- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape (10 Feb 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0224072668
- ISBN-13: 978-0224072663
- Product Dimensions: 13.5 x 1.4 x 21.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,167,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Snow
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Product Description
Book Description
The first novel to be published in Britain by one of Sweden's most important young writers
Product Description
'The sky was now a block of darkness, punctured only by driving snow. The stars had gone out, the king was dead. And the wound on his arm refused to heal.' So begins Snow, the first novel by Ellen Mattson to be published in Britain - a brilliant exploration of an individual's codes of ethics and honour in the face of political and social collapse.
The man is Jakob Torn, a small-town apothecary, stumbling drunkenly through the streets, a refugee from his own home, carrying a deep stab-wound inflicted by his wife. He does not understand what brought on this sudden violence, any more than he can come to terms with the death, in battle, of his king. When the town begins to fill with the starving, frostbitten remnants of the defeated army, and Jakob is conscripted into helping to embalm the king's body, all his certainties are called into question.
Though set in 1718 in the west coast of Sweden, Snow is a profoundly modern and universal novel, interested less in the real-life historical drama that forms the backdrop than in the emotional and moral dilemma of Jakob Torn - a simple, loyal, honourable man who finds himself the damaged centre of a collapsing world.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I knew very little about the history of Sweden in the 18th Century, but this story inspired me to find out. The king is dead and the frozen remnants of his army are straggling back through the frozen west coast. Their despair is reflected in the life and marriage of Jacob, also now exiled from his home, and out in the snow. This story is both beautifully and sparingly written. You can feel yourself freezing as the story take hold of you.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a beautifully written, moving, and engaging book with a profoundly sympathetic central character and some of the most extraordinarily immediate images in contemporary fiction (a birthday party from the perspective of a drunk and the embalming of a king are two). Although concerned with some of the most fundamental philosophical and political questions about mortality, power, idealism, love, and, ultimately, what it is to be human (and all in 180 pages), this isn't a dry or inaccesible book. It sits very firmly in the broader, Scandinavian tradition of existential art, but without any of the ponderous gloom of, say, a lot of Ingmar Bergman films. Beautiful, engaging, moving and a book that invites you to think about the world - what more could you want from literature?
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A rather dense and obscure piece of literary fiction which will appeal only to those with a lot of time on their hands, enabling them to delve into the less commercial end of European fiction. I like my fiction to be as unusual and challenging as possible but this was a really hard slog. Approach with caution.
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