Short stories
Sensitiva Amorosa
Ola Hansson · 1887
Opening lines
Jag har nu icke mer än ett enda intresse kvar: att studera och njuta könet.
I now have only one interest left: to study and enjoy sex.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
Nine sketches on love and what undoes it. The narrator announces at the outset that only one interest remains to him: to study sex and to enjoy it. There follow cases in which an insignificant detail kills an attachment: a young girl discovers in the man she loves a trait that reminds her of her hated father, and her love dies; a young man realises that his fiancée resembles an infanticide he saw being led to court. Other pages are set on the shore of Lake Lucerne, and throughout, desire is mingled with disgust and anxiety.
Context
The publishers, uneasy about the quarrel over morals then agitating Sweden, held back: the author found the printer Hans Österling only with difficulty, and the collection appeared in November 1887. Swedish critics overwhelmed it: the reviewer of the Aftonbladet saw in it the product of a depraved imagination, and Gustaf Fröding was one of the few to defend it. Its author left Sweden two years later. Translated into Danish and German in 1890, and joined to the sequel Parias under the title of tales of fate, it found in Germany, thanks to the translations of Laura Marholm, the public that Sweden refused it. A second Swedish edition appeared in 1902, and Paul Norlén translated it into English in 2002.
Who it is for
Nine short texts, in Swedish; one must accept a prose of sensations, in which psychological analysis takes the place of plot. An English translation exists.
Prizes and reception
The decadent collection that caused a scandal in the Sweden of 1887, and which Germany received better than its own country did.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.