The Art of Flight

Description

Two more tales of memory, nature, travel and collecting from the author of the Swedish bestseller The Fly Trap Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started. In this follow-up to The Fly Trap, Sj berg continues to explore the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world. In these two tales, he calls on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and follows the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the United States. From Stockholm to the Grand Canyon, Sj berg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

Fredrik Sj berg collects hoverflies on the island of Runmar , in the archipelago east of Stockholm. He is also a literary critic, translator, cultural columnist and the author of several books, including The Fly Trap and The Raisin King, which form a trilogy with The Art of Flight.

Digressive, discursive and delightful. -- Michael Kerr * Telegraph * A joy . . . Fredrik Sjoeberg's best-selling memoir The Fly Trap marked him as a maestro of the episodic. Here, he completes a trilogy. * Nature * By his own admission Sjoeberg has a "butterfly mind"; the effect of his narrative excursions amounts to a sort of Sebald-lite, albeit without the fictional element. What insures this approach against triviality is the author's patient alertness to pattern, to telling correspondence. -- Nat Segnit * Times Literary Supplement * Delightful, at once informative and often humorously digressive . . . a humane man of wide-ranging curiosity, Sjoeberg writes with infectious passion. * Independent *