norvik press gb (212 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New. This spirited and at times sinister novel ensnares the reader in a tangled encounter between modern-day Scandinavia and the ancient world of myth. In the 1980s, a hardworking Icelandic businesswoman and her teenage daughter Dis, who has been arrested for apparently committing a strange and senseless robbery, are unwittingly drawn into a ritual-bound world of goddesses, sacrificial priests, golden thrones, clashing crags and kings-in-waiting. It is said that Gunnloth was seduced by Odin so he could win the 'mead' of poetry from her, but is that really true, and why was Dis summoned to their world? The boundaries dissolve and the parallels between Gunnloth's circle and the strange company into which Dis's mother is drawn as she fights to clear Dis's name grow ever closer. The earth-cherishing goddess seems set on a collision course with strategic thinker Odin who has discovered that iron can be extracted from the marshes where she resides, and environmental disaster also looms in the modern context, brought into sharp focus by a shocking world event.At the same time the novel is a moving, under-the-skin portrait of a mother in crisis, cast into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions by seeing her daughter under arrest and in prison. Dis's father has refused to get involved, claiming he is too busy. Her mother is left to tussle with lawyers and fight to clear Dis's name. She goes to Copenhagen in order to be near the prison where Dis is on remand. The couple's business ambitions for a government contract will be in shreds if the prosecution accuses Dis of involvement with a terrorist group, but on the other hand, how can any mother willingly pursue the option of agreeing that her own daughter is mentally ill? Particularly when she has followed Dis into the depths of legend in her quest for the truth?

Paperback. Condizione: New. The Löwensköld Ring (1925) is the first volume of the trilogy considered to have been Selma Lagerlöf's last work of prose fiction. Set in the Swedish province of Värmland in the eighteenth century, the narrative traces the consequences of the theft of General Löwensköld's ring from his coffin, and develops into a disturbing tale of revenge from beyond the grave. It is also a tale about decisive women. The narrative twists and the foregrounding of alternative interpretations confront the reader with a pervasive sense of ambiguity. Along with the narrative technique, the spell of the ring extends into the two subsequent volumes, Charlotte Löwensköld (1925) and Anna Svärd (1928).

Paperback. Condizione: New. This new addition to Norvik Press's well-established 'Lagerlöf in English' series turns the spotlight on the power of short stories. Key autobiographical pieces, morality tales both dark and light, legends from several lands and folklore-inspired narratives combine to reveal the breadth and stylistic range of Lagerlöf's storytelling skills.This is a collection of interest to general readers but also a useful teaching tool for Swedish and comparative literature courses around the world. The book includes a comprehensive and accessible introduction by Lagerlöf specialist Bjarne Thorup Thomsen (University of Edinburgh). The nine stories have been arranged into three thematic sections: Women and Writing; Landscapes, Families and 'Others'; Epochs, Societies and Values.

