OTHER GERMANIC LANGUAGES.

Kops, Henri ; Schoolfield, George C. ; Sondrup, Steven P. 等

Danish

Thorkild Bjornvig. Samlede digte 1947-93. Copenhagen. Gyldendal. 1998. 497 pages. ISBN 87-00-32274-1.

Thorkild Bjornvig's collected poems, published in observance of his eightieth birthday, will bring enormous pleasure to admirers of his work; unfortunately, the volume does not include his three books of translations from Rilke (1949, 1957, 1958), where his close knowledge of and affinity for the Austrian poet-and his own great verbal gifts-make these renderings masterpieces. (Maybe someday, as an act of gratitude, his Rilke og tysk tradition [1946, printed 1959] will be issued in German or English, so that it will be accessible to the large run of Rilke scholars.) Translations of Bjornvig's own poems, heaven knows, have not been numerous, albeit P. M. Mitchell and Niels Ingwersen did what they could in their selections of Danish literature from 1971 and 1981. In 1993 Paula Hostrup- Jessen issued a selection from the verse, The World Tree. The technical refinements of his earlier style make great demands, and contemporary translators may be scared away. For too many amateurs of Scandinavian letters, particularly in English-speaking countries, Bjornvig remains an accessory figure to Karen Blixen, because of his account of their bizarre relationship, described by him in Pagten (1974; Eng. The Pact)-notably, the only one of his prose works translated into English.

At the start, Bjornvig won his loyal readership by that very technical mastery-a rhymer (like Rilke), inventive, plausible, and unabashed, and a subtle metrician-and by his large frame of reference and perception; his poems had a richness of form and texture which invited the readership to sink into them, perhaps a little baffled at first but always rewarded. One thinks-"alte Liebe rostet nicht"-of Anubis (1955), Figur af Ild (1959), Vibrationer (1966); the artwork poems (e.g., "Cypresser under nattlig Himmel," "De store blaa Heste"); the portrait and semiportrait poems (the Nietzsche cycle, "Poes Dod," "Koslow"- and how many today know who the unspeakable Koslow was?-"Hill" on the Swedish painter [1849-1911], "Skrevet i Vand" on Keats); the heroic poems on events and things ("Sejdmaendene paa Skratteskaer," "Balladen om Great Eastern," the double prose poem on the Titanic); the travel poems ("Kap Finisterre," "Castel Saint' Angelo"); the nature poems ("Maanenat," "Ahorntraeet"). In all these and others, Bjornvig reached outside himself in a wonderful demonstration of the employment of objective reality for the creation of poetry. Ravnen (1968) combined this externalism with a mythological layer that produced the most unified of his collections; but Delfinen (1973) contains some intimations of a falling-off, of failing concentration. In Morgenmorke (1977/79) and beyond, personal and public concerns got the upper hand: a divorce, a battery of (justified) charges against the neon-lighted world in which Bjornvig (like many of the rest of us) was aware of having landed, a whole catalogue of (admirable) ecological causes, gave Bjornvig's verse an air of argumentation, of haranguing, of speaking too plainly, sometimes even of editorializing. The old skills of the literary handwork were neglected if not jettisoned. Still, complaint is ungrateful and ungracious. Recently, the old Bjornvig discipline and vigor have reappeared in such flashes as "Jeronimus i Rhodos" or the conjuring-up of a picture by the Chinese Tai Wen-Chin, "Siv vand og mane," which provides the title for Bjornvig's latest individual collection. May it not be the last.

George C. Schoolfield

Yale University

Dutch

Willem Brakman. Ante Diluvium. Amsterdam. Querido. 1998. 142 pages. 29.90 fl. ISBN 90-214-5417-3.

The author of over thirty novels and novellas in addition to several collections of short stories, Willem Brakman creates in Ante Diluvium a surrealistic world of youthful violence where young boys plot evil acts against their elders and against one another. The "club" of ten-through-twelve-year-olds meets in a deep ravine near a factory. We find early on that the narrator, known as Old Shatterhand, is given to extremes and that he fantasizes readily. As the narrative progresses, Old Shatterhand decides that an older youth, Maarten Olie, who aspires to become a member of the club, should be murdered. When Maarten tells the members of the club of his earlier experiences with stigmata on his hands and feet, it seems his fate is sealed. There are a number of biblical references to Christ's death, and Old Shatterhand indicates that Maarten has no possibility of becoming a member.

Some time later, the narrator as an adult introduces himself to Mr. Mager, their former teacher, as the person who "threw a student" from a high bridge. He complains that he himself was a victim of Mr. Mager's violence, which resulted in Old Shatterhand's splintered bones and subsequent social isolation. When Mr. Mager walks away afterward with a woman dressed in red who had been making eyes at the narrator, the narrator begins to plot an event which will bring maximum suffering to them. Shortly thereafter, a detective appears at the narrator's door to ask if he had thrown a student from the bridge, which the narrator immediately denies. When he is suddenly seized by a throng of people and threatened with great bodily harm, the woman in red miraculously appears to suggest he is demented and should be left alone. Desiring to thank her but unable to track her down, he is startled to hear her footsteps at his door but finds himself berated by her for "holding" her in his thoughts.

