Dostoevsky as lover - by Henrik Karlsson

This is the second part of a series that began with Looking for Alice. You don’t have to read that to understand this. But it’s cute. A summer ten years ago, I spent all day every day talking to Johanna. We were 23. Her laughter was like a shotgun. She could lure out a hidden richness from the people she met: faces that would have just passed me by in the street with Johanna turned into characters in a Doestoevskian novel. When they saw us in the street, the homeless would come running. “What happened to your hair?” she’d say. “I fell asleep on the stairs of this house and when I woke up someone had cut it off, folded it beside my head!” “What!” They would tell her the most remarkable stories. As would the shopkeepers and the dog walkers and the archivists at the university library. Which was interesting, because Johanna herself was introverted and largely kept her thoughts private. But she had the same effect on me: the words that came out of my mouth when I talked to her continually

This is the second part of a series that began with Looking for Alice. You don’t have to read that to understand this. But it’s cute. A summer ten years ago, I spent all day every day talking to Johanna. We were 23. Her laughter was like a shotgun. She could lure out a hidden richness from the people she met: faces that would have just passed me by in the street with Johanna turned into characters in a Doestoevskian novel. When they saw us in the street, the homeless would come running. “What happened to your hair?” she’d say. “I fell asleep on the stairs of this house and when I woke up someo