Death of a Beekeeper

Gustafsson, Lars

Harvill Press

The Death of a Beekeeper

Collins, Harvill

A Tiler's Afternoon

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Harvill

When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, “What makes a good poem?” Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer. The fifteen poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry from the 1640s, at the beginning of the Period of Great Power, to the late twentieth century. Poets as diverse as Skogekär Bergbo, Erik Johan Stagnelius, August Strindberg, and Vilhelm Ekelund are discussed from historical, psychological, and sociopolitical viewpoints. However, Gustafsson includes only those poems he considers excellent. Each essay begins with a presentation of the poem both in Swedish and in English translation. Gustafsson’s analyses are built upon his subjective experiences with poems and poets and upon a more objective structural approach that investigates the actual machinery of the poems. Thus, Gustafsson enlightens us with his always imaginative, sometimes daring analyses, and we learn a great deal about the critic himself in the process. One of his main concerns is what he calls, in his discussion of Edith Södergran, the very mysteriousness of human existence. Time and again, Gustafsson emphasizes the enigmatic, arcane aspects of life in his analyses. In contrast, his vocabulary and approach also bespeak a constant interest in science and technology. In his introduction, Robert T. Rovinsky, the volume’s translator, presents examples of Gustafsson’s various thematic interests as voiced in his poems, several of which are translated here for the first time. While “The Machines” explores his theory of people as automatons and “Conversation between Philosophers” his linguistic pessimism, Gustafsson’s work as a whole shows his enchantment with its major theme: the intrinsic mystery of life.

Forays into Swedish poetry

Poetry

University of Texas Press

A retired schoolteacher, dying of cancer, refuses to go to a hospital and remains at his home in the Swedish countryside, where he records his daily thoughts as the disease progresses

The Death of a Beekeeper (English and Swedish Edition)

Literary

New Directions

The celebrated Swedish author's American debut, The Death of a Beekeeper is a gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. 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."

The Death of a Beekeeper: Novel

American college life is satirized in the story of the comic experiences of a Swedish professor teaching at the University of Texas

The Tennis Players (English and Swedish Edition)

King Sigismund, the seventeenth-century Polish monarch, learns how to live simultaneously in the past, present, and the future

Sigismund: Novel

King Sigismund, the seventeenth-century Polish monarch, learns how to live simultaneously in the past, present, and the future

Sigismund: From the Memories of a Baroque Polish Prince (English and Swedish Edition)

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gustafsson, Lars. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gustafsson, Lars

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gustafsson, Lars. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Death of a Beekeeper

The Death of a Beekeeper

A Tiler's Afternoon

Forays into Swedish poetry

The Death of a Beekeeper (English and Swedish Edition)

The Death of a Beekeeper: Novel

The Tennis Players (English and Swedish Edition)

The Tennis Players (English and Swedish Edition)

Sigismund: Novel

Sigismund: From the Memories of a Baroque Polish Prince (English and Swedish Edition)