Hockey Town

Beartown 

by Fredrik Backman

“One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don't turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are.”  
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown











Having not read any of Fredrik Backman's previous novels I did not know what to expect with this story. Set in a small Swedish town called Beartown, the story centers around the local juniors' hockey team and their preparation for their semifinal game. The hockey team is the pride of the town, which is otherwise suffering a decline. People are out of work and local businesses are shuttering. The plot involves a small group of people associated with the hockey team and the importance of it to the town. After the team wins the semifinal game there is a terrible event that affects everyone directly or indirectly leading to decisions that must be made by the individuals involved.

Backman focuses on the human experience and provides insights into the difficulties surrounding the individuals' abilities to deal with their feelings. The author captures some of these feelings when he comments:
"All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much tie fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we're going to be able to carry on."

The author uses the theme of community to demonstrate how an identity based on belonging to a group can have both positive and negative effects. Beartown is a small community that is centered around a successful hockey team. The people of Beartown are very devoted to both the team and the town, but this ultimately causes many to dismiss the importance and impact of the event that interrupts their regular activities.

How each of them carry on is demonstrated in their actions as the novel moves toward a denouement. The conclusion is not necessarily a happy one, but it is portrayed in a true and realistic way. The author did tend to emphasize the points he was trying to make a little too hard, but overall I found the book suspenseful and excellent.

Imaginative Swashbuckling

Long John Silver 
by Björn Larsson

"I saw the sun set in a sea of ​​liquid fire and arise as a ball of burning copper. I saw the moon to shine the veils of the night sky as wisps and reflected in the slow breath of the waves. I have seen the sea so smooth and the air so clear that the starry seemed doubling the point that it was not clear what was the most and under which the above, and it seemed to sail inside a globe shining lights. I've seen skies and clouds that an artist would take entire existence trying to play. " Bjorn Larsson


If you loved Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure novel, Treasure Island, you may like Swedish writer Larsson’s first US publication, a retelling of the life of the pirate Silver.  Comfortably retired on Madagascar in 1742, Silver is nettled that all the literature written about his life has got it wrong. Amid his plundered riches and house staff, he opens his recollections during his youth back in Scotland, where he’s raised a motherless son by a drunken father.
Having learned the knack of plucky self-reliance, he takes to the sea, is shipwrecked, and later is rescued by Dunn, a charitable soul of baffling kindness. Silver falls in love and has multiple adventures at sea, sailing on an unlikely variety of ships. As expected Captain Flint enters the story.  The action scenes in these passages are what make the book, since Silver’s meditations on slavery, independence, honor, and human rights are something less than stirring. There is a cameo appearance by none other than Defoe, who discusses literature; but also plenty of rum, treasure, plundering and pirate-like misbehaviour.
While it is likely that few of Stevenson’s Treasure Island readers have been terribly gripped by Silver’s inner life this exposition is worth a look. After all. the genial old salt is harmless enough and capable of telling a good yarn from his kit bag of memories.

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The Ghost Sonata and more . . .

Strindberg: Five Plays 

by August Strindberg

Death doesn't bargain.   --August Strindberg


A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was an author of extremes. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science. Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. 


He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period. His plays are what I would characterize as an "acquired taste", but the power of his drama is intense and worth exploring.


No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.

-- August Strindberg

Illustration: Edvard Munch Portrait of August Strindberg, 1892, Museum of Modern Art,Stockholm, Sweden

Strindberg: Five Plays by August Strindberg. Signet Classics, 1984 (1960)

Mesmerizing Fiction

Bernard Foy's Third Castling 

by Lars Gustafsson

“The fantastic in literature doesn't exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle. This happens when Piranesi in his imagined prisons depicts a world peopled by other beings than those for which it was created. ("On the Fantastic in Literature")”  ― Lars Gustafsson



I remember being mesmerized by the unique fictional world(s)of this novel. the author manages to narrate three disparate lives, all belonging to characters with the same name, done with a voice reminiscent of my favorite nineteenth century novels. At the same time it is a philosophical tour de force in three long sections from Swedish writer who also wrote The Death of a Beekeeper (The Tennis Players; Funeral Music for Freemasons; etc.). This was my introduction to his work and it was an astounding discovery. At its best, it is intellectually challenging in the tradition of Borges or Calvino.
The title is an obvious metaphorical reference to the game of chess, but the novel's complexity goes beyond that of mere characters moved about on a chessboard. Bernard Foy is alternatively an American rabbi who gets caught up in an episode of international intrigue, an 83-year-old poet unable to finish his memoirs because he's lost his memory, and a gifted juvenile delinquent who is writing a novel that contains poetry, vanishing with Baudelaire's poems into a bog. Though self-indulgent at times, the book is witty and engaging, and Gustafsson has it both ways: in a ruminative 19th-century voice, he's written a brilliantly contemporary novel, a playful chess game that cancels itself out.
It is truly indescribable and must be experienced; it can be frustrating, but it is a brilliant conception.  Gustafsson is the rare writer who seems equally adept at writing fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He has a philosophy background, and often deals with complex concepts, but effectively and -- more importantly -- unobtrusively integrates theory and ideas into his work.   His books are filled with linguistic, moral, and other philosophical concerns, but these never crowd out actual story. Amazingly, he's able to tie invention and philosophy together in a way that often enhances the stories.

