Memoirs of a Dead Man (Series B: English Translations of Works of Scandinavian Literature)

Hjalmar Bergman is one of my favorite writers in Sweden, I'm really pleased his book is now in English, only I think the second one. This is a very good story, right at the middle of his writing - after he got really good, but before he started to write his most popular books. So in it you can see what was really important to him, like freedom of will, and how far people are forced to do things because of their background and childhood and inheritance from their family.

This book is a riddle - you see different characters doing the same things, but in new ways and in new places. Grandfathers, fathers, sons, uncles - same questions affect all of them, and some do right, some do wrong, some go crazy! Actually it is a very funny book, but in a way that is hard to say - Bergman is a very ironic writer, with a comical sense of the world.

I hope there will be more books by this writer in English, so I can show my English friends how good he is!

A remarkable novel by an unjustly neglected author (3/4 people found this helpful)

It's practically impossible to find anything by this Swedish author in English, but at last one of his most important novels is available in a new translation. It's a great read, with a labyrinthine plot centring upon a family curse, played out over several generations: the sins of the fathers really are visited upon the sons of the two branches of this family, as they seem doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forefathers. There are some great scenes, reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's 'Fanny and Alexander', and some very haunting passages - a ghostly gatekeeper at an upper-class brothel in fin-de-siecle Hamburg, some disastrous (and very funny) family gatherings in Sweden, and a biting satire on the quack-medicine business in America. Yet somehow it all hangs together, as the main characters all find themselves drawn to Hamburg, acting out the curse once more at a climactic masked ball.

If the sign of a good novel is that it keeps replaying in your mind once you've read it, then this is good! I can't work out what it reminds me of - Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks? Dickens' Bleak House? Gogol's Dead Souls? There's a bit of all of them in here, and quite a few others. Once you get past the info-dump of the first section (lots of important background information) you'll be hooked...

Memoirs of a Dead Man (Series B: English Translations of Works of Scandinavian Literature)

Hjalmar Bergman

Reader Reviews:

a very good writer from Sweden (1/1 people found this helpful)

A remarkable novel by an unjustly neglected author (3/4 people found this helpful)

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