Death on the Beach: Essays from a Marginal World

A walk with Per Högselius, skirting shipwrecks and bodies, relics of war and vanished lives, is a deep-dive into landscape and culture. It leaves us fragile and shows us wonders.

Holidaymakers go to the beach to play. The world's great writers, film makers and artists head there to tread the margins between life and death. In Death on the Beach, Per Högselius leads us in their footsteps.

What do we find? Life-busting ideas, powerful landscapes, scenes to make you shiver, and an entry-gate to some of the most exciting books and films you've never heard of.

Translated from Swedish by award-winner Agnes Broomé (The Gospel of the Eels), this gripping essay collection reveals that longing inside us that continues to draw us to the sea – even when so many have failed to return.

Preface

As far back as I can remember, I've been drawn to beaches.

The beaches of my childhood belonged to Lake Mälaren, their sand dark and coarse. My mother anxiously watched over me as I played at the water's edge. Further out, there was a shipping lane where large boats passed by. I wasn't allowed to swim out that far.

When I was eleven, we took a family holiday on Gotland, the large island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. There, we stumbled across Kvarnåkershamn, a small village where several plots of land were for sale in the coastal pine forest. The cottage my parents quickly had built became my fixed point during the summers that followed. It's where I met my first love and lost myself in longing. But when I was alone, I roved the shingle beaches in search of fossils. The rocks were full of long-since extinct plants and animals: crinoids, corals, trilobites. I dreamed of becoming a palaeontologist, dedicating my days to these creatures that once were.

As it happened, however, my scientific career never really took off. Instead, I increasingly turned my gaze to the sea, towards the foreign beaches hidden somewhere beyond the horizon. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I went to see them. I took to writing about the Baltic Sea region and its eventful past. I was struck by how our new, optimistic era – in which we were said to have reached the end of history – contrasted with the physical state of the Baltic's eastern shores: they were desolately dirty, littered with debris from the Cold War Era. Rumour had it mines were still buried in the sand.

Many years later, I settled in the Netherlands for a while. I wandered the beaches of the North Sea, my daily routine governed by the rhythm of the tide. I still remember the silhouettes of the freight ships out at sea, lying at anchor as they waited to dock in Rotterdam. At the beach cafés, I listened to stories of capsized ships and beached whales. I thought about Doggerland, once a favourite grazing ground for woolly mammoths between the Netherlands and the UK, now swallowed by the sea.

Beaches are places of mystery and contradiction. And over time, I've come to see more of their dark side, not only in my own explorations, but also through my encounters with the seashore in literature, film, art, and music – as well as in the daily reports from every corner of the world relayed to me by the newspapers.

Where does it come from, this dark side? Is there a way to find out? I remember a faded old photograph my mother once showed me. She's standing on a Black Sea beach, a smiling young woman, with her arms around a tall, lanky man who is about to become my father. She doesn't know it yet: that she's pregnant. That a child is growing inside her. The sea glitters behind them, the sea that was named for blackness, even though it's so blindingly bright in the summer sun.