Paperback. Condizione: New. With high hopes, Captain Riber embarks with his young bride Aurora on a voyage to exotic destinations. But they are an ill-matched pair; her naive illusions are shattered by the realities of married life and the seediness of society in foreign ports, whilst his hopes of domestic bliss are frustrated by his wife's unhappiness. Life on board ship becomes a private hell, as Aurora's obsession with Riber's adventures as a carefree bachelor begins to undermine his sanity. Ultimately both are betrayed by a hypocritical society which imposes a warped view of sexuality on its most vulnerable members.Amalie Skram was a contemporary of Henrik Ibsen, and like him a fierce critic of repressive social mores and hypocrisy. Many of her works make an impassioned statement on the way women of all classes are imprisoned in their social roles, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged so many Nordic writers in the late nineteenth century. Her female characters are independent, rebellious, even reckless; but their upbringing and their circumstances combine to deny them the fulfilment their creator so painfully won for herself.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Ypsilon is a human being reduced to the most basic essentials, a naked one-eyed brain floating in an aquarium of nutritious liquid. Through his consciousness we observe his obstinate struggles to maintain his freedom of action in this utterly dependent situation - to assert the right to express his anger, to fall in love, to run away - whilst it slowly dawns on him that he is a part of a wide-ranging scientific experiment. In this fantasy about a society which is scientifically only slightly more advanced than our own, the Swedish novelist P C Jersild explores the resilience of the human spirit set against the threatening Big Brother of technological progress. Like most of his other novels, it paints no rosy picture of the future of mankind, yet it celebrates the defiance which cannot be eradicated as long as the mind itself remains intact.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Written in 1899, Selma Lagerlof's novella A Manor House Tale is at one and the same time a complex psychological novel and a folk tale, a love story and a Gothic melodrama. It crosses genre boundaries and locates itself in a borderland between reality and fantasy, madness and sanity, darkness and light, possession and loss, life and death. Lagerlof's two young characters, Gunnar and Ingrid, the one driven to madness by the horrific death of his goats in a blizzard, the other falling into a death-like trance as a result of the absence of familial warmth, rescue each other from their psychological underworlds and return to an everyday world that is now enhanced by the victory of goodness and love. Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) quickly established herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages. Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date. This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlof in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Fru Inés is a city novel, vividly evoking the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century Constantinople. The city is a hub, a meeting point of East and West, where privileged Europeans enjoy a cossetted existence screened from the tumult and misery of the streets. One of the privileged is Ines, a Spanish Levantine from Alexandria, whose marriage to a Swedish consul has brought her a life of enviable luxury; but behind the polished facade she is lonely and unfulfilled, trapped in a loveless marriage. Her yearning for passion leads her to embark on an affair with a naive young Swede, Arthur Flemming; but their love is threatened from the start by portents of disaster and the threat of discovery, and Inés is inexorably drawn to seek rescue from the sordid dealers from whom she had been so careful to keep aloof.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Powderhouse is a novel which is set in an asylum for the criminally insane, where the narrator functions as a kind of porter, observing and commenting on the foibles of inmates and keepers alike. The patients are a motley collection, and their treatment is unorthodox to say the least; part of their treatment consists of composing and delivering a series of lectures on subjects dear to their hearts, such as the history of witchhunting and the most humane methods of execution. The doctors themselves have their own troubled history; and the narrator finds rich material amongst both for his study of the follies and evil of which mankind is capable. Yet he is not just a gloomy philosopher, but also a sensualist, and the novel is relieved by passages of lyrical beauty as he enjoys the velvety summer nights, the taste of black bread and white wine, and the gentle caresses of his lover.This is the first English translation of this novel from 1969 by the controversial Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, a man whose irreverent provocations of the sacred cows of his society several times landed him in a court of law. Powderhouse forms the second volume of a trilogy dedicated to exploring "The history of bestiality," following Moment of Freedom (1966), though it stands on its own with a different setting and narrator from the other two.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This volume marks the apex and the culmination of the provocative Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe's investigations into the nature of evil. Here the study moves to a broader canvas than in earlier works; the enquiring narrator explores not just European history, but the crimes committed by Europeans against the rest of humanity in the name of expansion and conquest. Cortez' destruction of the Aztec empire and Pisarro's of the Incas were crimes of genocide comparable with Hitler's against the Jews, and Columbus' glorious discovery of America becomes simply an act of colonialism: "The Indians had discovered America long before I came." His realization of European culpability and anticipation of the blood-bath that will ensue when the Third World claims its rightful share of the world's riches lead the narrator into a long plunge into the tunnel of depression, from which he emerges in a cathartic realization that human beings have not only an unfathomable capacity for evil, but also an immeasurable capacity for good; man is the destroyer of all things, but also the renewer of all things. The 25 years which have passed since this novel was first published have not diminished its relevance and its urgency.