Novel
The Flight of the Eagle
Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd
Per-Olof Sundman · 1967
Synopsis
In 1897, on Spitsbergen, the engineer Salomon August Andrée is preparing to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon with the photographer Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel, who has come to replace Nils Ekholm, who gave up the year before for lack of confidence in the venture's safety. It is Frænkel who narrates, as in the diary he never kept. We see the preparations, the trailing ropes Andrée invented to steer the balloon, the gas leaks he refuses to take seriously, the pressure of the public and the newspapers, then the Eagle's departure to the north.
Context
The novel rests on documents: the remains of the three men were found in 1930 on the island of Kvitøya, thirty-three years after their departure, with their diaries and films that could still be developed. Its author worked on it from 1964 to the summer of 1967 and the following year gathered the documents he had assembled in a separate volume. The book offers one of the first public reassessments of the expedition leader, until then regarded as a hero: he becomes a cynical dreamer, a prisoner of his fixed ideas and of the taste for sensation of his time. Printed eleven times as early as 1967, it was translated into French and English, and in 1982 Jan Troell made a film from it with Max von Sydow.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred and eighty pages, in Swedish, French or English. It is written for a reader who knows that the expedition really took place.
Prizes and reception
Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1968 and the Litteraturfrämjandet grand prize for the novel; its author's greatest success.
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