<—— Previous page The official web site for Mare Kandre
 

In Xavier the main character Xavier catches a glimpse of a woman and becomes obsessed with her. He searches desperately for her. He arrives at an apartment building where he searches room after room. The house is insurveyable, next to Kafka-like in its nightmarish labyrinthical character. The people Xavier meets with on the different apartment floors are strongly stylized: a confused young man who is about to hang himself, a coarse-limbed worker, a prostitute and a few others. They are there as catalysts for Xavier’s increasingly shattered experience, they rarely grow in their own right as characters. Typically Xavier also never finds his way back to the apartments, which emphasizes that his wandering also can be interpreted as an inner such.
 
In all essentials ”Xavier” is an entirely convincing novel which downright radiates with Mare Kandre’s unmistakable luminosity and suggestion power, stylistically and in terms of ideas.
  Mare Kandre passed away on March 24th 2005, grieved not only by her family (a son of eleven, a brother and parents) but indeed also by numerous devoted readers and writer colleagues. As her publisher, Hans Isaksson, Bonniers, puts it ”she was a writer who lived for her writing. She wrote faster than we could publish. She had lots of writing remaining”.
 
Tomas Götselius in Dagens Nyheter remembers Mare Kandre as the maybe only genuine literary wonder child of the 1980ies.

NOTES (excerpt)

 30. Mare Kandre: Aliide, Aliide
      (Bonniers, Stockholm 1991), pp. 25–6. (Al)
 31. Marie Kennedy: ’Mare Kandre ­ tror på
       orden som berusar’ (’Mare Kandre: She
       believes in the Words that Intoxicate).
       [Interview]. Göteborgs-Posten Aveny,
       3-9 July, 1992.
 
32. Gunilla Bjärsdal: Review of Mare Kandre:
       Bebådelsen, Bonniers litterära magasin,
       
vol. 56, 1987, No. 1, p.62
 33. Mare Kandre: Bübins unge
       (Bonniers, Stockholm 1987), p. 74.
 34. Ibid., p 110.
 35. Al, pp. 185-6.
 36. Ibid. p 110
 37. Ibid., p. 225.

 

   

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