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Penwoman is the classic novel about the Swedish women's suffrage movement. Originally published in 1910, this was Elin Wägner's second novel. Having begun her career as a journalist, she went on to become one of Sweden's leading writers, her prolific output developing radical feminist and feminist-pacifist tendencies.The novel, whose central character is a young female journalist, offers exceptional insights into the dedicated work and strong sense of sisterhood uniting a group of women campaigning for suffrage. But it also explores a range of other issues affecting the situation of women in Sweden at the time, from the role of paid work to matters of morality, eroticism and love. The refreshingly disrespectful and witty style has helped make the novel one of Wägner's most enduringly popular.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This novel tells the story of the misalliance between Lucie, a vivacious and beautiful dancing girl from Tivoli, and Theodor Gerner, a respectable lawyer from the strait-laced middle society of nineteenth-century Norway. Having first kept her as a mistress, Gerner is so captivated by Lucie's charms that he marries her, only to discover that his project to turn her into a proper and demure housewife is continually frustrated by her irrepressible sensuality and lack of fine breeding. What had made her alluring as a mistress makes her unacceptable as a wife. His attempts to govern her behaviour develop gradually into a harsh tyranny against which she rebels in a manner which brings misery and despair to both. Amalie Skram, a contemporary of Ibsen, expresses the same criticism of repressive social mores and hypocrisy here as he does in plays like A Doll's House and Ghosts, although in a deeply personal way. In this novel from 1888, as in her other novels, she makes an impassioned statement on the double standard, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged many Scandinavian writers in the late nineteenth century. She also presents a closely observed realistic depiction of a lively cross-section of Kristiania society from the turn of the century, ranging from high society dress parties to arid country cottages to dark and dingy tenements reeking of poverty.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Pentti Saarikoski was a prolific translator and journalist, and a revered modernist poet central to the Finnish literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The inventiveness, warmth and humour of Saarikoski's voice have made him something of a national treasure in Finland. His writing is at once playful and political, drawing on everyday life and current affairs, as well as Greek antiquity. This collection of poems chosen and translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah charts Saarikoski's artistic development over the decades from his early Greek period to his politically charged participative poetry, and ultimately his last known poem. This dual-language edition places the original Finnish poems side-by-side with their English translation, inviting readers to explore the elegant craftsmanship of Saarikoski's use of language.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Murder in the Dark sports a winning combination of engaging crime narrative and cool, unsentimental appraisal of Scandinavian society (as seen through the eyes of its shabby, unconventional anti-hero). There are elements of the book which now seem quite as relevant as when they were written, and like all the most accomplished writing in the Nordic Noir field, there is an acute and well-observed sense of place throughout the novel. The descriptions of Copenhagen channel the poetic sensibility which is the author's own: 'Copenhagen is at its most beautiful when seen out of a taxi at midnight, right at that magical moment when one day dies and another is born, and the printing presses are buzzing with the morning newspapers.'.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In Tallinn in 1946 a young boy is transfixed by the beauty of a luxurious cream-coloured car gliding down the street. It is a Russian Pobeda, a car called Victory. The sympathetic driver invites the boy for a ride and enquires about his family. Soon the boy's father disappears. Ilmar Taska's debut novel captures the distrust and fear among Estonians living under Soviet occupation after World War II. The reader is transported to a world seen through the eyes of a young boy, where it is di cult to know who is right and who is wrong, be they occupiers or occupied. Resistance ghters, exiles, informants and torturers all nd themselves living in Stalin's long shadow.Ilmar Taska is best known in his native Estonia as a lm director and producer. Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory is his first full novel, and is based on a prize-winning short story from 2014.

Hardback. Condizione: New. The twenty-six stories included in this volume are taut, economical in structure, precisely observed and laced with irony. They include some of his most popular and well known stories: A Dog without a Master, a meditation upon a godless existence, The Fur Coat, in which a borrowed garment reveals an adulterous secret, and The Chinese, with its delicate depiction of loneliness and isolation. Shining through all the stories is Söderberg's clear-sighted affection for Stockholm, in all its moods - it is only too easy to see why Söderberg is regarded as one of the foremost chroniclers of the city.

