M Sarki

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/81982040134/the-red-mist-by-johan-borgen

It is quite possible that this slender novel could rank as another five-star wonder, a masterpiece in its incessant ranting, insanely versed but controlled, and presented as a sometimes fitful digression in regards to the nervous character always present on the page. But I am not sure. Fact is, I liked the book very much and I am more than willing to rate it four stars with the idea that I may in time generously raise it as rightfully high as his most obvious obsession the author called The Column of Freedom.

The entire reading experience for me was presented as a question to determine some type of answer for. And for me, and almost comforting in its realization, The Red Mist became the horror of one’s own life that we are attempting to escape or run away from.

… always there must be something happening for people without knowledge or perspectives, people on the run from what they know to something they don’t wish to know.

Johan Borgen’s analogy regarding the quote mentioned above is to row a boat backwards to catastrophe.

To flee is not to create, it is to anticipate change, from fear of what must come. And what must come is the past, the thing that bobs up behind layers, that vanished once, or nearly vanished, that bobs up again with a letter, a thought, a smell. Who can say that a flight can stop, or a fall — that it can stop? The doomed, the absurdly unliving — they’re no longer my friends, they’re deserting me in their sphere.

Many years ago as a small boy I had, perhaps like many others but unbeknownst to me, a four-pack of my own personal Play Dough and wanted not only to impress but to find another someone, perhaps and to be honest, probably a female, in which to play with. But I was not willing under any circumstance to part or sacrifice all four containers of my precious colored dough and so opted to only bring out with me the red. I bring this memory up because while reading this book I profoundly surmised this voice, or even this set of voices, was telling me that freedom meant being “so high that you can see far below that your liberation is red.” And that I admit was a bit weird and something I cannot, nor wish to, explain.

In my feeble attempt at providing for you a nutshell, The Red Mist is a story featuring Goldilocks and Herman, and a monstrously tall and hideous Column of Freedom. But be prepared for an insane account of a past murder, a vigorous dunking, and a hidden corpse. As well as a mental illness misused and untreated. And doctors possibly as sick as the patients they treated. Pages and pages of an obsessional monologue ranting and raving in its lunacy. A book so convincing that it almost takes one to know one, if you know what I mean.