At the conclusion of the novel the narrator and his friends are called upon to give an account of Maarten's death. All deny responsibility. The narrator, in fact, suggests that Maarten's father may be guilty. Later, after the narrator has returned home, he finds a figure creeping behind him in bed, then embracing him. The narrator is startled at the accompanying figure's lack of bodily warmth and at the evidence of stigmata.

In flashbacks throughout the novel Brakman provides us with vignettes which suggest that evil is an ever-present threat, although some of his youths are clearly more malevolent than others. Valkenoog, for example, who plots to burn down the school, urges the group to chase a terrorized victim into the burning school. Other youths are clearly less precocious in their propensity to violence but readily join in the search for a victim.

Brakman's narrative technique is unusually complex. His chronology appears deliberately vague, and the reader's difficulty is compounded by the fact that Brakman's narrator is himself writing a book entitled Winnetou Is Dead, where events and characters self-reflexively parallel situations in the primary novel.

Arie Staal

Eastern Michigan University

Hugo Claus. Desire. Stacey Knecht, tr. New York. Viking. 1997. 211 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0-670-86746-2.

Hugo Claus is internationally known as one of Europe's best writers, one who has been writing for nearly fifty years in most of the major genres. His works are translated into many languages, and he has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. Desire, unfortunately, does not deserve the critical praise accorded to such masterpieces as The Sorrow of Belgium (1990). The writing is superb, to be sure, but it fails to yield an esthetically satisfying experience.

The plot focuses on two rogue gambling buddies whose impulse to leave Belgium for Las Vegas leads them through high and low adventures, to misfortunes, and finally to alienation and separation from each other. Michel is the brooding one, complex, self-absorbed, sophisticated, yet insecure, secretly nurturing a desire for a solid identity like the late Rickabone, who used everybody for his own purposes without a twinge of conscience. Jake, on the other hand, is the simple and well-fed oaf whose blustering and bumbling ways disguise an innocent heart that is eager to love and be loved. The two make for a pair of unlikely traveling companions; the spiritual distance between them becomes increasingly apparent as they play the foreign tourist around Los Angeles and at the gaming tables and night dives in Las Vegas. They don't strike it rich. In fact, more often than not, they strike out. In Michel's case, this only serves to deepen his ennui. For Jake, however, the flight into decadence and self-indulgence awakens him to his deep-down desire for shalom, for what is true and real, for peace and happiness. His life henceforth will not be with his gambling buddies in the hometown's Unicorn but instead with his wife and abused daughter, whose mind snapped when she was cast aside as unwanted baggage.

The vivid and outrageous episodes of Desire overpower the theme and generate a sense of incoherence. The translator, Stacey Knecht, did an outstanding job in capturing the vigorous and colorful style of the original, but the author fell short in shaping his fiction into finished art.

Henry J. Baron

Calvin College

Paul de Wispelaere. En de liefste dingen nog verder. Antwerp/Amsterdam. Atlas. 1998. 229 pages. ISBN 90-254-2317-5.

Paul de Wispelaere has been known for his autobiographical writing, especially since his previous novel, the diaristic Het verkoolde alfabet (1992; see WLT 67:3, p. 618). In En de liefste dingen nog verder (And the Dearest Things Even Further) it was hardly surprising that several readers recognized de Wispelaere himself in the main character, a vital novelist in his late sixties, and assumed he had cancer. Again, it seems clear, the author's life provided most of the material for the novel.

Never before in de Wispelaere's novels have love and death been as closely knit as in this one. An aging novelist is told that at best he may have but one more year to live. He starts writing his last book, a kind of incantation evoking his memories, aspirations, and loves. Writing makes him experience it all all over again, bringing new insights. The resulting text is an account of half a century, a tale reaching from the thirties well into the nineties, a story of love and friendships and travels, an interior journey that confronts the author with himself and his way of leavetaking and with the transitory quality of human experience as opposed to the cyclical time of nature. It is not a coincidence that the novel begins and ends in October.

En de liefste... is written in two directions. Heading forward, the author's health is deteriorating, and every now and then short passages illustrate the unavoidable approach of death. Life, however, lies in the past, a past structured along periods colored by the women he has loved. The dominating female presence in the novel is Marlies. The protagonist met her on an archeological site in the Caribbean; she lived with him for a while and then left him. He writes her several letters, later he recounts their relationship, and toward the end, in September, she comes over for a few days and they take a final short journey together. In one of his letters he writes that if ever she should lay her hands on the manuscript, she can do with it as she pleases, thus asking her to see to his literary afterlife, to the writing that was his last defense against decay and death.

In his latest novel the traditional themes of de Wispelaere's work are again omnipresent: reality versus imagination, the passage of time, ecological problems, the ambivalence of safeguarding and at the same time adapting both one's natural and cultural heritage. De Wispelaere contemplates the general features of this half-century as they reflect his personal experience. His alter ego evaluates the problems he faced both in his youth and later on in life in the light of the books he read. In that way, again, life is linked with literature.

Never before mentioned in his novels is the period during which de Wispelaere taught literary criticism at Antwerp University. His alter ego now mentions that period and does not approve much of the overscientific approach of those years, which completely ignored the existence of the author and often even of the literary text, opting for dull and barren theorizing instead. A difficult situation indeed for a critic who is an autobiographical writer as well.

Stylistically and structurally, En de liefste dingen nog verder is an extremely well-written eulogy on nature, love, friendship, and human values, though it is also very obvious that even good friends are seldom able to communicate their real feelings. That lack of communication is at least one of the reasons for their growing apart. And so, time and again, the novel is about taking leave: a splendid and melancholy approach of fading life.