Paperback. Condizione: New. August Strindberg (1849-1912, Sweden's internationally recognised dramatist, was an astonishingly prolific all-rounder. The new National Edition of his works will run to seventy-two volumes: he was a writer of novels, short stories, essays, journalism and satire, he experimented with early photography, and in recent years his paintings have achieved the recognition they deserve. His novel The People of Hemsö (1887) will come as a surprise to most English-language readers, used as they are to seeing the bitter controversialist of plays like The Father and Miss Julie or the seeker for cosmic meaning and reconciliation of those mysterious later dream plays To Damascus and A Dream Play. This novel, a tragicomic story of lust, love and death among the fishermen and farmers of the islands of the Stockholm Archipelago, reveals a very different Strindberg. The vigour and humour of the narration, as well as its cinematic qualities, are such that we witness a great series of peopled panoramas in which place and time and character are somehow simultaneously specific and archetypical, and we leave the novel with memories of grand landscapes and spirited scenes.In a recent essay Ludvig Rasmusson wrote: 'For me, The People of Hemsoe is the Great Swedish Novel, just as .The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [is] the Great American Novel'. His comparison is an apt one: if the Mississippi becomes the quintessence of America, the island of Hemsoe and the archipelago become the quintessence of Sweden.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 1968. Riga. News of the Prague Spring washes across Europe, causing ripples on either side of the Iron Curtain. A young Estonian woman has agreed to pose as a model for a famous sculptor, who is trying to evade military service and escape to the West. Although the model has only a vague awareness of politics - her interest in life is primarily poetic - the consequences of the politics of both past and present repeatedly make themselves felt. Chance remarks overheard prompt memories of people and places, language itself becomes fluid, by turns deceptive and reassuring.The Beauty of History is a novel of poetic intensity, of fleeting moods and captured moments. It is powerfully evocative of life within the Baltic States during the Soviet occupation, and of the challenge to artists to express their individuality whilst maintaining at least an outward show of loyalty to the dominant ideology. Written on the cusp of independence, as Estonia and Latvia sought to regain their sovereignty in 1991, this is a novel that can be seen as an historic document - wistful, unsettling, and beautiful.Viivi Luik is one of Estonia's most highly-acclaimed and well-known writers.The Beauty of History has been published in eleven languages.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This is the first volume of a trilogy which marks the high point of outspokenness and originality of one of Norway's most controversial modern writers. Jens Bjørneboe was an author and polemicist of fierce energy and deep conviction, who throughout his career provoked and upset the establishment by his unrelenting attacks on its most sacred cows: a repressive school system, a hypocritical Christianity, an inhumane prison system, power-seeking politicians, corrupt police and depraved moral guardians - all concentrated in his particular bete noire: the authoritarian personality.With this trilogy, Bjørneboe turned his attention to a more general problem: the evil inherent in the human race itself. Why, his narrators ask despairingly, does man behave so inhumanely to his fellow creatures? The first volume is set in a middle-European principality, where the narrator is a servant of justice, employed to brush gowns and fill inkwells, and to be daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. The experience sets him off on an odyssey through human experience and his own past, asking what went wrong with mankind.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Two British environmental activists are discovered dead amongst the whale corpses after a whale-kill in Torshavn. The detective Hannis Martinsson is asked to investigate by a representative of the organisation Guardians of the Sea - who shortly afterwards is killed when his private plane crashes. Suspicion falls on Faroese hunters, angry at persistent interference in their traditional whale hunt; but the investigation leads Martinsson to a much larger group of international vested interests, and the discovery of a plot which could devastate the whole country.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 1968. Riga. News of the Prague Spring washes across Europe, causing ripples on either side of the Iron Curtain. A young Estonian woman has agreed to pose as a model for a famous sculptor, who is trying to evade military service and escape to the West. Although the model has only a vague awareness of politics - her interest in life is primarily poetic - the consequences of the politics of both past and present repeatedly make themselves felt. Chance remarks overheard prompt memories of people and places, language itself becomes fluid, by turns deceptive and reassuring.The Beauty of History is a novel of poetic intensity, of fleeting moods and captured moments. It is powerfully evocative of life within the Baltic States during the Soviet occupation, and of the challenge to artists to express their individuality whilst maintaining at least an outward show of loyalty to the dominant ideology. Written on the cusp of independence, as Estonia and Latvia sought to regain their sovereignty in 1991, this is a novel that can be seen as an historic document - wistful, unsettling, and beautiful.Viivi Luik is one of Estonia's most highly-acclaimed and well-known writers.The Beauty of History has been published in eleven languages.