- Published: 23/01/2003
- ISBN: 9781862075726
- 136x20mm
- 176 pages
Bench Press
Sven Lindqvist
Translated by Sarah Death
In the late 1980s, Sven Lindqvist fell into conversation with an evangelical bodybuilder while relaxing in the sauna after his weekly swim. The conversation challenged Lindqvist’s view of the sport as macho and vain and individualistic and led to his first attendance at the local gym. In Bench Press, Lindqvist takes us through his own journey in the gym, but also tells us the entertaining and bizarre history of bodybuilding and meditates on what its increased popularity tells us about contemporary society.
£8.99
A book which paints a whole life from an entirely unexpected angle, and paints it beautifully, cleverly, true
The Scotsman
A concise, modern and thought-provoking vignette of one man and his physicality
Big Issue
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Sven Lindqvist on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
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Sven Lindqvist
Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.