Because terminal cancer leaves no positive way out, de Wispelaere ends his text with the dream of a large party at which young people choose from among his books, read fragments aloud, take them along, and make new collections-books as seeds blowing in the wind.

Ludo Stynen

Antwerp

Frisian

Rink van der Velde. Smoarge Grun. Ljouwert, Neth. Friese Pers. 1998. 176 pages. 25 fl. ISBN 90-330-1487-4.

Homme Veldstra is back. Sure, he retired some time ago, but he keeps bumping into stuff that smells like crime, and then his detective instincts take over. In this case it is the suspicious death of Klaas Vogelzang, a rogue of long acquaintance because of his frequent conflict with the law. Still, somehow the two, cop and troublemaker, developed a degree of mutual respect. In fact, in recent years their relationship has bloomed into a kind of friendship, and that is why Homme feels it nothing less than noblesse oblige to get to the bottom of Klaas's sudden demise from drowning in a polluted pond at his old sewage dump.

He does, of course, in his usual unofficial, seemingly disinterested, low-key way. He discovers that Klaas's small garbage and sewage business has grown into a powerful cleaning and recycling conglomerate; that sometimes toxic chemical waste is potent enough to kill anything it touches; that Klaas will not tolerate such illegal dumpings which pollute the ground (hence the title Smoarge Grun or "Polluted Ground") but that his sons, who have taken over the business, honor profits more than their father; that the shadiest character in the whole business is Jef de Hondt, the company manager, an import from the South with suspicious connections to the Mafia; that Klaas was in the process of gathering soil samples for testing when the "accident" occurred.

But the story is not about a single-minded search for a solution to a crime. The Homme stories never are. They are just as much about domestic small talk, the cost of living, changing times, and contemporary controversies and problems-in sum, the ordinariness of daily life that is a common experience for us all. This story meanders too, like Homme's leisurely bike rides in the countryside, to people and places that may offer clues to the suspected crime. But it accomplishes its apparent purpose: to entertain the reader by intrigue and at the same time make the point that today's crimes make the transgressions of a past generation look like mere mischief. The focus on Klaas's two sons, who are as different as night and day, adds interest and perspective. And the final surprise of the story is not the unmasking of the real murderer but another murder. All of Homme's sleuthing on behalf of old acquaintance Klaas Vogelzang leads him in the final scene to another dead body, this time at the hand of Klaas's own kin. It gives Homme no satisfaction, but perhaps it serves as author Rink van der Velde's final criticism of contemporary crime.

Smoarge Grun lacks the depth of Gjin lintsje foar Homme Veldstra (1993; see WLT 68:2, p. 380) and the suspense of Rjochtdei op de Skieding (1993; see WLT 68:4, p. 831). The

reader also misses the presence of Homme's old colleague Bonne Hos, whose collaboration often added fine touches of humor as well as pointed social commentary. Still, the novel provides a pleasant read, a good chuckle now and again, and a sharpened concern with the threat of organized crime, driven by the profit and power motive, to our way of life and to life itself.

Henry J. Baron

Calvin College

General Area

Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria. 3: Vida varlden, 1900-1960. Elisabeth Moller Jensen et al., eds. Hoganas, Sweden. Bra Bocker. 1996. 608 pages, ill. ISBN 91- 7119-260-3.

Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria. 4: Pa jorden, 1960-1990. Elisabeth Moller Jensen et al., eds. Hoganas, Sweden. Bra Bocker. 1997. 597 pages, ill. ISBN 91- 7119-261-1.

The Nordic Women's Literary History project, a collaborative endeavor involving more than a hundred individual contributors from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, was initiated more than fifteen years ago. The first two volumes, I Guds namn (In the Name of God), covering the period 1000-1800, and Fadershuset (The Father's House), devoted to the nineteenth century, were published in 1993 (see WLT 69:1, p. 159). With the appearance of Vida varlden (The Wide World) and Pa jorden (On Earth), encompassing the years 1900-60 and 1960-90 respectively, the narrative portion of the literary history is now complete (a final bibliographic volume remains). All four volumes were published simultaneously in Swedish and Danish-language versions so as to reach a wider audience.

As the editor-in-chief for the entire project, Elisabeth Moller Jensen, explains in her general introduction to the first volume, there has been no attempt to apply a unifying theory of women's literature throughout; rather, contributors were granted a great deal of freedom to approach their topics however they saw fit. The Nordic Women's Literary History may be compared to a mosaic in which unifying patterns nevertheless emerge, not least because the editors have grouped the essays under rubrics that emphasize commonalities. In volume 3 these categories are "Jaget" (The Self), where the connecting theme is the struggle to achieve an autonomous identity, with Ebba Witt-Brattstrom's insightful essay on the seminal Finland-Swedish modernist poet Edith Sodergran serving as a fitting introduction; "Begaret" (Desire), which focuses on female sexuality; and "Kon och krig" (Gender and War), which explores, among other topics, responses to World War II and alternative pacifist visions. In volume 4 "Fornyelser" (Renewals) and "Forandra spraket" (Changing the Language) both emphasize linguistic and formal experimentation, whereas the long central section titled "Varlden i rorelse" (The Changing World) primarily concerns socially oriented or confessional literature of the feminist new wave; "Bliva sig sjalv" (Becoming Oneself) returns to issues of identity and self-realization in a postmodern context. The volume concludes with an informative piece on women writers among the indigenous peoples of Northern Europe, the Sami and the Greenlanders.