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Written in 1899, Selma Lagerlof's novella A Manor House Tale is at one and the same time a complex psychological novel and a folk tale, a love story and a Gothic melodrama. It crosses genre boundaries and locates itself in a borderland between reality and fantasy, madness and sanity, darkness and light, possession and loss, life and death. Lagerlof's two young characters, Gunnar and Ingrid, the one driven to madness by the horrific death of his goats in a blizzard, the other falling into a death-like trance as a result of the absence of familial warmth, rescue each other from their psychological underworlds and return to an everyday world that is now enhanced by the victory of goodness and love. Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) quickly established herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages. Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date. This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlof in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Fru Inés is a city novel, vividly evoking the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century Constantinople. The city is a hub, a meeting point of East and West, where privileged Europeans enjoy a cossetted existence screened from the tumult and misery of the streets. One of the privileged is Ines, a Spanish Levantine from Alexandria, whose marriage to a Swedish consul has brought her a life of enviable luxury; but behind the polished facade she is lonely and unfulfilled, trapped in a loveless marriage. Her yearning for passion leads her to embark on an affair with a naive young Swede, Arthur Flemming; but their love is threatened from the start by portents of disaster and the threat of discovery, and Inés is inexorably drawn to seek rescue from the sordid dealers from whom she had been so careful to keep aloof.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Pentti Saarikoski was a prolific translator and journalist, and a revered modernist poet central to the Finnish literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The inventiveness, warmth and humour of Saarikoski's voice have made him something of a national treasure in Finland. His writing is at once playful and political, drawing on everyday life and current affairs, as well as Greek antiquity. This collection of poems chosen and translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah charts Saarikoski's artistic development over the decades from his early Greek period to his politically charged participative poetry, and ultimately his last known poem. This dual-language edition places the original Finnish poems side-by-side with their English translation, inviting readers to explore the elegant craftsmanship of Saarikoski's use of language.

Paperback. Condizione: New. With high hopes, Captain Riber embarks with his young bride Aurora on a voyage to exotic destinations. But they are an ill-matched pair; her naive illusions are shattered by the realities of married life and the seediness of society in foreign ports, whilst his hopes of domestic bliss are frustrated by his wife's unhappiness. Life on board ship becomes a private hell, as Aurora's obsession with Riber's adventures as a carefree bachelor begins to undermine his sanity. Ultimately both are betrayed by a hypocritical society which imposes a warped view of sexuality on its most vulnerable members.Amalie Skram was a contemporary of Henrik Ibsen, and like him a fierce critic of repressive social mores and hypocrisy. Many of her works make an impassioned statement on the way women of all classes are imprisoned in their social roles, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged so many Nordic writers in the late nineteenth century. Her female characters are independent, rebellious, even reckless; but their upbringing and their circumstances combine to deny them the fulfilment their creator so painfully won for herself.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This novel tells the story of the misalliance between Lucie, a vivacious and beautiful dancing girl from Tivoli, and Theodor Gerner, a respectable lawyer from the strait-laced middle society of nineteenth-century Norway. Having first kept her as a mistress, Gerner is so captivated by Lucie's charms that he marries her, only to discover that his project to turn her into a proper and demure housewife is continually frustrated by her irrepressible sensuality and lack of fine breeding. What had made her alluring as a mistress makes her unacceptable as a wife. His attempts to govern her behaviour develop gradually into a harsh tyranny against which she rebels in a manner which brings misery and despair to both. Amalie Skram, a contemporary of Ibsen, expresses the same criticism of repressive social mores and hypocrisy here as he does in plays like A Doll's House and Ghosts, although in a deeply personal way. In this novel from 1888, as in her other novels, she makes an impassioned statement on the double standard, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged many Scandinavian writers in the late nineteenth century. She also presents a closely observed realistic depiction of a lively cross-section of Kristiania society from the turn of the century, ranging from high society dress parties to arid country cottages to dark and dingy tenements reeking of poverty.

