The Wandering Pine: Life as a Novel

Description

The Wandering Pine starts off in a little green house in the Vasterbotten province of northern Sweden. It ends with Enquist's return, both to writing and to another kind of life, after several despondent years. The pages in between describe -with humour, warmth and endless wonderment -his rise, his fall and his redemptive resurgence. Enquist spends much of his adult life travelling and living abroad -Berlin, New York, Paris, Copenhagen. But the success that has skyrocketed him to fame as a Swedish author and world-renowned playwright tears him apart inside. He walks around in an impenetrable fog, barely able write a letter, much less a novel. He dashes from one form of escape, one well-intentioned hell, to the next. Finally he finds his way back, to writing and to life.

Per Olov Enquist was born in 1934 in a small village in Norrland, the northern part of Sweden. He is one of Sweden's leading contemporary writers, both as a novelist and a playwright. He has twice won the August Prize for fiction, the most prestigious Swedish literary prize, and was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Visit of the Royal Physician.

One of the contemporary novel's greatest human investigators - Paul Binding, Independent A deeply impressive book. It is strictly restrained and musically flowing, in perfect musical balance with its subject, written in a rhythmic manner, darkly serious, but also ruggedly humorous. Despite a bubbling excess of events, the direction is clear - down into the darkness, in towards the core - Expressen