Such a cursory overview cannot, of course, convey the full variety of topics covered or the richness of the separate contributions. Virtually without exception, the texts are sensitive, incisive, and free of jargon. Though primary emphasis is on individual female authorships, some background essays or overviews delineate the social and political context in which women wrote. Thus in volume 3 Birgitta Holm's article "Det tredje konet" (The Third Sex) describes the experience of the first generation of women university students, and Anne Birgitte Richard's "Kvinnor pa kant med fortplantningen" (Women Resisting Reproduction) examines sexual politics in the 1930s.

A particular strength of this collaborative effort is its inclusiveness. Both established and largely forgotten women writers are considered, often with a discussion of various factors, both personal and institutional, that have determined the course of their careers and their literary reputations. Since attention is paid to writers in all the Nordic languages, including Finnish, which is not related to the others (leaving aside Sami), even readers well versed in the female literary traditions of one or more of the countries are likely to encounter much that is new.

As with earlier volumes in the series, Vida varlden and Pa jorden are handsomely produced, with colored sidebars that allow inclusion of pertinent quotations or supplementary information without disrupting the flow of the main text. There are hundreds of extraordinary illustrations that support and augment the subject matter. The Nordic Women's Literary History is a remarkable achievement.

Rochelle Wright

University of Illinois, Urbana

Icelandic

Gu>bergur Bergsson. Fa>ir og mo>ir og dulmagn bernskunnar. Reykjavik. Forlagi>. 1997. 320 pages. ISBN 9979-53-321-8.

Whether or not the years of one's childhood are regarded as the "good old days" or the "bad old days" depends to some extent on whether nostalgia or realism prevails. Sometimes pride in having survived hardships is the prevailing mood. In "Father and Mother and the Mysteries of Childhood" Gu>bergur Bergsson defies easy classification by focusing on character and emotions. In a preface Bergsson calls his work a skaldaevisaga, a blend of the Icelandic words skaldsaga (novel) and aevisaga (biography) which we can probably translate as "biographical novel." He states that from an emotional point of view it is only true in regard to himself.

The starting point for Bergsson's work is his purchase of his childhood home in Grindavik from his father, who in turn has secured a dwelling in his childhood village. The father was a sort of jack-of-all-trades, as men in rural districts often must be. In the haying season he worked on the farms roundabout, and in the fishing season he went to sea on a fishing boat. He possessed a special talent for carpentry, and in his spare time he built a house for the family. According to the author, it was constructed of boards from old packing cases- native timber is nonexistent in Iceland-although they seemed to him at the time to be the rarest of woods. The author and his brother were greatly in awe of their father's tools, especially his crowbar (kubein, literally "cow's leg" in Icelandic), but he was extremely possessive of those tools and rarely let the boys touch them. Eventually the house sported a galvanized-iron roof, like so many other Icelandic houses. When the kitchen of the house was finished, the family moved in-a proud moment for the author's father, for it was the first time the family could live under their own roof, even though conditions were crowded until the house was completed. The finishing touch came when the father built a cistern to catch rainwater from the roof. Up until then the family was dependent on neighbors for potable water.

In the summer and early fall Bergsson's father was away for long periods of time, and the mother assumed the task of feeding the family, often with barely enough money. However, her husband always made it home in time to replenish the supply. The author tells of the hard life that women had in those days and of their lack of opportunities. His maternal grandmother, in spite of his father's derision, must have been an interesting person. She detested housework, and consequently her house was generally filthy. She hardly ever put a decent meal on the table. Her talents lay elsewhere: she was renowned for her expertise in making men's trousers and for her knitted goods. She remarked that even though she had lived "in sin" with one man, and had been married twice, her true love was her work.

Bergsson relates many anecdotes about the various members of his family, and ends his novel with a chapter on the six "mysteries of childhood," such as prayer, the need for old women to quarrel, the moon in autumn, and so on. In general, his work is interesting, if not exciting. It would be better, I think, if he had resisted the temptation to make soporific sweeping philosophical or psychological observations.

Henry Kratz

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Norwegian

Hans Herbjornsrud. Vitner; Vannbaereren; Han. Oslo. Gyldendal Norsk. 1998. 331 pages. 298 kr. ISBN 82-05-25387-0.

Hans Herbjornsrud's 1997 collection of short stories, Blinddora (The Blind Door; see WLT 72:4, p. 856), attracted both critical acclaim and a growing circle of readers. The current volume, a reissue of the author's three previous works- Vannbaereren (The Water Carrier; 1984), Han (He; 1987), and Vitner (1979), for which he received the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas debut prize-is a result of this renewed attention.