Bernard Foy's Third Castling by Lars Gustafsson. New Directions, 1988 (1986)

The Death of Ahasuerus 

by Pär Lagerkvist

"I've always liked wandering about, being alone, at peace. Perhaps that day I felt more need for it than usual - more need to get away from the others; I was weary of this meaningless existence, of the pointlessness of everything." (p 33)


Set during the age of medieval pilgrimages, the first part of Par Lagerkvist's short novel brings together two fascinating, yet mysterious characters. They include Tobias (a soldier who became a bandit) and a wandering saint who meet at an inn on the way to the Holy Land. Although each look at divinity, sin, atonement and faith in different ways, embarking on the same road to Jerusalem (one on a mission as a sort of soldier of fortune, the other there to not let him alone). Both trying to accomplish a personal dream. But Tobias has acquired another companion along the way, a woman named, appropriately for this story, Diana.
We eventually come to understand that the alien could not be anyone but Ahasuerus, a name that is known in mythology as the "Wandering Jew" . It is the monologue of Ahasuerus that forms the second part of the novel. The interactions among the characters on their journey somehow surprised this reader, while the importance of the relation of them to each other and to nature was overpowering in its implications. From the scene of the storm to its peaceful aftermath the beauty of nature is exemplified in the following passage: "On the very loftiest mountains now had fallen - the first since the summer - and white peaks rose to the heavens like a song of praise." (p 64)
The ideas, images and questions raised by this story combine to make it an exceptionally thoughtful read. The story is told in an impressionistic style where glimpses of individuals and their environment must suffice to produce the overall picture. What sets Lagerkvist apart is his use of paradox, and his constant examination of faith and one's relationship to "god." The monologue of Ahauerus gives shape to this examination and questioning of the meaning of divinity. In this and in its beauty the novel mirrors aspects of life. It is a book that ends too quickly and that, ultimately, makes you wish to think about its meaning and perhaps read it again. 


"People puzzle themselves so much about what they're to live on - they talk and talk about it. But what is one to live for? Can you tell me? (p 32)


The Death of Ahasuerus by Par Lagerkvist. Naomi Walford, trans. Random House, New York.  1962 (1960)


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The Death of a Beekeeper

"Kind readers.  Strange readers.   We begin again.  We never give up.  It is early spring 1975, the story begins in the middle of the thaw." (The Death of A Beekeeper, Prelude, p 1)  



I first discovered the writing of Lars Gustafsson several years ago when I found his novel, Bernard Foy's Third Castling, in a neighborhood bookstore.  It was such a quirky, interesting and arresting book that I have sought out other works by Gustafsson over the years.  One of these is The Death of a Beekeeper which opens with what Lars Gustafsson calls a “prelude” in which he says good-bye to the readers of this, the last part of his five-volume novel sequence. He presents himself as merely the editor of notes left behind on Lars Lennart Westin’s death, telling the reader that the speaker to whom he now hands over the narrative suffers from cancer of the spleen. Told in the form a journal or diary it tells the story of a man who was a schoolteacher, but now is dying; a man who is a beekeeper, and a man who is very human. We first read that he has received a letter from a local hospital, probably containing test results and the diagnosis of his ailment. He burns the letter.  This brief, quiet novel speaks with a courageous voice. Refusing to die with his life unclarified, unexamined, he rejects the sterile confines of a hospital and, for the few months left to him, retreats to the isolated Swedish countryside to work among his bees, to endure the progression of pain, and to record his accompanying, disquieting insights. It is his humanity and the way he faces life that makes his story touching and gives meaning to what might otherwise be seen as mundane everyday events.  Gustafsson, by juxtaposing the beekeeper's notes on his inner life, feelings, and memories, and his notes on his outer life, the daily running of the apiary, suggests by the inquiring, seemingly spontaneous entries the deep relatedness of life, death, and hope.


"Above him was the whole summer.  A soft wind was moving through the trees.  On the other side of the island a kingfisher hovered above the water . . ." (p 140)


Lars Gustafsson is a Swedish, poet, novelist and scholar. Even though he was raised and educated in Sweden he lived in Austin, Texas until 2003, and has recently returned to Sweden. He served as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught Philosophy and Creative Writing, until May 2006, when he retired. In addition to his novels he has published poetry and essays.

The Death of a Beekeeper by Lars Gustafsson. New Directions, New York. 1981 (1978)