Expressionist sketches of Swedish country life
Aurell grew up in the province of Värmland, a rather rustic area of Sweden, and wrote about rural and small-town life. Much like America’s William Faulkner, however, Aurell experimented with language to the point where his writings would probably appeal more to big-city and university intellectuals than to the simple country folk he depicts in his stories. In the level of obscurity within his prose, Aurell manages to be even more frustrating than Faulkner. In an attempt to capture a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, Aurell frequently employs incomplete sentences, unfinished thoughts, and a liberal license with punctuation. His stories often switch back and forth between multiple narrative perspectives, providing disjointed snippets of information that create an effect similar to a cubist painting or collage. At times it’s difficult to ascertain exactly who is saying or thinking what, or even which character is dying in a given story. And in almost every story, there’s someone dying. As scholar Eric O. Johanneson explains in the book’s introduction, “Aloneness, illness and death, and sex are the three major motifs: the universal concerns of man.” Have no fear that these stories are relentlessly depressing, however, because Aurell does inject them with a sense of humor.
Aurell seems to be seeing just how little orientation he can provide to the reader while still delivering something that could be called a story. There often isn’t much of a plot in these selections, just the description of a situation that doesn’t go anywhere. According to Johanneson, again: “. . . some of Aurell’s stories are, in effect, as surprising and as inconclusive as life itself.” That’s a fancy way of praising the positive quality of Aurell’s writing: his realism. There’s nothing here in these stories that conforms to any artificial conventions of how a story should be told or what literature should be.
And sometimes Aurell’s strategy works, resulting in a moving story with characters that the reader really grows to care about. The title selection, “Rose of Jericho” is about a lonely older man who places an ad inviting a woman boarder to his country house for rest and relaxation in exchange for help with housework and garden chores. While the setup sounds picturesque, the relationship between the two characters is anything but predictable. Another effective story, “Gatepost,” interweaves a farmer’s tale of his lost calf with the inner thoughts of a man dying from a terminal illness. “True Confessions” is a poignantly realistic story about an aging widower’s relationship with his two grown daughters who have moved away to the big city.
The remaining half dozen stories left me less than impressed. In general, Aurell’s writing is just too abstract for my tastes, and I didn’t feel like I learned much about Swedish country life in the process. Readers with a taste for modernist, experimental fiction that bends formal conventions and embraces narrative ambiguity will enjoy these stories more than I.
Stories in this collection
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