Bøker av Lars Gustafsson

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."

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.

One grey November morning a friend rang Torsten Bergman and told him of a job on a house-conversion. Torsten arrived at the empty house in his decrepit car and got to work retiling the bathroom - the tiles were there already - while he waited for someone to turn up and make it all official. So begins this story of one day in an old man's life...

Caldwell lives by the lakeside at Austin, Texas, with his wife of thirty years. He is a judge in the Federal Bankruptcy Court. And the dog? A mongrel that kept upsetting his dustbins as it rooted about in them, until the judge went after it and secretly beat its brains out with the edge-trimmers.

In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he will not live through the 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.

Swedish 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. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2018 (for translation from Swedish).

Lars Gustafsson's Funeral Music for Freemasons (1983), the Swedish writer's fifth book of fiction to be translated into English, follows the lives of three free spirits of the 1950s, from their aspiring student years in Stockholm to their present realities, so different from their youthful imaginings. Jan Bohman, a brilliant poet become smalltime African merchant--a latterday Rimbaud--is about to be deported from Senegal. Hans ("Hasse" to his friends), an idealistic research physicist, is now a professor at Harvard, leading the protected surburban life of an American academic. Ann-Marie Nöhme, the promising Mozartean soprano in the bonds of whose love both men agonized, has had a failed career in a provincial repertory. How could so much talent have come to so little? Was there something in the Sweden of their youth, and by extension the whole of the industrial West, that prefigured the death of creativity? Or might it have been spent, drained away in love's passion? Then again, perhaps these years never did in fact happen, memory following one time-line, existence another, so that their real lives seem to have gone unlived. With his customary psychological delicacy and philosophical aplomb, Lars Gustafsson has composed a novel in Funeral Music for Freemasons that, like the Mozart Trauermusik the title invokes, sings a moving dirge for an age.

A knowledgeable, loving and poetic account of a journey across his country by one of Sweden's most renowned and revered writers. Gustafsson paints an evocative portrait of his homeland.

This imaginative novel suggests the possibility of parallel lives. In part one, Bernard Foy is a young American Rabbi, caught up in a ruthless game of international intrigue and espionage. In Part Two, he is a lecherous 83-year-old poet and member of the Swedish Academy. And, in Part Three he is a brilliant, homicidal juvenile delinquent-perhaps writing about the other two. Or maybe all three Berard Foys are conceived of in a beehive within a skull, lodged deep in a Swedish forest. Although Swedish, Gustafsson spends most of the year at the University of Texas, Austin.