Karin Johannisson’s Melancholy Rooms (Melankoliska rum, Albert Bonniers Förlag) makes for engaging and captivating reading. In Melancholy Rooms Karin Johannisson investigates how melancholy speaks and how this speech is influenced by time and space. It is an examination of the condition’s historical forms, but when Johannisson considers melancholy from an historical point of view, it also becomes a contemporary commentary. Today the concept of depression covers virtually every kind of darkness. By taking the long perspective she shows how the register of emotions has varied, but also how it has been possible to accommodate these dark feelings within the normal framework. The more our vulnerability is designated with diagnostic names, the more we risk shrinking normality.

 

“Karin Johannisson´s text is however the pure and simple cure for depression. It rather evokes manic euphoria.”

Dagens Nyheter

 

“Johannisson´s text is an example of science at its best, as seminal force of art.”

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