Herbjornsrud is not an easily accessible writer from the point of view of language and milieu. Modern-day Norway as most outsiders know it, an industrialized advanced welfare state of gender equality, international engagement, and oil-based prosperity, does not appear on Herbjornsrud's pages; or when it does, as in the first story of the present collection, it is only as a surface and a lead-in. His characters populate a rural Norway that, aside from some infusion of modernity, could well have been the countryside of the early 1800s. Human beings are specks in this majestic and threatening landscape. Herbjornsrud's world is one of internal and external darkness, occasionally lit up by flashes of lightning and pelted by torrential rains or unexpected spring squalls. The hills are alive with ancient spirits, and houses whisper to the inhabitants about death and horrors of bygone days. Here religion tends to be of the fundamentalist kind: people speak in tongues and converse with Jesus in holy frenzy. Human tenderness is thwarted, love destroys the self, and protagonists keep asking their mournful question, "Can one love another human being?" In these surroundings justice is not meted out by God or officialdom. This is a society in which a father can only break a cycle of violence by killing his son who has fled jail, and a man kills his twin after the latter hints that he may be a murderer.

The search for truth is the overarching theme in these stories, the characters' futile attempts to hide and conceal the truth about acts that constituted defining moments in their lives. Reading them, one is reminded of Selma Lagerlof's Varmland stories, where God punishes an individual and a whole community for an evil deed until atonement is made. The personal and communal world in Herbjornsrud's stories is definitely out of joint. Once the truth begins to emerge, his protagonists move from their deceptively simple domestic or working life into a world of spiritual dismemberment and terrifying events. Everyday reality recedes and is replaced by a reality of another kind. A woman who has escaped death in a car accident sits in a cafe drinking cocoa and "floats around in her own body." Identity means nothing in this precarious condition: "I felt how my burning eyes dissolved in the cold water. . . . I looked upon myself as I kneeled in reality." In Herbjornsrud's tales nothing is what it seems, everything is pregnant with hidden mythical forces, his characters become "huldren"-"crazy, confused, possessed by the huldre" (the wicked female spirit of the hills and mountains). Children often become conduits of these forces of destruction and disintegration. A horrifying story in Vitner about an adolescent girl who experiences a schizophrenic breakdown described by her father in a monologue with Jesus shows Herbjornsrud as a master of language and imagery.

The reader of this work often feels like the man in one of the stories who drives on in a rainstorm while his windshield wipers intermittently fail. Distorted images from another dimension appear in front of him, but once in a while he notes gratefully that the wipers function again, and the street of his everyday life reappears. These tales are unsettling, spellbinding, and totally captivating; their author certainly deserves the critics' designation as "one of the most interesting names in recent Norwegian literature."

Rose-Marie G. Oster

University of Maryland

Swedish

Werner Aspenstrom. Israpport. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1997. 51 pages. 162 kr. ISBN 91-0-056532-6.

Werner Aspenstrom has over the last several decades remained one of the most widely read contemporary Swedish poets and has enjoyed broad appreciation as a dramatist as well. Although his first volumes of poetry appeared during the 1940s, he is strongly associated with the modernist tendencies of the 1950s and a circle of friends including Karl Vennberg and Artur Lundkvist. He clearly transcends, however, any attempt to see his long and varied career narrowly in terms of the esthetics of that decade. He was nevertheless the last surviving member of that generation that had such a profound impact on Swedish literature. His career spanned more than fifty years from the appearance of his first volume in 1946 until his death and the publication of Israpport in 1997. Several of the poems in Israpport were written during the last weeks of 1996 during what proved to be a terminal illness. Just before his death in January 1997, he put the finishing touches on this collection of poetry in verse and prose and in fact did not live to complete all the revisions he apparently had in mind.

Israpport is not an attempt to provide a summary of the poetic accomplishments of half a century or to crown that achievement with a grandiose final gesture; rather, it is a worthy continuation of what Aspenstrom has done so well for so long. These poems are animated by simplicity and straightforwardness, the ability to see the significant in the minuscule, a distrust of unbridled rationalism, and confidence in the resilience of mankind. Although the paradoxes of modern chaotic life have long been played off against the images of the timeless and the mythic, here the perspective of eternity focuses individual images as well as the entire collection with notable though nonetheless subtle power. The opening poem, "I Sandladan" (In the Sandbox), begins with a description of playing with children in a sandbox and continues with an evocation of the primal elements of earth, fire, and water. The uninhibited and naive play of children in the context of mythically primitive and fundamental matter is juxtaposed to a parenthetic observation evincing the contrasting forces of contemporary social reality: "Utanfor staketet skramlar sparvagnar forbi / med forgangliga varelser i" (Beyond the fence, street cars rattle by / with perishable beings inside). In the poem that gives the collection its title, two men are pictured on the frozen ice of the bay just beyond the home of Aspenstrom's all-observing though long-deceased friend, the poet Gunnar Ekelof. The poem "Israpport" (Ice Report) closes with the warning, "Nar vi blundar eller inte langre orkar se / far vinden leka med sig sjalv darute / skriver vinden sig sjalv" (When we close our eyes or no longer dare to see / the wind can play with itself out there / the wind writes itself). This gentle admonition to continued poetic vigilance expresses both apprehension as well as confidence. It is probably neither a credo nor a testament but a legacy passed on.

Steven P. Sondrup

Brigham Young University

Stig Claesson. Vad man ser och hedrar. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1998. 231 pages, ill. 272 kr. ISBN 91-0-056629-2.

Week 1 to week 52. The Swedes organize their calendar according to weeks, not months, and it is frustrating to say the least when a Swede suggests: Let's do whatever in week 32. When is that? spring, summer? June, July, August? Actually week 32 occurs in August, and it is a good thing to keep this peculiar habit of counting in mind when communicating with Swedes, because it has become second nature to them by now.

