Sigrid RausingAnmeldelser

A couple of haunting pieces from Cambodia. Recurring notes on notes, music qua music, that is lost on me.

Fine little dollops. Took a long while to get through, but they were fine.

I read them all but the first, which was so heavily accented that I couldn't make sense of it.

Definitive Narratives of Escape

Reproducing Paul discusses loss of a sibling & figuring out parenting

For the Love of Losing - professional gambling, and wanting to lose

What it Promised - photo essay of Black Americans Great Migration & remnants, in Syracuse NY

Deaf Body - Performance of Johnnie Ray

Long, Too Long America - photo essay of 1990 road trip.

Through the Smoke - photo essay of Black poet giving reading at Plantation Museum, boy's fingerprint on brick & cast out belongings

Sibling issue.

Removing younger brother from life support. Plastic Mothers, with adult sisters and mother trading drinks and men. Brother from Sudan that ended up in prison in UK. Swedish science family with multiple half siblings from famous father's affairs. Ray and her sisters.

Read on flight to Amsterdam. Memorable reporting from the Ukraine. There is also a haunting photo essay from Baghdad theme parks.

Solid offering, non-fiction strolling and living around UK nuclear reactor complex, Haiti afterhours underworlds, similar for Senegal and a sardine fish house, visiting Florida retiree parents. Better than expected short fiction on growing up classmate of the queen, a chess club upset

I think this is the most disinterested I've been in a Granta. I actively disliked a couple of the essays (no need to name them). The issue earns the two stars only by closing with _Beirut Fragments, 2021_, which is outstanding and why I continue to look forward to Granta mail day.

I had no idea who the Rausings were. I looked them up and discovered they are one of the wealthiest families in Britain. Drug addiction knows no social boundaries. This heartbreaking memoir reveals the ugly, despairing face of how addiction and loss tears at the whole family and not just the addicts themselves. Rausing's writing is both vivid and haunting.

Excellent follow up to the last flat issue.

Series of photos between granddaughter, mother, and grandmother. Tides, following woman running from everything at beachfront hostel. The Repeat Room was weird, sequestered jury or the lottery? Last Chance in Whitefish, used to listen to his podcast, broken down Montana sculptor, should have shot him. Finally, Fire and Ice is just a gut punch about the last days of Barry Lopez. Picked up his final Horizon & just started. So much loss.

Gave up close to the end. None of these are better than what I would otherwise be reading.

The guy locked up in the space capsule will stick with me. Nothing else.

Some pieces that stand out
The Stinky Ocean on UK's industrial past - Photo essay from the Colville Reservation. When the Cholera Came the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide. Essay from Northern Italy Corona outbreak. The dramatic impacts of bad dad in My Phantoms.

Fantastic issue. The ard on an Australian station rethinking Ag. The following story from a neighboring Ngarigo, talking his country and the trees holding up the sky is superb. Root fungi relationships. Mexican cloud forests. The last salmon fishers in UK. The collapse of vultures in India. Bird flight paths. Each chapter hits home.

Solid volume, the first to actively recount our current time of quarantine.

I especially enjoyed the title story Still Life, The Temptation of St Anthony, and the runaway dog Clementine/Carmelilta.

3.5, really...but a bump for the pictures.


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Highlights -
The Station J Robert Lennon - creepy mysterious observer job
Hair - Young woman cuts hair for wig for new boyfriend's mom
Diminishing Returns - Mapping moving world in rural Africa
Border Documents - Borderlands photo essay
The Lake - Border fresh water lakes from Albania/Italy

I struggled with this issue, skipping two long stories that I declined to invest in - a gothic horror story and an absurdist tale (The Story of Anya).

'Miss Bristol's Front Porch' was good, 'The Second Career of Michael Riegels' was outstanding.

It read like a storyline from the latest thriller. In a £70 million pound mansion in the plushest part of London, in a drug den sealed with duct tape, human remains were found covered by a tarpaulin and a couple of flat screen TVs. The staff were told not to enter the room and with the discretion that the ultra-rich demand, none thought to question the reason why, nor disobey. This wasn't a bestseller though; it was real life. The remains were the body of Eva Rausing, wife of Hans Kristian Rausing, heir to the multi-billion Tetra Pak fortune. The couple had long been addicted to Class A drugs and had often been in the newspapers with the journeys in and out of rehab. Her death of a heart problem had not been ignored by Hans, but his drug-addled state caused him to take actions that a person in normal circumstances would not have done.

