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, ...
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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.'
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Seller's Description:
Paperback. NOT Ex-library. Acceptable/fair. Edgewear and bumping. Lightly soiled. Clean pages and tight binding. Page edges soiled. Proceeds benefit the Pima County Public Library system, which serves Tucson and southern Arizona. Until further notice, USPS Priority Mail only reliable option for Hawaii.
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in Very Good jacket. 8vo. New York: New Directions, 1981. First edition in English and first book published in English. The Death of a Beekeeper, published in 1978, is Gustafsson's best-known novel. [11] John Updike praised it as "a beautiful work, lyrical and bleak, resonant and terse."[12] Ia Dübois has called it "one of his greatest works."[13] Eva Stenskar has written that it "seems so effortless yet lyrical that only an artist at the height of his powers could've produced it."[14] Its main theme is the agony of disease, as it follows Vesslan—a beekeeper who is dying of cancer—through entries he makes on notepads. The book's innovative structure allows Gustafsson to explore identity through its expression in a variety of forms: imagination, memory and even the mundane details of life. The book's central theme is revealed by the repeated motto of the protagonist, "We never give up. We begin anew." Gustafsson himself has described it as "A book about pain. It describes a journey into the center where pain rules and pain can tolerate no rivals." The novel was re-published in 1984 as the last in a five-novel sequence Sprickorna i muren (The Cracks in the Wall), the other volumes being Herr Gustafsson själv, Yllet, Familjefesten, and Sigismund. Previous owner gift inscription, light wear to dust jacket bottom of spine. Near fine in very good dust jacket, protected with an archival-quality mylar cover.
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Seller's Description:
Fine copy in fine dust jacket. Translated from the Swedish by Janet K. Swaffar and Guntram H. Weber. 8vo 8 1/4"x 5 1/4" black cloth w/ gilt lettering on spine; 163 pgs w/ 5-pg afterword by Swaffar; photo-illus dustjacket w/ $12.95 on front flap, author photo on back cover; author's first fiction trans into English. jacket design by Hermann Strohbach w/ photo by Susanne Strohbach.