Novel
Lacemaker Lekholm Has an Idea
Snörmakare Lekholm får en idé
Gustaf Hellström · 1927
Opening lines
Man närmade sig Sverge.
They were nearing Sweden.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
Karl Lekholm, who has become Dr Charles Holmes abroad, returns after twenty years away for the birthday of his father and his grandfather, and while waiting goes back over the story of his family. It all begins with the grandfather, a passementerie maker in a garrison town in Scania, who fought in the Danish army at Kolding and tells the story of that battle to people who laugh at it. Married to Augusta, from a more refined background, he gets it into his head that his sons will take the school-leaving examination and that the family will move up a notch. The novel follows this idea over nearly a century.
Context
The novel tells how one rises in society and how many generations it takes. The author sets the action in his native town, without naming it, and partly draws on the figure of his father, a stern non-commissioned officer; the Kolding episode, in 1849, rests on authentic documents. He finished the book before leaving again for London in 1927. Its success was immediate: three editions in the first year, a fourth in 1929, six more from 1934 to 1940. It was translated into Danish in 1928, into English in 1930 by F. H. Lyon, then into German in 1939.
Who it is for
More than five hundred pages in Swedish, about three hundred and fifty in English; one must be willing to follow an entire family over three generations. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the masterpiece of its author, and presented in Sweden as the classic novel of social mobility.
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