Light (Oberon Modern Plays) [Paperback]

I have read this book three times but only once in English. This is the best book written by Torgny Lindgren! And it means a lot, everything he has written is worth reading! This is a great anecdote in an epic language. The translation works very well, although I miss the dialect. The story is just fantastic. About a small village in Norrland (northern part of Sweden) a long time ago. Life and death in a village hit hard by the Great Sickness. The best is, however, how well the form corresponds to content. The real question is how to distinguish right from wrong? Könik, Önde, Blasius and the others will help you out.

In this astonishing novel, Torgny Lindgren tells the story of a small village that is ravaged by the plague, and the chaotic moral void that the few surviving residents fall into when everything they know has been taken from them. The story opens with one of the villagers traveling to a neighboring town to search for a woman he has dreamed of but never met, but whom he believes he is fated to marry. When he fails to find her, he returns to the village, buying a pregnant rabbit along the way as a sort of consolation prize. The rabbit is carrying the plague, which proceeds to swiftly ravage the town.

The rest of the novel tells the story of what happens to the few survivors when the plague has passed, what they do to cope in this new world they find themselves in. Without a priest, they don't know how to conduct the proper funeral ceremonies for those who have died. At first, they do their best at imitating the priest's incantations, mumbling incoherently over the graves and waving their arms about, but as the number of dead increases exponentially, they eventually give up all pretense of ritual and bury them as quickly and simply as possible.

Left to their own devices, not only without a priest, but with no government, no elder statesmen to guide them, they feel they have no way of knowing how things should be done. The knowledge of what's right and proper has vanished with those who died; and anyway, there must have been something wrong with the old ways if they could not prevent the plague from wiping out the village. So the men of the village take it upon themselves to reinvent the ethical codes and daily habits that they are to live by. They seem mostly motivated by a desire to do what's best, or at least whatever works, but their motives are not untinged by the usual components of greed, avarice, and lust, and even when they seek to do good they are at best flailing about blindly without a moral guidepost in sight.

The story is told in a very simple, straightforward style, and it has elements of both history and fable. There is a great deal of humor here, and there is some goodness to be found in every character, but on the whole this is, despite the title, a dark novel that is not afraid to examine the worst side of human nature. It is easy to imagine that in a similar situation, people today would not act much differently from the people in this novel - and the recent events in New Orleans make this feel even closer to home.

This is truly a brilliant novel. The characters, though simply drawn, are utterly believable, and the story unfolds swiftly and compellingly. It is boldly honest and clear in its look at the motives and consequences of human actions. The ending comes full circle in an elegant way, revealing something surprising about the search for love that began the novel, and suggesting that life can and will go on despite catastrophes of both the body and the soul, but at the same time hinting that the basis of the ethical framework upon which we depend is both tenuous and arbitrary, though in the end we can't do without it.

I was sucked in my the first line of the review, "A man goes on a journey... plague-ridden rabbit" and I just had to read this book. I love odd fiction, and I was not disappointed. As with all humans, the characters were flawed but I felt compassion and understanding for the decisions they made and their consequences, as none of it could have come about with the most extreme of circumstances, which these people certainly were facing. There was nothing predictable about the book, so I was interested to the very end. I recommend it to anyone looking for fiction that's really "different" to read.