Books by Lars Gustafsson
The Tale of a Dog: Novel
by Tom Geddes, Lars Gustafsson
The judge and protagonist of this roman noir is Erwin Caldwell. The year is 1992, and the rivers in and around rain-soaked Austin are flooding their banks. The life of the city is thrown into confusion, and Judge Caldwell, a comfortably married man for thirty years, has an affair with the owner of a small bookstore. His stepdaughter returns home after being denied tenure at Harvard, her little boy in tow, and Judge Caldwell learns of the death of drowning of the Dutch philosopher-semanticist Jan van de Rouwers, revered by a generation of Texas university students. Murder or suicide? Van de Rouwers has been discovered to have been not a World War II Resistance fighter as supposed, but a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite apologist. Caldwell, who is Jewish, ponders the disconcerting turns of history and life in Texas. And what does this all have to do with a dog? Thereby hangs the tale...
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The Death of a Beekeeper: Novel
The celebrated Swedish author's American debut, The Death of a Beekeeper is a gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he has cancer and will not live through spring. Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper, is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. Westin has refused to surrender the time left him to the impersonation of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. "I took little walks and noticed that in the last months the pain had actually colored the landscape in a peculiar way. Here and there is a tree where it really hurt, here and there is a fence against whose post I struck my hand in passing." His inner landscape is also re-forming: "This constant concern with an indefinite dangerous secret in one’s own body, this feeling that some dramatic change is taking place, without one’s being able to have any clarity about what really is... reminds me of prepuberty. I even recognize this gentle feeling of shame again." The relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychic detachment, rendering his survival "a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high that no one exists who can practice it.” Yet he insists, "We begin again. We never give up."
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Elegies and Other Poems
by Lars Gustafsson, Christopher Middleton
A companion volume to Gustfasson's popular collection, The Stillness of the World before Bach (New Directions, 1988). Lars Gustafsson is one of Sweden's leading and most prolific men of letters; a poet, philosopher, and fiction writer with dozens of books to his credit since his literary debut, at the age of twenty, in 1956. Although known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels, Gustafsson is nevertheless one of the most frequently translated of contemporary Swedish poets. Elegies and Other Poems is a companion volume to The Stillness of the World before Bach (New Directions, 1988). As in that earlier volume, editor Christopher Middleton has made his selection from several of the poet's books and included his own translations as well as those of others, Yvonne Sandstroem, Bill Brookshire, and Philip Martin. Readers of Gustafsson's fiction will recognize in his verse the elegant mix of intellect and sheer play, the ruminations of a mind that apprehends humanity in the riddles of the universe.
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A Tiler's Afternoon (New Directions Paperbook)
In his newest novel, A Tiler's Afternoon, Lars Gustafsson invites us to share a day's work with Torsten Bergman, an aging, semi-retired tile-layer. On this particular day, Torsten arrives at an empty suburban villa, partially renovated and left unfinished. A master craftsman, he knows what to do and goes about his business, all the while reminiscing over his past, considering what may be left of his future, daydreaming about the mysterious Sophie K., the absent occupant of the villa's upstairs flat. No one checks on the work. With the close of the day comes Torsten's growing unease over hours spent on perhaps futile labor. "But at that moment there was a loud knocking at the door - no, more of a pounding than a knocking. It sounded as if by some strange coincidence the whole world had come to life again and was trying to get in." Like Samuel Beckett, Lars Gustafsson turns the plainest of circumstances into poignant universals. There are yet roads to travel after we say we cannot go on.
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Stories of Happy People
What is happiness in an age of packaged needs and liberated desires? Lars Gustafsson’s Stories of Happy People is a collection of ten short fictions that maps the range of contentment, from inner joy to the edges of despair. “Uncle Sven and the Cultural Revolution” finds a politically indifferent Swedish research engineer, in Mao’s China as an industrial consultant, surprised by his own imagination. “The Four Railroads of Iserlohn” lead to poignant, illusionary journeyings. The half-felt yearnings of displaced intellectuals, trying to break out of the stasis of their existence, are explored in “The Art of Surviving November,” “What Does Not Kill Us, Tends to Make Us Stronger,” and “The Fugitives Discover That They Knew Nothing.” “A Water Story” is a sketch of the elusive staying power of love. The protected, private universes of the mentally retarded, the insane, and the senile are opened to view in “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases,” “The Bird in the Breast,” and “Out of the Pain.” In all of these stories, Gustafsson, one of Sweden’s leading men of letters and philosophical writer par excellence, places lives of seeming smallness within the wider context of the culture and history of our hapless era.
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Selected Poems
Poet, novelist, and philosopher Lars Gustafsson (1936-2016) was one of Europe’s leading literary figures. Much of his writing is concerned with the search for moral consciousness and the relationship between personal experience and self-awareness, imbued with a philosophically founded scepticism toward language. His poetry is renowned for relating the metaphysical to the mundane with a particular clarity and precision, illuminating the potency of ordinary objects and everyday events as he addresses critical issues that have concerned great thinkers over the centuries. Introduction by Per Wåstberg. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2018 (for Translation from Swedish).
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