Tua Forsström – I Studied Once At A Wonderful Faculty

As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.

I Studied Once At a Wonderful Faculty is a trilogy comprising Snow Leopard (1987), The Parks (1992) and After Spending a Night Among Horses (1997), coupled with a new cycle of poems, Minerals. Forsström’s poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.

The translation of After Spending a Night Among Horses is by Stina Katchadourian.

‘Icy intensity…aphoristic as well as mystical…a fragility that is wholly particular…Forsström’s visions of loneliness and despair are tempered by a lyrical pluckiness…the tenderness of snow’ – Adam Thorpe, Observer.

‘Tua Forsström’s poems give a sense of having crystallised under a great pressure…a survey of the landscape of grief, exercises in renunciation and in the affirmation of loss of love, sexuality and communion with others…She belongs to a tradition that includes Rilke, Hölderlin, Paul Celan and the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’ – Claes Andersson.

‘Forsström has a superb ability to use the everyday and the practical to get closer to the most complicated elements of life. Her language constantly goes through changes allowing the usual meanings of the words to be replaced by new insights which are a kind of magic ritual. Just like a Native American shaman, she can surely bring forth rain with her poetry if she wishes’ – Gustaf Widén, Hofvustadsbladet.

Bo Carpelan – Urwind

“…it is the story-teller’s name Daniel Urwind, in whom is focused a wealth of literary and artistic allusions and antecedents that include the Merz-Bau of Kurt Schwitters, the paintings of Cézanne and the fiction of Kafka.”

In Urwind, on the face of it a simple tale of a Helsinki antiquarian bookseller whose wife has left him, there is a complex layering of experience, past and present. The telling is more a matter of inner than outer events –  intimate, rapt.

In the `ur-vind’, or primordial attic, are stored not only relics from the story-teller’s past, but also memories of the neighbours, friends and relations who inhabited the apartment house in which he was brought up. The `ur-vind’ is also the cosmic wind, blowing from beyond the reassuring walls of houses and apartments. And it is the story-teller’s name Daniel Urwind, in whom is focused a wealth of literary and artistic allusions and antecedents that include the Merz-Bau of Kurt Schwitters, the paintings of Cézanne and the fiction of Kafka.

Snow

A beautifully measured, Breughelesque gem of a novel.

Jakob Törn, a frustrated and becalmed small-town apothecary in Sweden in 1718, finds himself called upon to cope with an influx of starving soldiers from a defeated army, and then to help with the embalming of his own dead monarch.  Winner of the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, it was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.

Martin Birck’s Youth

A modern translation of Hjalmar Söderberg’s classic novel first published in 1901.

Martin Birck’s Youth is a book rich in fin-de-siècle themes: melancholy, eroticism and decadence abound. The Stockholm depicted here is a haunting city of shadows and snowstorms, suppressed passion and loneliness. The novel traces the development of the title character from a seemingly idyllic childhood to maturity as a thirty-year-old man, an introspective outsider, critical of society, constantly searching for the truth but going through a gradual process of disillusionment.

Trier on von Trier

City of Light

Swedish literary critic Maria Schottenius describes City lof Light as one of the greatest Swedish fiction projects of the twentieth century, structured as a mandala and particularly effective if read as interwoven with a Jungian process of individuation.

Anne-Marie is a middle-aged woman returning to the Swedish town where she grew up to sell the old house she has inherited from her father. Memories of the past are everywhere, ensnaring her.

Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism

April Witch

April Witch was Majgull Axelsson’s breakthrough novel in 1997, and still ranks among her best and most beloved. From her hospital bed, Desirée follows her sisters seeking the life she feels was stolen from her. Thought-provoking and spellbinding.

Born severely disabled and without the ability to walk or talk, Desirée is an “April Wtich,” clairvoyant and omniscient and cable of following the world through the eyes of both other people and animals. Addressing the themes of mother-daughter relationships, competition between women and the shortcomings of the post-war Swedish welfare state, April witch is a thrilling, fascinating story.

The Spring

The children of the characters from Witches’ Rings move toward adulthood and Tora and Frida toward middle age, as the reader is drawn into this narrative of life in early twentieth-century Sweden.

The second volume of the Women and the City tetralogy, The Spring follows the women the reader encountered in Witches’ Rings, mainly through the years between the World Wars.

Witches’ Rings

The lives of working class women and children are followed here, rather than the lives of the wealthy and powerful, in a small Swedish community. The tetralogy continues until the 1970s, covering a full century.

Kerstin Ekman, one of the foremost living Swedish authors, began what became a tetralogy commonly referred to as Women in the City, with this volume in 1997. it opens in the 1870s, and follows the women of a small community as it grows, thanks to the advent of the railroad, among other changes.