Fabian Kastner
Fabian Kastner (born 1977) is a Swedish writer and literary critic.
Kastner caused a commotion in 2006 with his debut novel Oneirine, which turned out to be a literary experiment too far for the majority of critics: the book consisted exclusively of unattributed, pasted-together quotes from one thousand works of world literature. By doing so, Kastner wanted to discuss the issue of whether originality is possible in literature.[1] The book was later turned into a library artwork at Bonniers Konsthall, a venue for Swedish and international contemporary art in the centre of Stockholm.[2]
In The Layman: A demented comedy (2013), Kastner took as his starting point a theological essay on madness, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness)[3] by Daniel Paul Schreber, from 1903, creating from it a hallucinatory literary fantasy. Schreber was a German lawyer who spent long periods of his life in various mental hospitals, and Kastner allows the reader to enter into his paranoid universe, a claustrophobic space in which concepts such as madness and sanity are twisted, turn after turn.[4]
Kastner is a regular contributor to the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
Bibliography
- Oneirine, 2006 ISBN 91-0-010833-2
- Anachronisms/Anakronismer (ed. Sara Arrhenius, Magnus Bergh), 2007 ISBN 978-91-0-011606-4
- Lekmannen (The Layman), 2013 ISBN 978-91-0-013436-5
Notes
- ↑ New Swedish Books Annual Edition 2013, p. 13, accessed 2015-08-23
- ↑ Bonniers Konsthall - Mot tiden/Against Time, accessed 2015-08-23
- ↑ Schreber, Daniel Paul (1903). Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2000. ISBN 0-940322-20-X.
- ↑ New Swedish Books Annual Edition 2013, p. 13, accessed 2015-08-23