Harry Martinson (1904–1978)

Martinson's big picaresque novel of vagrant life follows the adventures of Bolle, a skilled worker — a cigar-maker — who loses his job to mechanisation in the 1890s, and goes on the road as a vagrant after he is unable to raise the fare to America. It's not so much a straight narrative as a collage of incidents and themes in vagrant life — obviously based to some extent on Martinson's own experiences as a vagrant the 1920s, but set back into the years before the First World War.

Martinson uses Bolle's experiences particularly to reflect on the fear and hostility people without a fixed home inspire in those who have one, and the way this affects the character and behaviour of homeless people. But he also has time to talk about the arbitrary injustices of the social care system and the criminalisation of vagrancy, about the joy of travelling on foot through the Swedish landscape and the way that style of vagrancy is becoming a thing of the past with the advent of trains and cars, about pleasant and unpleasant encounters with country people in different parts of Sweden and Norway, and a thousand other things. Through dream-sequences and a kind of magic realist finale in a brickworks he also (half-ironically) sets out what might be an existentialist philosophy (or an anti-religion) providing an intellectual framework for vagrancy.

A big, warm, compassionate book, and a very strongly-felt one, but also a firmly realistic view of the world and its troubles: not the place to go if you want the romance of the road.

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Zeit der Unruhe is a publisher-specific selection of German translations of ten of Eyvind Johnson's short stories originally published between the 1920s and the 1940s, in several different Swedish collections.

The title-story, originally "En tid av oro för Eugenia" (in Än en gång, kapten!, 1934), is a lovely piece about a woman who has a slightly too colourful past for a small town, but is now trying to settle down, running a haberdashery shop and engaged to marry the house-painter and (almost) reformed drinker, Göransson. The town unsuccessfully tries to needle them both about her former boyfriends, but then the news comes through that Emil is coming back from America, presumably having made his fortune...

"Burell tappar kraftarna" and "Vallberg" are both stories about showmen trying to make a living in rural backwaters as progress — and younger competitors — catch up with them, the former featuring a young projectionist who must be a self-portrait. Then there are a couple of stories set in a remote railway-hamlet in the North, and a set of more reflective pieces dealing with social and technological change in 20th century Sweden, culminating in "I det Overkliga", a touching little sketch where the narrator and a friendly farmer go on a fishing trip to some mountain lakes, whilst discussing how we can deal with the contradiction of being out enjoying ourselves in beautiful scenery whilst knowing that elsewhere in Europe bombs are falling on civilians.

Probably not enough to get a full picture of what Johnson is about, but certainly enough to see that he must be a very interesting writer, with an unusual perspective on life.… (altro)