Novel
The Book about the Little Brother
Boken om lille-bror
Gustaf af Geijerstam · 1900
Opening lines
Hela denna bok är en bok om döden, och dock handlar den, synes det mig, mera om lycka än om olycka.
This whole book is a book about death, and yet it is, it seems to me, more about happiness than about unhappiness.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
“Once upon a time there was a writer who lived happily with his wife and his three children”, so happily that he did not realise it, and who wrote books about the misfortune of others. He believed he could ward off all evil; the only enemy he had never measured himself against was death. He tells in the first person of his marriage to Elsa, the two eldest, Olof and Svante, and the youngest, Sven, who is called Nenne. He remembers an evening when his wife showed him in the Bible the curse of bearing children in pain, before going to bend over the little one's bed.
Context
The book carries the subtitle “a novel of a marriage”, and its foreword calls it a book about death that nevertheless speaks more of happiness than of unhappiness. The author wrote it after losing his youngest son. It appeared in 1900 and was by far his greatest commercial success; the author's first wife died the same year. The novel passed into English in 1921, under the title The Book about the Little Brother. The Swedish text is now online at Project Gutenberg and at Litteraturbanken.
Who it is for
A short novel, in Swedish, in which the narrator speaks of his own family; there is an old English translation, none in French.
Prizes and reception
Reissued at least twelve times in Sweden, and one of only two novels by its author translated into English.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.