The Parable Book - Hardcover

Olov Enquist, Per

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857059912 ISBN 13: 9780857059918

Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2016

Synopsis

"The love that dare not speak its name . . ."

Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of?

Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write.

This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film.

Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

About this title

About the Authors

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.

Deborah Bragan-Turner is a translator of Swedish literature, and a former bookseller and academic librarian. She studied Scandinavian Languages at University College, London, and her translations include works by Per Olov Enquist and Sara Stridsberg.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacLehose Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857059912
• ISBN 13: 9780857059918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240