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Children's Island (Paperback)
P.C. Jersild; Translated by Joan Tate; Afterword by Ross Shideler
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R642
Discovery Miles 6 420
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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First published in Sweden in 1976, "Children's Island" increased
the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild.
The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone,
has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and
Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of
Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in
some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye,"
"Children's Island" is told from the point of view of a
ten-year-old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in "not" going to
summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty,
sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy
he needs to find the answers to life's dilemmas. He lulls his
divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the
task of supporting his love for McDonald's hamburgers. What he
finds in Stockholm--a kind of Children's Island all its own--is a
series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define
contemporary society. It's a society of isolation, violence, and
aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening
to Reine's psyche and well-being than the changes taking place
within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and
that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the
world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the
Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls
"Children's Island" "an extremely entertaining, extremely funny,
and very serious book."
Ross Shideler offers an in-depth introduction to the works of Per
Olov Enquist and discusses the writer's central themes and the
imagery and motifs he uses to develop them. This in-depth study
begins with a brief introduction to the social and literary
backgrounds that are the foundations for Enquist's writing. His
work is presented in chronological fashion beginning with his early
psychological novels written in the tradition of the French nouveau
roman and proceeding to his highly regarded documentary novels and
popular plays. Shideler traces Enquist's fascination with modern
man's isolation and his attempt to find connections in history to
explain the dilemma. Other psychological, social, and political
themes are examined and analyzed in this first critical study
concentrating entirely on Enquist's work.
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