The Death Of A Beekeeper

‘A beautiful work, lyrical and bleak, resonant and terse’ – New Yorker

This thoughtful and beautifully written novel… We cannot fail to be moved

Has all the lyric intensity we have come to associate with Scandinavian films…It is full of spirit, observation, insight, sadness, struggle, pain and, inevitably, of hope

The landscape of pain has never been defined more graphically… A disturbing, moving and thought-provoking novel that stays in the mind long after it is read

It is brilliant: an evocative book of exquisite beauty and exceptional wisdom… Hope is the theme of the novel, and it is explored sensitively, intelligently and philosophically by an author who knows the impact of simple, precise language… Art can change the way we see the world and Gustafsson is a fine, fine artist

A beautiful work, lyrical and bleak, resonant and terse

Lars Gustafsson was born in Västerås, Sweden, in 1936. After taking a doctor’s degree at the University of Uppsala in 1962 he became editor of the leading literary periodical Bonniers Litterära Magasin. His publications reflect a broad range of interest and expertise, extending through philosophy, history, sociology and mathematics, as well as literary criticism, poetry, short stories and novels. 
 
His fiction published by Harvill includes The Death of a Beekeeper, The Tale of a Dog, and A Tiler's Afternoon, which was shortlisted for the Dublin International Impac Award and was described by the Independent as ‘a beautifully conceived poetic allegory about an artist's life'.

In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he will not live through the spring. Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. 
 
Westin has refused to surrender the time left to him to the impersonality of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue his solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. While he watches his inner landscape reforming, the relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychological detachment. 'We begin again,' he insists, 'we never give up.'

From the Diaries and Letters of a Texan Bankruptcy Judge

The Tale of A Dog

At once wryly humorous and shrewd, intelligent and relaxed – Expressen

Reminiscnet of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment…exciting and thought-provoking

At once wryly humorous and shrewd, intelligent and relaxed

Caldwell lives by the lakeside at Austin, Texas, with his wife of thirty years, his two children having long ago flown the nest. He is a judge in the Federal Bankruptcy Court. And the dog? A mongrel that kept upsetting his dustbins as it rooted about in them, until the judge went after it and secretly beat its brains out with the edge-trimmers. 
 
But this is not a crime story – for all that Caldwell’s lifelong mentor, the Dutchman van de Rouwers, Philosophy guru and idol of the American campuses, was fished out dead from the lake about the time his Murky Past caught up with him. No, this is a Philosophical Tale: weaving through the judge’s humdrum life between the Bench, the campus bookstore, the cocktail party circuit and his own kitchen, Great Metaphysical Questions are asked, about the reality of Good and Evil, ontological proofs of the existence of God, and the theoretical existence of the Most Intelligent Man in America. 
 
Lars Gustafsson taps a rich vein of comedy in the series of contrasts here engendered between the mundane and the highflown as reported in the judge’s maybe fanciful narrative. The Tale of a Dog has marked affinity with his last novel, translated into English as A Tiler’s Afternoon, in the clearsighted dissection of small people trying to cope with an all too complex modern world.

Lars Gustafsson

Tom Geddes

A most beautiful book – its theme, fantasy as a form of escape

With this masterly and probing tale Gustafsson the moralist draws up the balance sheet of his own work as a writer… It is the self-portrait of the artist as an old man, and it reflects both his passion and his serenity

These few dozen pages pack a remarkable punch

a beautifully conceived poetic allegory about an artist's life

One grey November morning a friend rang Torsten Bergman and told him of a job on a house-conversion. Torsten arrived at the empty house in his decrepit car and got to work retiling the bathroom – the tiles were there already – while he waited for someone to turn up and make it all official. 
 
So begins this story of one day in an old man’s life: a day of work, of day-dreaming, of memories, of chance encounters (for men and women, not to mention children, burst in on his solitary tiling). And as he put away his tools that evening, there came also a discovery that might, after all, hold a clue to the elusive Meaning of Life. 
 
 
In A Tiler’s Afternoon, Lars Gustafsson has written an enchanting tale, full of insight, wisdom and gentle irony, sensitively conveyed in the childlike simplicity of its telling, as the tiler’s life-story is gradually filled in from his memories. Here is a book that in short compass embraces a whole rich microcosm.

Lars Gustafsson

Praise for A Tiler's Afternoon

A most beautiful book – its theme, fantasy as a form of escape

With this masterly and probing tale Gustafsson the moralist draws up the balance sheet of his own work as a writer… It is the self-portrait of the artist as an old man, and it reflects both his passion and his seren ...

These few dozen pages pack a remarkable punch

A most beautiful book – its theme, fantasy as a form of escape

With this masterly and probing tale Gustafsson the moralist draws up the balance sheet of his own work as a writer… It is the self-portrait of the artist as an old man, and it reflects both his passion and his seren ...

These few dozen pages pack a remarkable punch

A most beautiful book – its theme, fantasy as a form of escape

With this masterly and probing tale Gustafsson the moralist draws up the balance sheet of his own work as a writer… It is the self-portrait of the artist as an old man, and it reflects both his passion and his seren ...

These few dozen pages pack a remarkable punch

Books by Lars Gustafsson

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