Par Lagerkvist - Nobel Prize in Literature, 1951 (8 books)

PÄR LAGERKVIST (1891-1974) was a Swedish author who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951 "for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind."

Lagerkvist's central themes include the problem of man's relation to God and the fundamental questions of good and evil. As a moralist, he uses religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of the church. One Swedish critic remarked that "Lagerkvist and John the Evangelist are two masters at expressing profound things with a highly restricted choice of words."

THE DWARF (1944), a searching, ironic novel about evil, was the first to bring him positive international attention outside of the Nordic countries. Set in the Italian Renaissance, it is also about World War II and about man in all places and times.

BARABBAS (1950), Lagerkvist's most famous work, was immediately hailed as a literary masterpiece. The novel is based on the Biblical story of the convicted thief and murderer Barabbas, who is freed by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate and his life exchanged for Jesus of Nazareth. Barabbas later watches Jesus as he bears the cross to Golgotha, witnesses the crucifixion, and then spends the rest of his life trying to understand why he was chosen to live rather than Jesus.

In THE SIBYL (1956), a powerful and poetic parable, the Wandering Jew of medieval Christian legend journeys to Delphi to consult the famed oracle of the pagans. He is turned away but not before learning that one of the most adept of the old priestesses, or sibyls, lives in disgrace in the mountains above the temple. In her rude goat-hut he seeks the meaning of his disastrous brush with the son of God.

THE DEATH OF ABASUERUS (1960) is set during the age of medieval pilgrimages. The pilgrim Tobias, bound for the Holy Land, joins company with a mysterious stranger who travels with a woman known as Diana. The stranger is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who denied Jesus a moment of respite and was condemned to eternal life, and who stands in for modern man in his ambivalence toward Christ and his ultimate rejection of God.

PILGRIM AT SEA (1962) opens aboard the pirate ship in which Tobias, passenger and pilgrim, and still hoping to reach the Holy Land, comes to know Giovanni, a pirate and unfrocked priest who lost his faith over his passion for a woman. The novels ends with Tobias and Giovanni still at sea, and the Holy Land a seemingly impossible goal. In THE HOLY LAND (1964), Tobias and Giovanni are cast ashore on a bleak coast, where they find shelter in the ruins of an ancient temple, and where their only companions are herdsmen. Tobias, the eternal wanderer, pursues a god in whose existence he cannot believe, and in the end the search becomes his belief, the answer within himself; Giovanni resists a god in whose existence he cannot really disbelieve. By such diverse approaches do both discover a kind of peace.

His final novel, HEROD AND MARIAMNE (1967) makes use of a symbolic constellation that appears often in his books: here the brutal, power-sick Herod and his wife Mariamne, whom he must kill when he realizes he can never understand the love she represents.

THE MARRIAGE FEAST (1973) contains nineteen short stories in which there is no settled frontier between fact and fable, and where fantasy permeates the actual and "reality" can take on the dimensions of the fabulous.

Lagerkvist's strength lies in his ability to create memorable figures that symbolize eternal forces in man: the hangman, the dwarf, and Herod are men in despair; Barabbas, the Sibyl, and Tobias represent the seekers who have experienced the divine and can never be at peace again. Mariamne, the hangman's wife, and Asak in Barabbas, who do good without question, can be obliterated by man's brutality or by life's indifference but represent an enduring quality that Lagerkvist believes will never perish.


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise indicated:

* BARABBAS (Vintage, 1951/1989). Translated by Alan Blair, with a Preface by Lucien Maury and a Letter by André Gide. -- PDF + ePUB

* THE DEATH OF AHASUERUS (Vintage, 1982). Translated by Naomi Walford.

* THE DWARF (Hill & Wang, 1973). Translated by Alexandra Dick. -- PDF + ePUB

* HEROD AND MARIAMNE (Vintage, 1982). Translated by Naomi Walford.

* THE HOLY LAND (Vintage, 1982). Translated by Naomi Walford.

* THE MARRIAGE FEAST & OTHER STORIES (Hill & Wang, 1982) . Translated by Alan Blair and Carl Eric Lindin.

* PILGRIM AT SEA (Vintage, 1982). Translated by Naomi Walford.

* THE SIBYL (Random House, 1958/1963). Translated by Naomi Walford. -- PDF + ePUB