Novel
Guds vackra värld
Not translated into English
Martin Koch · 1916
Opening lines
Där ligger Norrsjön, bred över det järngråa vattnet, stränderna resa sig med högburna, mörka skogar längst uppåt nordkanten.
There lies Norrsjön, broad over its iron-grey water, its shores rising with lofty, dark forests up along the northern edge.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
The novel opens on the parish of Hobo, which its church, set between two lakes, divides in two: to the north the woods and the thieves, to the south the big farms of the faithful, from which the peasant's son Tomas Eliasson sets out one June evening to ask a young woman to marry him. The other thread follows Frasse Karlsson-Gyllenhjelm, whom petty thefts and frequenting Stockholm's homosexual circles have led to crime: blackmail, expedients, flight on a ship, then, on his return, the police on his heels and the dream of a settled life and a great deal of money.
Context
The novel appeared in 1916 from Bonnier, in two volumes, with the subtitle “a story of the just and the unjust”. In the foreword, dated October, the author says he received a bundle of notebooks in which a criminal had written his own life, partly in prison, and that he reconstructed his character's course from them, also consulting criminal psychology; he warns that this character is meant only for mature readers. It is the last of the three great novels he wrote between 1912 and 1917, in which a realism of milieu inherited from Zola joins a religious passion in the spirit of Dostoevsky. It was reissued in the Bonnierbiblioteket in 1964; the text is online at Litteraturbanken.
Who it is for
A long novel in two volumes, in Swedish, dark and harsh; it has been translated into neither French nor English.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's principal work, and as a milestone of the working-class novel in Sweden.
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The pages consulted to check this page.