews of Far Beyond The Limit

Here are some quotes from reviews of my fifth collection of erotic short stories, Långt över gränsen/Far Beyond The Limit (the title refers back to my fourth collection, from 2015: Över gränsen/Past The Limit):

Bernur writes on April 5th:

"… the dark is often contrasted against the light. Not so that it becomes 'comic porn', but the high-pitched expression in some way removes the extremes in what otherwise could have become totally tasteless ('the devil in mr Jones' is a funny euphemism). It has a carnivalesque and partly anarchistic vein, which Edenborg happily empties to the last drop [---] There is an inventiveness and an ingenuity that dazzle, with gender-transcending forms and where the variation moves from angels to squids, and more."

Thomas Almqvist in Opulens, April 9th:

"Everything takes place on the vertiginous rim of the abyss, where the Black Hole of Angst grows, when the fear multiplies. Everyone sleeps with everyone in these stories, women and men, young and old. He is she and she is he. Everyone is a subject and noone is an object or a victim. This is true eroticism in MeToo's Sweden"

"Sexuality is fashioned with an glowing heat, open-minded and without prejudice, but also often with bits of absurdism and black humor. Edenborg expresses passion, reposal and possession with the same strong intensity."

Margit Richert in Aftonbladet, April 23th:

"I enjoy myself richly when I read some of the stories. Edenborg suffers from a certain entertainer's disease: partly it's both too high-pitched and too 'pilsnerfilm'-like ["pilsnerfilm" being the swedish name for a genre of pretty lame, vulgar film comedies from the 30-ies ---] But the will is good, and when Edenborg forgets his own wittiness it becomes surprisingly beautiful, as in the story "The Other", where an odd couple join each other in a way which are every intercourse's purpose and idea. It is tender, in the best meaning of the word."

Terese Eriksson in Svenska Dagbladet, May 31th:

"Carl-Michael Edenborg, in his short story collection "Far Beyond The Limit", has set out to let the imagination challenge all kinds of limitations and boundaries. And on 13 short stories, of varying length and quality, he is able to break a lot of taboos. The collection encompasses widely different sexual contexts, from invading tentacles that curl up from floor wells to celestial sex while travelling with angel wings. The incest taboo shows up in various designs, clearly a challenge of said boundaries, but the collection is characterized as much by the fact that it moves freely between genres and environments; Both the folk tale and the history book get a new touch here. [---] Can everything that man thinks and feels, all that she fantasizes about, be embodied in art and literature? Carl-Michael Edenborg moves far out into the paws of the imagination, and thus puts the question at his head. He should have an affair for that. Freedom is defended when its ultimate limits are tried."

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