Sweetness
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
No doubt about it, Lindgren has joined the ranks of the greatest writers" Michel Crepu, La Croix
The woman had come from a city in the south to lecture in a small village amid the snowbound forests of northern Sweden. She was a writer. After the lecture in the village hall an old man who had been sleeping at the back introduced himself, as she was to be his guest for the night. So it was that she moved in with Hadar, a man who lived on his own and was in the last stages of cancer. Not another house in sight, save for one just a field away; there lived Hadar's brother Olof, also on his own, and dying of heart disease. Neither brother would consent to die, the woman discovered, for that would give the other the satisfaction of outliving him.
Cut off by a snow blizzard, the woman settles into Hadar's attic, leaving only to pick her way across to Olof's, and in the days that follows she acts as both nurse and confessor to each of them. She learns of the woman they shared and the son of disputed paternity, uncovering the tissue of lies and self-deceptions that keeps the ailing brothers alive in a bond of mutual loathing. Ultimately to her roles of nurse and confessor she adds a third: the hand of Providence . . .
The author of The Way of a Serpent and Light is one of Sweden's outstanding practitioners of black humour. In Sweetness he has achieved a work of brilliant comic invention.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guilt, resentment and rivalry animate Lindgren's sparkling parable, a darkly humorous tale of two brothers and the tangled ties that bind them. In the remote reaches of northern Sweden, an unnamed traveling writer and lecturer on saints finds lodging in the home of Hadar, an elderly man dying of cancer. Although she plans to stay with Hadar for only one night, a blizzard extends her visit, and she becomes his caretaker. Hadar's brother, Olof, as obese as Hadar is thin, lives a field away and is dying of heart disease. It is only their hatred for each other that keeps the two alive. As winter turns to spring, and the writer still remains, she becomes a conduit for their acrimonious communication. It's a tangled web concerning Minna, the woman they both loved; Lars, the son they both claimed; and the hatred born when Lars and Minna died. Alternating Hadar and Olof's story with the account she is writing of St. ChristopherDshe hopes to capture the essence of both the legendary saint and the putative real personDthe writer explores the nature of human duality. The brilliance of this novel, in Geddes's elegant and seamless translation, is its ability to gracefully present an ironic and gripping account of sibling competition while, on a deeper level, grappling with the structure of love, personality and relationships. Lindgren (The Way of the Serpent; Light) is one of Sweden's most renowned writers of literary fiction, a fabulist who translates contemporary dilemmas into tongue-in-cheek folktales.
