Summary
"Do you know what bottle is called in Hebrew?" he asks. "It's called baqbuk from the gurgling sound it makes when you pour. Did you know the Swedish word for pain, smSrta, is similar to the Russian word for death - smert?"
[Lars Gustafsson] was born in Västerås, a city in central Sweden, in 1936. He studied at Uppsala University and at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was awarded his Ph.D. in Theoretical Philosophy in 1978. Along the way, Gustafsson has picked up a number of prizes and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow of Poetry in 1994 and the Italian Una vita per Ia Letteratura in 1989, and he is a member of several academies, like Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering. And though a heavy intellectuality is present in many of his books, it never weighs down the plot. Above all, Gustafsson is a masterful storyteller, an internationally celebrated writer whose books have been translated into over 20 languages. What few Americans know is that they, too, in a way, can claim him as theirs: Lars Gustafsson spent over twenty years in a fruitful exile, teaching philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Only last year did he return to Sweden. It's hard to picture Gustafsson, who seems such an Old World kind of soul, in Texas, that sun-drenched land of armadillos, rodeos and big hair, but his stay there was a happy one."It's a book about pain. It describes a journey into the center where pain rules, and pain can tolerate no rivals," Gustafsson explains. "Myself, I haven't really experienced much pain beyond the occasional dentist's visit, but the idea was to write something in a very minimalist way. Many artists and composers work like that. It was a hard book to write but I still wrote it fairly quickly."See the full content of this document
Extract
How Do You Do, Herr Gustafsson?
When one of Sweden's leading men of letters - the prolific and highly acclaimed Lars Gustafsson - vacationed in New York some time ago, Nordic Reach asked for a meeting at Gustafsson's hotel, the posh mid-town Algonquin.
"This is where they all met, the famous members of the literary Round ...See the full content of this document
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