Stig Claesson has organized Vad man ser och hedrar (What One Sees and Honors) according to this principle. With one column, or chapter, a week from New Year to Christmas, he comments on what he sees happening around him in his neighborhood. Which is not much, you would think at first, since Claesson lives along a country road with a five-mile walk through the woods to his mailbox. In front of the house, which he inherited from his uncle, is a small lake where he keeps his rowboat for some occasional fishing, and in the back are a few acres of land kept open by thirty hungry sheep for the purpose of preventing the woods from invading his property. These sheep behave like sheep, and Claesson never ventures outside without his cutting pliers if a creature has got caught in his fences. His neighbors are deer, fox and moose, mice and birds. He lives alone and does not drive a car. But it is precisely this isolation from modern civilization that gives him an advantageous perspective.

Claesson (signature SLAS) celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1998. He has lived a lot of life, done a lot of travel, known a lot of people, read and written plenty, drawn and painted abundantly. He has learned to judge situations and people with discrimination. He possesses good common sense and a wry sense of humor. As a columnist, he is Sweden's answer to Russell Baker. He writes about current affairs indirectly. The ecological crisis is mounting all around him. He does not preach but writes about picking lingonberries and mushrooms, yet cannot find any where there once were plenty. All the small, abandoned farmhouses in his neighborhood have been bought by Germans and Danes and nicely gentrified as summer homes.

Claesson lives alone, but he is far from lonely. Browsing through Vad man ser..., one finds scores of clever and some quite stunning sketches of writers and poets who also happen to be his friends or friends of people he has met or are acquaintances he has made in his solitude. He recalls the situation and gives a citation of a stanza or a couplet. Nils Ferlin, Par Radstrom, Cornelis Vreeswijk, Kristina Lugn, and Werner Aspenstrom pass by. But not all are contemporaries-Carl Jonas Love Almquist and Verner von Heidenstam, for instance- and not all are Swedes: Joseph Brodsky, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and many more have had their encounter with Claesson's pen. SLAS belongs to the generation that learned poetry by heart in school, and he has continued this habit, which serves him well. The poems give him consolation, and the poets are the company with whom he feels at home. These are the people he honors. And since he is truly an artist, his sketches are so ingenious that they cannot be said to be merely illustrations. They are as much the book as is the text.

Claesson makes use of a quotation from Turgenev, who warned his readers, "Do not peruse the text hastily. It would presumably bore you silly." This is good advice. By the time Christmas comes around again, SLAS himself seems ready to hibernate. But if one reads slowly and looks through Vad man ser och hedrar with abandon, arrested here and there by the pictures, the appeal at the end of the Turgenev quotation rings true: "Perhaps some lines will remain in your heart." Yes.

Brita Stendahl

Cambridge, Ma.

Lars Sund. Lanthandlerskans son. Helsinki. Soderstrom. 1997. 431 pages. ISBN 951-52-1671-0.

Six years after his highly acclaimed magical-realist novel Colorado Avenue (1991; see WLT 66:4, p. 740), Lars Sund has picked up the dangling threads of his emigrant epic to produce a sequel saga, Lanthandlerskans son (The Storekeeper's Son). Again the reader is introduced to the emigrant storekeeper Dollar Hanna and her son, the renowned "Canister King," Otto Nas. However, in the latest novel we are transported to Finland in the 1930s as the country is ravaged by the Depression and the Lapua Movement is promoting fascism.

The story begins explosively as the ninety-four-year-old Otto attacks the color TV in a home for the elderly while the unsuspecting residents are engrossed in an episode of "Dallas." As Sue Ellen screams and J.R. dives for cover behind the Southfork Ranch sofa, the TV bursts into flames, and Otto escapes to his awaiting grandson, who takes him on a journey through the past. Acting as the unreliable narrator, the grandson re-creates his family history during the three-day escape with the aid of photographs, diaries, films, and other documentary evidence. In exchange for his collaborative role in Otto's escape, the grandson expects Otto to complete the family history by revealing what happened during Otto's ten-year disappearance from the Ostrobothnian town of Siklax.

As Otto's story is exposed, the action returns to America, the ever-present backdrop for the narrative. But rather than the Dallas of modern Finland, we return to the days of Scandinavian immigration and hear of Otto's quixotic escapades as a high-class swindler's henchman, a pilot in a flying circus, and finally of his friendship with a Finnish pioneer family. In a narrative dovetail, it is revealed that the father of this family was once a Red Army soldier whose life was spared by Otto. And it is through this family that Otto learns of his acquittal on the charge of murder that precipitated his flight from Finland. Nevertheless, before completion of his tale, Otto again disappears, and his grandson is left to complete the story of Otto's return to Siklax in 1939 as Finland finds itself on the brink of war.

Around the grandson's vicarious narration of Otto's life, Sund has woven the stories of several other family members. From Otto's long-suffering sister Ida and her politically confused, alcoholic husband Gustav, to the pioneering Ostrobothnian Holm brothers who introduce transportation, cinema, and agricultural innovations to the rural Siklax community, these family members provide a unique historical perspective of Finland during the 1920s and 1930s. The authenticity of these historical details is, nevertheless, constantly undermined as the chattering narrator juggles between fact and fiction in a relentless search for his own narrative authority. Elements of magic realism, such as the narrator's interview with the Lapua leader Vihtori Kosola, who supposedly rises from the grave just for the occasion, strengthen the historical details and make of this playful tale a true postmodern masterpiece.

