Ross Shideler

Ross Shideler offers an in-depth introduction to the works of Per Olov Enquist and discusses the writer's central themes and the imagery and motifs he uses to develop them. This in-depth study begins with a brief introduction to the social and literary backgrounds that are the foundations for Enquist's writing. His work is presented in chronological fashion beginning with his early psychological novels written in the tradition of the French nouveau roman and proceeding to his highly regarded documentary novels and popular plays. Shideler traces Enquist's fascination with modern man's isolation and his attempt to find connections in history to explain the dilemma. Other psychological, social, and political themes are examined and analyzed in this first critical study concentrating entirely on Enquist's work.

First published in Sweden in 1976, Children's Island increased the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild. The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone, has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Children's Island is told from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in not going to summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty, sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy he needs to find the answers to life's dilemmas. He lulls his divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the task of supporting his love for McDonald's hamburgers. What he finds in Stockholm—a kind of Children's Island all its own—is a series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define contemporary society. It's a society of isolation, violence, and aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening to Reine's psyche and well-being than the changes taking place within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls Children's Island "an extremely entertaining, extremely funny, and very serious book."