Göransson, Johannes: The New Quarantine

Inside the Castle, paperback

Publication Date: April 10, 2023

Publisher Marketing: Sara Tuss Efrik reads Johannes Göransson. She decodes a farce of masculinity, a wounded lover's tragedy, a prison cell of language. Using her knowledge of the occult and pornography, Sara Tuss reads letters that may belong to Shirley Temple and letters that may belong to Louise Bourgeois and letters that may belong to a woman who doesn't belong at all. She finds legs that belong to a spiderlike girl and a confusing sorrow she can't erase. She tries to understand the letters. Is he stuck in the pigsty with all those screaming animals? Can a torso be damaged by loneliness? Is this why he keeps transforming himself into something like an uncle? You cannot write yourself free; you can only write yourself even more unfree. That's what she told him, the woman who does not belong at all. She imagines that she's writing violence, a female violence, but she has to take a shortcut, has to use the language of male violence to be able to write the female violence. In that moment when she finally describes her own face, she will bleed. But she's not there yet. She has not yet described her own violence, but she will. She has to reach the end of the quarantine. The word quarantine comes via the French quarantaine from the Italian expression quarantena, which means a forty-day period. Sara Tuss has written the definition on a wall in her room. On the same wall she has written: Come but don't save me. All these phrases you have gathered: this is a collection of dead lovers or dead children. Your burning horse gallops away from you, the blood dries on the wall. It's a tragic universe of possessions and stalkers. Welcome home, Johannes. Bury yourself in your unwritten novels. Everything is set. Now Sara Tuss Efrik will abandon her decoding games and lock herself in Johannes Göransson's quarantine.