Michael Glover

Education via the gymnasium

issue 18 January 2003

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.

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