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Title: Sprickorna i muren by Lars Gustafsson ISBN: 9-1183157-2-0 Publisher: Norstedt Format: Unknown Binding

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Includes one of the foremost Swedish 20th-century novels
Comment: This is a collection of five novels by Lars Gustafsson, in which he tried to deal with his time (the seventies) from different perspectives. Gustafsson is highly productive and quite uneven, but at least two of the novels in this volume deserve a place amongst the best swedish fiction of the century.

Yllet (The Woolen) is a piece of social realism, but without the dogmatism and dullness that quite often go into works of this swedish "national genre". The story is about a high school maths teacher in a small town lost deep in the woods, and his efforts to help a young math genius to a career and to understand why he is really bothering with anything at all. The setting is extremely suggestive: you can really feel the hoplessness and emotional poverty of life in this all-to-typical swedish countryside town.

And yet, Gustafsson manages to make it an absorbing read, mainly through the richness in philosophical observations and interesting personalities portrayed throghout.

En biodlares död (Death of a beekeeper) is a different sort of novel. It is about a middle-aged man dying from cancer in a litte house of his own in the same god-forgotten countryside. Paradoxically, and as opposed to Yllet, it is filled with hope and positivity. We are invited to follow how, in the lasts months of his life, the main character comes to grips with his life and what is important. As always with Gustafsson, the story is filled with apparently meaningless digressions, which combine to make more than a few philosophical and existential insights and questions. In the end, the novel leaves the realistic vein altogether.