As the previous reviewer said, this book is a very powerful story of a man trying to deal with cancer and at times can make you cry, but also laugh. Lars's descriptive powers are incredible. There is one part where a friend of his dives to the bottom of deep stream, and by the end of the chapter, I could feel the cold and wet of the stream. Overall excellent book- HIGHLY RECCOMENDED!!!

when i took the book from the library i thoght it would be a real burden. I think it's the best book i have ever read and I really recommend it.The story is so sad but contains some of the greatest qotes ever. Lars is a great author that can really reach out and grab you- sometimes when you least expect it and sometimes he can really make you cry.

This is a collection of five novels by Lars Gustafsson, in which he tried to deal with his time (the seventies) from different perspectives. Gustafsson is highly productive and quite uneven, but at least two of the novels in this volume deserve a place amongst the best swedish fiction of the century.

Yllet (The Woolen) is a piece of social realism, but without the dogmatism and dullness that quite often go into works of this swedish "national genre". The story is about a high school maths teacher in a small town lost deep in the woods, and his efforts to help a young math genius to a career and to understand why he is really bothering with anything at all. The setting is extremely suggestive: you can really feel the hoplessness and emotional poverty of life in this all-to-typical swedish countryside town.

And yet, Gustafsson manages to make it an absorbing read, mainly through the richness in philosophical observations and interesting personalities portrayed throghout.

En biodlares död (Death of a beekeeper) is a different sort of novel. It is about a middle-aged man dying from cancer in a litte house of his own in the same god-forgotten countryside. Paradoxically, and as opposed to Yllet, it is filled with hope and positivity. We are invited to follow how, in the lasts months of his life, the main character comes to grips with his life and what is important. As always with Gustafsson, the story is filled with apparently meaningless digressions, which combine to make more than a few philosophical and existential insights and questions. In the end, the novel leaves the realistic vein altogether.

"Stories of Happy People" is one of my very favorite collections of stories; there's absolutely nothing like it that I know of. Lars Gustaffson--a Swedish writer long since transplanted to Texas--is one of the greatest unknown writers alive today.

the best book ever written about tennis and wagner.

This was a required reading for a college course, yet I really enjoyed it. It is short and easy to get through.

More concise and poetic than Death of a Beekeeper, this subtly captivating book delights at every turn. LG expounds on the "joys" of solitude and pedantic endeavors. His ability to turn bottomless bitterness into insightful humor is masterful.

Consisting of three separate but interwoven stories, Bernard Foy's Third Castling is a fascinating and complex work that questions traditional definitions of art--the novel is subtitled in the Table of Contents as "A Detective Story and Reconstruction of Les fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire." Each story contradicts the others, forcing the reader to question: Who is Bernard Foy? Who is telling the story? And why do we, as readers, believe him? Not easily digested, but certainly worth while, the novel is both entertaining and thought-provoking, forcing a reconsideration of traditional systems of knowing and understanding the world.

It is bad enough for a Swede to portray a culture (Texas) that he does not understand. However, to have this book translated into British, not American, makes the portrayal all the more bizarre. I've enjoyed Gustaffson before in German translation, and on safe, European, subjects. He jes duss'nt unnerstan' Texiz.

I can't speak to the quality of the English translation, having only read the original. Gustafsson demonstrates his usual idiosyncratic reflection of reality in the setting of the book--some details are dead on, others are vague, still others are changed in ways that probably wouldn't matter to a European audience but are weird to annoying to one familiar with the city and time period in question. Reading about one's home town in Swedish is an enjoyably bizarre experience--I can't say I was as taken with the actual underlying story, which involves a lot of philosophizing about good, evil, and the existence of God which just does not feel particularly relevant. Part of the problem, from my perspective, may be that the book really contains only one major character, the narrator, and he is clearly keeping things from us. With a couple of college philosophy courses and a jug of red wine, you could probably discuss this book all night, but on the whole I think "Bernard Foy's Third Castling" is a better example of Gustafsson's current period.

Lars Gustafsson is an author with the rare ability to distill insightful philosophical explorations from stories of everyday life. In Tale of a Dog, he weaves a riveting hodgepodge tapestry of good and evil as seen through the eyes of an Austin bankruptcy judge. The stories of Austin personalities ring true to those familiar with the quirkiness of the Austin scene, where everyone is a student of something. Gustafsson, typically, steps into the shoes of the outsider, the pretender. He is a Texan who doesn't like Tex-Mex; a Judge who cannot decide; a member of the social elite who prefers the company of his road-hard hairdresser. The fun is in Gustafsson's ability to show us the world from the outside and turn the small things large. The meat is in Gustafsson's ability to draw us to his characters' world of profound moral ambiguity. This is a very good book.