"The love that dare not speak its name . . ." 
Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of?
Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write.
This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film.
Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

The Parable Book

Literature & Fiction

Olov Enquist, Per

Literary

Quercus Publishing

<div> What was it about Hjoggböle, a farming village in the northernmost part of Sweden, that created so many idiots - and writers? There was nothing to indicate that P.O. Enquist would be stricken by an addiction to writing. Nothing in his family - honest, hardworking people. Not a trace of poetry. And yet he worked his way, via journalism, novels and plays, to the centre of Swedish politics and cultural life. His books garnered prize after prize. His plays ran for decades and premiered on Broadway. Why then, living with a new wife in Paris, does he hole up in their palatial Champes-Élysées apartment, talking only to his cat? How is it that he wakes to find himself in an uncoupled carriage on a railway siding in Hamburg, two - or was it three? - days after the first-night party finished? And what is it that drives him to run shoeless through the deep January snow of an Icelandic plain, leaving the lights of the drying out clinic far behind? Narrating in the third person, as if he were merely a character in the eventful, perplexing and ultimately triumphantly redemptive drama of his own life, P.O. Enquist is as elliptical as Karl Ove Knausgaard is exhaustive. Clear-eyed, rueful, written with elegance and humour, this is the singular story of a remarkable man. </div>

The Wandering Pine: Life as a Novel

Genre Fiction

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Books by Olov Enquist, Per

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Olov Enquist, Per. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Parable Book

The Wandering Pine: Life as a Novel