Tanya Thresher

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Birgitta Trotzig. Dubbelheten: Tre sagor. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1998. 137 pages. 232 kr. ISBN 91-0-056492-3.

Birgitta Trotzig is an established Swedish writer with a large and coherent production of metaphysically oriented novels and short stories. Dubbelheten (Doubleness) is a small collection of three tales ("sagor"), all of which deal with the theodicy problem of the human condition: suffering, want, meaninglessness, and death.

The first tale, "Smeden" (The Blacksmith), describes the difficult but creative work of the blacksmith and his failure to communicate with his wife and son. In the father's eye the son's work is never to his liking, even though it is as talented as that of the father. It is different and the son is different. Partly due to this lack of recognition, the son takes to drinking and is found in the snow and presumed dead. In the morgue, however, he revives and flees. People are afraid of this "resurrected" person, and he subsequently lives in isolation-only communicating with the dead-till he dies. The mother, who was overlooked by the father, drowns herself. The blacksmith is now left to communicate with the deceased loved ones.

The second tale, "Pa andra sidan havet" (On the Other Side of the Sea), takes place in Russia during the period before the Revolution. The brief happiness of a young couple with their newborn and a foundling sister is abruptly interrupted when the husband is conscripted into the czar's army. Soon after, their legitimate daughter is taken away for a childless couple in the army. The two girls never find each other again, and their different lives end respectively in a fiery and a frozen death: two meaningless fates.

The last tale, "Dubbelheten" (Doubleness), is perhaps the most compelling story and is related through the powerful image of the indomitable mother. The protagonist is an outsider woman in a mountainous region of Spain during the reign of Franco. She (barely) survives by taking any available work indefatigably and ingeniously. As an outsider and therefore "superfluous" in a fascist society, she finds herself in a precarious position, not least through her continually growing flock of (fatherless) children. Her last child does not live long, and she is finally worn out, living alone on the seashore in a donated beach dress, her children scattered in all directions. She is defeated like all the other characters, but at least her joy of life and courage linger on in the mind of the reader.

The three tales all share the "doubleness" of the title. The exact meaning is ambiguous, but the accounts all point to a hidden and mysterious dimension. In the first selection the double aspect has to do with life and death, and although the son is "resurrected,0" his revival is without redemption; death is predominant. In the second tale, the hidden presence is symbolized by a kind of grotesque Phoenix. The shadow of the bird reappears for the second sister, but again rebirth turns into a confirmation of an all-pervasive death. In both the middle piece and the last one the female protagonist experiences a brief encounter with love, all the more cruel because the budding hope is never fulfilled.

The only redemption of these bleak stories is their lyrical style, their simple and stark beauty. The tales read like prose poems-a rhetorical elegy on the hopelessness and meaninglessness of human existence.

Charlotte Schiander Gray

Berkeley, Ca.

Jacques Werup. Det stora preludiet. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1997. 77 pages. 182 kr. ISBN 91-0-056499-0.

Readers who appreciate Jacques Werup's many-faceted literary oeuvre will surely welcome the verse collection of Det stora preludiet. Werup's attention in recent years has been directed toward fiction, essays, translation, and travel narratives; so a return to the lyric merits attention. His poetry, as he has stressed in various ways, is cut from the same fabric as the rest of his writing but is to be distinguished by a relative accessibility and a readily identifiable inventory of themes.

Although the somewhat cynical tone that permeated earlier works to varying degrees is not particularly prominent in Det stora preludiet, Werup once again explores themes that have occupied his attention for nearly thirty years. The thematic focus of the volume derives from the title and the author's brief commentary on it at the end of the volume. The prelude to which the title refers is Chopin's opus 28, a set of twenty-four preludes for solo piano representing each of the twenty-four major and minor keys, not in the abstract but specifically in a performance by Hans Palsson that Werup heard in 1990. He explains that Palsson's interpretation of the preludes embodied what he had long been trying to express in poetry-i.e., the idea that life is only unfulfilled waiting, though constantly renewed.

The poems are arranged in four groups paralleling common musical performance practice with occasional poems not directly associated with a particular prelude interspersed, most notably a single poem at the end entitled "Dodens ansikte" (The Face of Death). The infinite variety possible in essaying a verbal articulation of musical impressions notwithstanding, Werup's sense of the preludes may well seem arrestingly original, extremely personal, or highly idiosyncratic. The same is true of his reading of the individual pieces: the relationship between a poem and its corresponding prelude is by no means obvious and may in some cases be little more than a formality. Although Werup is deeply sensitive to the music, the profound and intimate sense of musicality in the thinking and poetry of Osten Sjostrand and Tomas Transtromer, for example, is not readily apparent. The most immediate point of comparison, however, is Tobias Berggren's collection of poems entitled 24 romantiska etyder (1987; see WLT 62:2, p. 296), also based on Chopin's opus 28. Whereas Berggren is an unabashedly cerebral poet preoccupied with the complexities of language and its relationship to reality, Werup is more given to a nostalgia and yearning that occasionally veer-perhaps precariously-toward sentimentality. Werup's evocation of Chopin's music in terms of unfulfilled anticipation strikes emotional chords that will elicit a broad sympathetic response as a longing for what could have been but is not.

