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Loading... Sorgemusik för frimurare (Funeral Music For Free Masons) (1983)by Lars Gustafsson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I really have no idea how to rate this novel; familiarity with the culture and the time in which it was written probably would have gone a long way in helping me determine what to say about it. Still, the questions throughout about where the years go; how we interact with ourselves and others; how and why we come to be where and who and how we are, especially as products of a certain time and place-- all of those inquiries, I would wager, are widespread enough to make this book a valuable read for anyone. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Lars Gustafsson's Funeral Music for Freemasons (1983), the Swedish writer's fifth book of fiction to be translated into English, follows the lives of three free spirits of the 1950s, from their aspiring student years in Stockholm to their present realities, so different from their youthful imaginings. Jan Bohman, a brilliant poet become smalltime African merchant - a latterday Rimbaud - is about to be deported from Senegal. Hans (Hasse" to his friends), an idealistic research physicist, is now a professor at Harvard, leading the protected surburban life of an American academic. Ann-Marie Nohme, the promising Mozartean soprano in the bonds of whose love both men agonized, has had a failed career in a provincial repertory. How could so much talent have come to so little? Was there something in the Sweden of their youth, and by extension the whole of the industrial West, that prefigured the death of creativity? Or might it have been spent, drained away in love's passion? Then again, perhaps these years never did in facthappen, memory following one time-line, existence another, so that their real lives seem to have gone unlived. With his customary psychological delicacy and philosophical aplomb, Lars Gustafsson has composed a novel in Funeral Music for Freemasons that, like the Mozart Trauermusik the title invokes, sings a moving dirge for an age. " No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.7Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Swedish literatureLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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