Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) – especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached the precarious age of 53, he met a rather threatening, gleamingly muscle-bound skinhead in a gym who changed his life. No, he didn’t fall in love with the man. He fell in love with the idea – and the ideals – of body-building.
The skinhead was himself a body-builder – every last, well defined pectoral testified to that fact. Sven, being a sedentary writer, had always pooh-poohed the whole thing – how vain, ridiculous, self-serving! What is more, body-building had always seemed to him to represent aggressive virility. Interesting, quasi-philosophical conversations (all reported here) ensued in the gym. The upshot was that Sven decided to give it (them) a flex. He became hooked. Body-building, he discovered, enabled him to come to terms with his childhood. It also unlocked the hitherto barred door to a rich new dream-life.
This brief, aphoristic autobiographical essay leads us gently through that conversion experience. It teaches us to care, perhaps for the first time, about the fact and the position of our anterior deltoids. Sad to say though, there is a slightly odoriferous miasma of bogusness which hovers above parts of the enterprise. Why? Because some of the revelations seem, to put it mildly, faintly disappointing. Consider, for example, that exciting unlocking of Sven’s dream-life. What was the first of those dreams? The vision consisted of a sudden and all-engrossing awareness of an open cheese sandwich.
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