This is not poetry of profound insight, of social engagement, of richly nuanced formulations, or of powerfully wrought metaphors, but speaks nevertheless with compelling force and emotional commitment. The broad appeal that the volume may well enjoy is a natural function of Werup's extroverted and generally unreserved mode of thinking and expression. Det stora preludiet will command the attention of many, including some who are not entirely seduced by its pathos, by means of its graceful diction and sonorous resonances and is certainly to be greeted as a further manifestation of Werup's unique style of literary and indeed poetic engagement.

Steven P. Sondrup

Brigham Young University

Noted

Gosta Friberg. Varvinterdagar. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1997. 100 pages. 192 kr. ISBN 91-0-056495-8.

Starting out in 1964, Gosta Friberg (b. 1936) has been a faithful composer of lyrics and some translations (Allen Ginsberg, 1964, and Indian poetry, 1972), a production capped by the much-praised novellas of Krigsvintrar (War Winters; 1995; see WLT 70:3, p. 720), in which he takes his young protagonist, Jorgen, through the proletarian Stockholm of those gloomy years. In Varvinterdagar (Late Winter Days) he continues with several of the figures, now dead, of the verses of Sav (Sap; 1989; see WLT 64:4, p. 656) and/or the prose book, his parents and the seamstress friends Ragny Moller and Therese, and adds still others, including the swellingly contoured Aunt Rut, poor little Elsy (an abused playmate), and, in a movingly understated piece, Uncle Jerker. As in the prose book, songs (Cole Porter) and movie references-Dark Victory and, from the early 1950s, Shelley Winters (whose face, according to Friberg's note, "has always had for me some sort of inexplicable magic")-help his reader-contemporaries remember.

Varvinterdagar is nostalgic but too painfully clear to be sentimental, and, understandably enough, tells much about the petty-seeming tragedies of aging: "Holes in the Memory," "In the Queues at the Post Office" ("Perhaps [the old man] dreams he is still standing on the kitchen floor at home"), "Visit to a Ninety-Year-Old Lady" ("When we part, she keeps standing / with the same smile / as before." The new collection contains a good deal else as well: formal experiments (an unrhymed sestina, semi-haikus), the nature poems of "The Woods in Handbord's harad," the jeremiad "In the Cyber City" with its motto from Bo Bergman's "Marionettes," the Bushman dreams of "In the Kalahari Desert" and "The Bushman's Fiddle"; but the family circle and Stockholm are much more likely not to fall through memory's holes.

George C. Schoolfield

Yale University

Lars Lundkvist. Aril. Stockholm. Norstedts. 1998. 62 pages. ISBN 91-1-300423-9.

Thus far, Lars Lundkvist (b. 1928) has produced seventeen verse collections, beginning with Offertrumma (1950). A native of Umea, Lundkvist for a long time made a specialty of Sami themes; his latest little book, however, is broadly North Swedish in its milieus and memories. (Surprisingly, there are a few detours to Helsinki and its environs-an unlovely January in Finland's capital, a walk through the Old Burial Place near the city's center, a recalcitrant outboard motor in the Sibbo skerries.) Mainly, the poems grow out of home ground: see the feigned (or not feigned) letter his mother wrote to a cousin in 1912; a tumbledown barn (in "Varmorgon"), before which, "this Sunday morning in March," a hunter shoots crows and "builds a sarcophagus of dead birds in the snow"; old folks ("the word oldster [gamling] is related to glaciers and blueberry wine, lingonberry twigs and snow"). The title of the collection is particularly apt, the out-of-date aril or "hearth," "an old and cozy word" related to "a miracle-a brimstone butterfly in November." Lundkvist is a poeta minor who has never received much attention; but perhaps his very obscurity fits the fragile quiet of what he says, and shields it from heavy-fingered interpretation.

George C. Schoolfield

Yale University

Toon Tellegen. Dora: Een liefdesgeschiedenis. Amsterdam. Querido. 1998. 177 pages. 29.90 fl. ISBN 90-214-8428-5.

Toon Tellegen has succeeded in publishing a dozen volumes of poetry. Now, at age fifty-eight, he ventures to recount in prose the tribulations of a weird relationship between two idle sixteen-year-olds who live separately in temperate sea-beach quarters. Vink appears imaginative, quirky, injury-prone, and hallucinatory. He and Dora do kiss and hug. She appears gentle, with abbreviated responses, likes to prepare picnic lunches and invite Vink to go share them and swim together. He keeps finding reasons for not accepting her invitations to join her on the sand: "Is love sometimes not combative?"

Verbal virtuosity supports chapters that are brief and uniformly constructed. Each is headed by an adjective whose first letter is one of seventeen different letters of the alphabet! The sadistic, destructive Leenderts keeps appearing to warn Vink, without ever specifying the problem. A small choir rehearses often at the lawn in front of Vink's house. The choirmaster despairs to perfect their sounds so that they reflect his interpretation of the lyrics: "Flowers fade, ships founder, but our love remains always." A pair of boys who regularly peer into Vink's front window are fantastic commentators on his apparent problems.

The book's simple structure is retained throughout. Deliberate repetitions and complex recurrences augment the mystery of inchoate desires. Enhancing his work via stylish typography, Tellegen is an audacious craftsman who sometimes leaves one unsure whether an occurrence is imagined or real. He dims the motivation of some of the behavior of the principals, evidently intending all along to resort ultimately to a trick ending of his inventive plot.

Henri Kops

Fort Bragg, Ca.