Stig Dagerman (1923–1954)

Uno scrittore tormentato e semi-sconosciuto e una serie di racconti bellissimi e tragici, per i quali la sola idea di lieto fine è da considerarsi offensiva. Personaggi dai contorni netti, lucidissimi nel loro male di vivere, soprattutto i bambini, che sono piccoli solo nell'età ma non nella comprensione dell'orrore in cui si trovano a vivere.

Written in 1948, this Swedish classic typifies Nordic literature in its sparse darkness and tension throughout.

This slim novel begins on the day of the protagonist's mother's funeral. She is a woman who was generally not well liked by neighbours or family, but as his mother the young man loved her and is bereft by her loss. As the novel develops, his grief and confusion is heightened as his father brings the woman he was having an affair with whilst his wife was still alive into the young show more man's life, and he becomes bent on getting his revenge on his father and his lover.

The first part of the novel I found to be quite difficult as the grief of the young man is pronounced and makes for bleak reading, but it slowly begins to reveal itself as a novel of some brilliance. Dagerman keeps the reader in an enthralled state of tension as the young man becomes more and more erratic and unreliable in thought and action as he tries to make sense of his grief and his confused feelings towards his father, his father's lover and his own fiancee.Through his thoughts, Dagerman explores the complexity of love and hate and how they are inextricably linked as two sides of the same coin.

Sadly Dagerman took his own life in his early 30s, and it feels as if some of his own wrestlings with life seep their way into the inner turmoil of the protagonist as he tries to make sense of what is unfolding around him.

4 stars - a dark and gripping novel that keeps you tense throughout. show less

I’ve read embarrassingly little by Dagerman, one of the great Swedish modernists - especially since his work seems so much like exactly what I loved about literature in my early twenties. Indeed, I think the fact that Dagerman is the kind of writer to appeal to young people – angsty, existential and mystic – has sometimes given him a sturm und drang label that is a bit unfair. Much like that thin, dark jewish clerk from Prague by the way, who obviously influenced him a lot.

The Games of show more might is a collection of short stories, starting out in psychological realism but moving into a more and more strange landscape as the book progresses: expressionistic and sometimes surreal. Most of the stories are very good, and I have favorites of very different kinds. “Var är min Islandströja?” is probably the most well known in this collection, and this inner monologue by a young man getting drunk the night before his father’s funeral, even though he promised not to, is really a masterpiece. I also loved the enigmatic puzzle that was “Mannen from Milesia”, a strange tale about falling to the bottom of society that reminded me of a David Lynch film. The story about a man suddenly losing all his friends due to his son taking up smoking a meerschaum pipe was deliciously odd too, and the story about the child punishing a friend for eating a sandwich he didn’t even want is heart-wrenching. A few stories are slippery and over-stylized though, and I never find my way into them.

All in all, I’m very glad I finally got around to reading this. But I suppose I would have loved it even more if I’d read it twelve years ago – when I bought this book… show less

I was surprised by "A Moth to a Flame". I had read another work by Dagerman ("Island of the Doomed") and enjoyed it a great deal (5 stars) but it didn't prepare me for this currently reviewed work. This work stunned me. The prose is deceptively simple but the power of the prose is overwhelming.

We are slowly drawn into the emotional life of the main character (Bengt). What at first seems to be a quirky but fundamentally understandable emotional life leads us into an increasingly uneasy show more place. The author toys with our initial empathy. As the title implies we become more and more anxious about where this is headed. We have become the ones who are at risk. The conclusion finally releases us but doesn't completely heal the pain of our journey.

Dagerman's work is masterful. He manages our mood in addition to the plot with a simplicity which disguises it's power. We find, despite our fears, we must read more. A remarkable talent and an equally remarkable novel. show less