Novel
The Enchanted Way
Den förtrollade vägen
Oscar Parland · 1953
Synopsis
Riki is five and spends the summer with his family and a crowd of relatives in a house on the Karelian Isthmus, at a time when the country was still Russian and refugees from the revolution were pouring in. The shy child, surrounded by uncles, aunts and a grandmother each more eccentric than the last, loses himself in reveries where animal creatures mingle with what really happens. What he sees and what he imagines flow together, between tale and truth.
Context
It came eight years after a first novel and was its author's breakthrough, immediately praised by the critics. It opens a sequence on Riki's childhood, continued in 1962 and completed by two posthumous volumes, in 2001 and 2003: it rests on the reconstruction of the very first memories, and partly on those of the author. Eeva-Liisa Manner translated it into Finnish; it also exists in English and in German. Benedict Zilliacus adapted it for Finnish television, where Åke Lindman directed it in 1986, with the author as the voice of the narrator.
Who it is for
A short novel, in Swedish. One must accept never knowing more than the child, and a demanding sentence.
Prizes and reception
Svenska Dagbladet literary prize in 1953, and regarded as a central book of modern Swedish-language prose in Finland.