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God's Widow
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16273 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1989 |
3,905 Words |
| Author
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Frank Gado
Frank Gado is the author of The Passion of Ingmar Bergman.
Gunilla Gado is the translator of all excerpts used in this
review. |
ANKAN
The Widow
by Sven Delblanc
Sweden: Roman Bonniers, 1988
(Available in Swedish only)
A relatively tiny population that has produced few writers of international reputation has not greatly hindered Sweden in the competition for the Nobel Prize in literature. Sweden has accumulated almost as many as the United States, which has about thirty times more people; among European nations, it has been outdone only by France. Every quarter-century period has seen the Swedish Academy honor at least one countryman. It is highly likely, therefore, that King Carl Gustav XVI will be awarding a medal to a Swedish writer before the end of the next decade. But who? Unless the Academy smashes tradition to give the prize to Ingmar Bergman--a much rumored possibility--the odds favor a shy, 57-year old elf with a Vandyke beard who has made pessimistic prognoses for humanity his specialty.
Sven Delblanc remains little known beyond Scandinavia's borders, despite translations of his books into eighteen languages. Within Sweden, he is generally acknowledged as the nation's outstanding man of letters. That eminence partly owes to his position on the humanistic faculty of the University of Uppsala (a well-regarded scholar, he is one of the two principal editors of a multivolume history of Swedish literature currently being issued), but it has chiefly been won through a marvelously inventive body of fiction that he has been building with better than biennial regularity since 1963, when he made his novelistic debut with Eremikraftan (The Hermit
... (1968 of 23961 Characters)
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