Power and Rebel
Spent the day with Becca in Munich yesterday. One of those rare days where everything just clicks—blue sky, no wind, that particular kind of peace you don’t really think about until it’s gone. We headed out on the U-Bahn to check out her new school, looked it over properly. No one minded that we were poking around. Back into the city after that. Pizza Hut for lunch, then Gravis to look at MacBooks, some ridiculous raspberry-tea-whatever from Starbucks that tasted cloyingly sweet—they were out of lemon-mango. We hit Saturn because she’s thinking about getting a laptop, so I wandered through the notebooks, glanced at the CDs and DVDs. Then we stepped back outside and the sky had just gone. Dark blue to dark gray in maybe five minutes. This unsettling wind tearing through the shopping street, rain on your skin before your brain even registers it’s raining. We ducked into Hugendubel, and that’s where I finally grabbed the book I’d been wanting: Power and Rebel
by Matias Faldbakken, this Norwegian writer.
The premise sounds straightforward. Two men in this crumbling society—one’s a corporate consultant, uptight, ambitious in all the ways that damages you. The other’s called Rebel, and he hates everything, including himself, purely cynical. They’re living in this culture obsessed with youth and logos and bodies and sex, the whole apparatus of corporate desire. They’re after some idea of what individual freedom even means in the 21st century. I’m only a handful of pages in but it’s already dark. Teenage girls are part of it. Mein Kampf gets quoted. The book came out here in punk-style editions, black and white, but the original has this old German typeface that looks uncomfortably close to Third Reich design. Fair warning: read the first three pages. If you’re not completely disgusted by then, you’ll probably want to keep going.
We made it home mostly dry, though the Munich train station was grim with the sky completely black and the thunder sounding like air raids.