Hardback. Condizione: New. The twenty-six stories included in this volume are taut, economical in structure, precisely observed and laced with irony. They include some of his most popular and well known stories: A Dog without a Master, a meditation upon a godless existence, The Fur Coat, in which a borrowed garment reveals an adulterous secret, and The Chinese, with its delicate depiction of loneliness and isolation. Shining through all the stories is Söderberg's clear-sighted affection for Stockholm, in all its moods - it is only too easy to see why Söderberg is regarded as one of the foremost chroniclers of the city.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'He realised that he would drown here. Someone had crafted this seat to drown people. To drown him. Terror rushed from his brain to rouse every cell in his body, but there was nothing to be done. He was well and truly tethered. Slowly it dawned on him that he did know why he was sitting here. He'd spent all his life running from this nightmare, and now he'd landed in its clutches.'Dead Men Dancing begins with the discovery of a corpse on the beach, the body of a man who has been shackled to rocks and left to drown. As the journalist Hannis Martinsson investigates, he comes across evidence of more deaths which have been caused in the same way, and starts to realise that they are all linked to a local revolt several decades earlier, which tore a community apart. The repercussions have continued to the present day, and Hannis' enquiries soon put his own life in danger.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Set at the end of last century, The Sharks is a thrilling tale of mutiny and shipwreck, which bears comparison with Melville's Moby Dick or Conrad's Typhoon in its suspense and its evocation of the fascination of the sea. It is also the story of mankind's voyage into the twentieth century, suspended between the empty skies and the bottomless depths, dreadfully aware of its potential for self destruction but clinging to a belief in the preservation of a fragile humanity. The narrator, Peder Jensen, is both competent second mate and unworldly philosopher, whose brain 'lacks walls, a floor and a roof'; through his eyes we follow the dismantling of the rigid power structure on board as a community begins to emerge.This novel from 1974 is the last one by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe (1920-1976), one of Norway's most original, outspoken and controversial modern writers.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Satan has a problem: God has come to the conclusion that it is unfair to send souls to hell if they are fundamentally incapable of living a decent life on earth. If this is the case, then hell will be shut down, and the human race written off as an unfortunate mistake. Satan is given the chance to prove that human beings are capable of salvation - thus ensuring the survival of hell - if he agrees to live as a human being and demonstrate that it is possible to live a righteous life. St Peter suggests that life as a farmer might offer Satan the best chance of success, because of the catalogue of privations he will be forced to endure. And so Satan ends up back on earth, living as Jurka, a great bear of a man, the put-upon tenant of a run-down Estonian farm. His patience and good nature are sorely tested by the machinations of his scheming, unscrupulous landlord and the social and religious hypocrisy he encounters.The Misadventures of the New Satan is the last novel by Estonia's greatest twentieth-century writer, Anton Tammsaare (1876-1940), and it constitutes a fitting summation of the themes that occupied him throughout his writing: the search for truth and social justice, and the struggle against corruption and greed. Tammsaare combines a satire on the inequalities of rural life and absurdly rigid social attitudes with biblical themes, mythology, and bawdy folklore. The novel has proved to be an enduring classic of European literature.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Ypsilon is a human being reduced to the most basic essentials, a naked one-eyed brain floating in an aquarium of nutritious liquid. Through his consciousness we observe his obstinate struggles to maintain his freedom of action in this utterly dependent situation - to assert the right to express his anger, to fall in love, to run away - whilst it slowly dawns on him that he is a part of a wide-ranging scientific experiment. In this fantasy about a society which is scientifically only slightly more advanced than our own, the Swedish novelist P C Jersild explores the resilience of the human spirit set against the threatening Big Brother of technological progress. Like most of his other novels, it paints no rosy picture of the future of mankind, yet it celebrates the defiance which cannot be eradicated as long as the mind itself remains intact.