SANGEN I TRADET (The Bed in the Tree)
En Barock hostoria (A Baroque tale).
Christian Stannow
Stockholm: Atlantis, 1989
295 pp.
Author Christian Stannow is keenly interested in ideals and in the progress of Western culture. He avidly reads books on a wide variety of topics, from belle letters to history of science. This reading inspires his meticulous preparation for the outstanding documentaries he has produced for Swedish television - programs on contemporary writers and on intellectual giants of the past such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Emily Dickinson. He travels widely to produce these films, exploring the locales and researching the periods in which his subjects lived.
When not filming documentaries, Stannow expresses his ideas in literary form; he has written thirteen novels and collections of poetry. His books frequently tell us that we could profit from lessons learned in the past, and this is indeed evident in his most recent novel.
"Finish. Return. Begin again? That is one course what everything finally is about…. This eternally repeating story about how the very first man peeked out from his mother's womb and without hesitation immediately chose life." The first man in this Christian Stannow novel, The Bed in the Tree: A Baroque Tale, is a Swedish documentary filmmaker by the name of Hans Jorgen Kineman (literally, "filmmaker") who is employed by the state bureaucracy. He is Odysseus; or for that matter he might be you or I, for we are dealing with cyclic, repeating events as one of the story's saying indicates: Everything is bound in rings (Gutasaga).
As is well known, Odysseus finally returned home to Penelope, having been delayed by many unforeseen events; Hans Jorgen too is on his way home, to Sweden, to a wife, to the normal and at times drab life he leads there. He has been to the island of Ithaca, to Texas, to Arizona, to the Caribbean, and elsewhere while making a film he has aptly titled The Hero's Return. Hans Jorgen is a middle aged, middle-class Swede whose Danish grandfather was one of the early silent filmmakers. Fortunately, this grandfather married into a family with money because many of Hans Jorgen's film ventures have failed. He even made a film of The Odyssey with the island of Faeroe in the Baltic serving as Ithaca.
Two branches of the family came about when the grandfather managed to get Tone, his pretty young secretary, pregnant. For Tone, this was an unusual opportunity for her fantasies to be realized; she had long dreamed about going to that cinema paradise, Hollywood. She was discreetly provided the means for the one-way trip and received as a going-away gift a wooden horse her lover's young son had carved. The boy who made the horse eventually moved to Sweden and became the father of Hans Jorgen.
The novel tells of Hans Jorgen's life and contains many beautiful flashbacks to his early years during World War II at home on Lidingo in the Stockholm area where his father is an engineer, and on Faeroe, where the summer cottage is located.
When Hans Jorgen is in Ithaca filming The Hero's Return, he
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