The Wandering Pine: Life as a Novel
A memoir that traces the road from youth to a literary life through fragments of memory. Illness, family, politics, and a stubborn devotion to writing accumulate into the portrait of a single life.
Work Information
The farther memory goes, the sharper the shape of a life becomes.
This memoir follows not only the start of a writing career but also the way illness, loneliness, and desire for creation gathered over time. It reads as a personal history with the force of major Scandinavian autobiography.
Review Summaries
-
Readers praise the way private memory is shaped into a work that joins pain with literary control. The non-linear telling can also feel distant to some readers.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Quercus Publishing
- Published
- 2018-07-24
- Pages
- 400 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.02 x 2.54 x 19.69 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781780870199
- ISBN-10
- 1780870191
- Price
- 3254 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Biographical
What was it about Hjoggböle, a farming village in the northernmost part of Sweden, that created so many idiots - and writers? There was nothing to indicate that P.O. Enquist would be stricken by an addiction to writing. Nothing in his family - honest, hardworking people. Not a trace of poetry. And yet he worked his way, via journalism, novels and plays, to the centre of Swedish politics and cultural life. His books garnered prize after prize. His plays ran for decades and premiered on Broadway. Why then, living with a new wife in Paris, does he hole up in their palatial Champes-Élysées apartment, talking only to his cat? How is it that he wakes to find himself in an uncoupled carriage on a railway siding in Hamburg, two - or was it three? - days after the first-night party finished? And what is it that drives him to run shoeless through the deep January snow of an Icelandic plain, leaving the lights of the drying out clinic far behind? Narrating in the third person, as if he were merely a character in the eventful, perplexing and ultimately triumphantly redemptive drama of his own life, P.O. Enquist is as elliptical as Karl Ove Knausgaard is exhaustive. Clear-eyed, rueful, written with elegance and humour, this is the singular story of a remarkable man.
Per Olov Enquist was born in 1934 in a small village in Norrland, the northern part of Sweden. He is one of Sweden's leading contemporary writers, both as a novelist and a playwright. He has twice won the August Prize for fiction, the most prestigious Swedish literary prize, and was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Visit of the Royal Physician .
Reviews
-
From village life to cosmoplitan
Like so many biographical books the early formative years are usually the most enjoyable. Pre-war village life and life during the second world war were very interesting. And although the later years life drifted the prose ws excellent the story telling sublime.
-
Five Stars
thank you
-
Five Stars
very good descriptive writer, held my attention, couldn't put book down, very emotive.
-
Very satisfied.
Very quick delivery. Very satisfied.
Related Literary Awards
- August Prize Edition 20 (2008) ・Winner