Fabian Kastner (born 1977) is a Swedish writer and literary critic.
Kastner caused a commotion in 2006 with his debut novel Oneirine, which turned out to be a literary experiment too far for the majority of critics: the book consisted exclusively of unattributed, pasted-together quotes from one thousand works of world literature. By doing so, Kastner wanted to discuss the issue of whether originality is possible in literature.[1] [2] The book was later turned into a library artwork at Bonniers Konsthall, a venue for Swedish and international contemporary art in the centre of Stockholm.[3]
In Lekmannen ("The Layman", 2013), Kastner took as his starting point a theological essay on madness, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness)[4] by Daniel Paul Schreber, from 1903, creating from it a hallucinatory literary fantasy. Schreber was a German lawyer who spent long periods of his life in various mental hospitals, and Kastner allows the reader to enter into his paranoid universe, a claustrophobic space in which concepts such as madness and sanity are twisted, turn after turn.[5]
In 2017, Kastner returned to the gallery space of Bonniers Konsthall to write a book from start to finish in twenty-four hours.[6] The resulting novella, Archive of the Average Swede, was published in English as the fourth title of Cabinet Books’ experimental “24-Hour Book” series. The book considers a project initiated by Sweden’s National Archive in the early 1980s designed to fully record the life of a typical citizen. The selected citizen, however, turned out to be a very different figure than what the archive had hoped for.[7]
Kastner is a regular contributor to the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.