Watching Hans and his Eva's lives implode was Han's sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing. She hadn't really paid attention when he first had become addicted to drugs in his twenties but saw them both relapse after being married for seven happy years. As the drug use spiralled out of control again they drifted in and out of rehab, she took to writing persuasive letters and emails trying to help them with the predicaments. This supportive help failed, but after taking advice she became the legal custodian of their four children, something that Eva strongly objected to claiming that Sigrid wanted the extra children for herself, something that she rebuts in the book.

It is a very personal and open memoir, with stories of her childhood growing up in Sweden and the small pleasures of life that she recalls in snippets. The core theme of the book though is addiction, and how an individual can become so absorbed that the neglect friends, family and themselves. She asks the question how do you help someone with an addiction? Especially if they really don't want to be helped at all, how the twelve step process does work, but after someone has relapsed and entered rehab again, it is easy to repeat the things that those running the centres want to hear, with no real commitment to their meaning or purpose. There are deeper questions too about where the line is where someone is knowing what they are doing and the point where that stops because of the addiction and mental capacity.

It is not an easy read subject wise, thankfully Rausing's sparse but beautiful writing helps makes this an essential read. She is brutally honest about her own life and the failures in helping Hans and Eva, but also now understands the limits of what she could actually do at the time. She doesn't and cannot provide the answers of where to go to get the help that people need, but does highlight how little is understood about addiction and how society can tackle the pain and anguish it causes.

Maly Trostinets - opening essay on finding massacre site of author's grandparents outside of Minsk.

On Being French and Chinese - that.

On the Island of the Black River - on being exiled to far Siberia.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs.
--Emily Dickinson

Mayhem is a powerful meditation on addiction, on how it maims not only the addict but also his or her family. With this reflective, literary, and allusive memoir, Rausing attempts to wrest the highly publicized and lurid narrative of her billionaire/philanthropist brother (Hans) and sister-in-law (Eva)’s long spiral into heroin and cocaine addiction from a media that reveled in splashing the sensational details of the case across newspaper pages. Rausing has been denounced—“condemned”, in fact—by the Kemenys, her sister-in-law’s family. The family regards her decision to publish a memoir as selfish. For them, it is a painful and unnecessary resurrection of a story that ought to have been laid to rest. The Kemenys are incensed at what they perceive to be a misrepresentation of their daughter and sister. They blame Rausing’s taking custody of Eva’s children for Eva’s despair and death.

I feel for the Kemeny family and understand why its members would be opposed to seeing this sad story brought back for viewing. At the same time, I do not feel that Sigrid Rausing “trashed” her sister-in-law in any way. Her treatment of Eva is sensitive and sympathetic. No doubt the Kemeny family members have their own understanding of what occurred, but they should not fear that Eva is represented in an insensitive or unsympathetic way in Rausing’s book. Furthermore, I do not see how anyone could argue that it was appropriate for Eva’s four children to remain with her and her husband. Yes, addicts love their children, but their relationship with the addictive substance is stronger than anything else. Addicts, including alcoholics, cannot parent. They are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable to do so.

Because of its literary allusions, Mayhem has been criticized as “pretentious”. I didn’t find it so. For me, it represents an effort to make sense of what happened, but it is also a powerful book of mourning. It offers something valuable to the families of others who have also clung to the wreckage left by addiction.

This was a fun one, I remember many of the pieces from the first time 'round. Too many great ones to list.

One of the best Granta's for some years, especially the pieces by Paul Dalla Rose, Lisa Wells, Leni Zumas and Tara Isabella Burton

Standouts include interview with Amos Oz about living on a kibbutz; Greedy Sleep, about sleep eating on Ambien as HIV kills your partner; Breaking your Holy Bone (lower back) and the haunting of old injuries.

#1 with a bullet: Yokosuka Blue Line, on being lost and drunk on Tokyo's trains in being riding on a submarine (!!!) - ordered Steven Dunn's book as a result.

The theme of "Ghosts" doesn't really hang together; there are some memoirs yes, but not many ghosts, literal or metaphorical. Still, the pieces by Bernard Cooper (on sleep eating), Sheila Heti (imagining Albert Speer although whether we need another version Speer is doubtful) and Sandra Newman with extracts of her new novel, The Heavens, are highlights½

In fact one of the best Granta's for many years in my opinion. A,N Homes' short story of romance and self loathing at the Holocaust survivors conference manages to be touching, hilarious and provactive without causing offence. Charles Glass' reportage from Palmyra is heart breaking. Jason Cowley's description of his childhood in Harlow New Town is enlightening, and David Flusfelder's accounts of the few surviving specialty shops (and their owners) in London, should have been considerably longer. All in all a very engaging edition½