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.”
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Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A bestseller in Sweden, and the basis of both a movie and a TV miniseries there, this picaresque novel has for its protagonist a worldly-wise yet vulnerable 10-year-old boy. Slated to go off to Children's Island for his annual summer at camp, Reine Larsson decides instead to explore Stockholm. On the brink of puberty, Reine provides some amusing episodes centering on sexual concerns; he indulges his passion for McDonald's hamburgers and gets caught up in some of the seamier trades of the city. The knowledge of his illegitimacy spurs Reine's search for a likely progenitor, and he pursues the idea that his father might have been the late Dag Hammarskjold. It is difficult to remember Reine is a child, however. His adventures are hardly typicala medley of the sad, the amusing and the absurd that serve as a vehicle for Jersild's exploration of contemporary child-adult relationships. Moreover, a stilted translation, weighted down by gratingly vernacular dialogue, detracts from the narrative's effectiveness.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
No other Swedish author writing today rivals Jersild's popularity among critics and the general public alike. His success rests mainly on his effective re-creation of everyday Swedish life in a series of satirical novels that also reflect his deep social commitment. In The Children's Island, first published in 1976, ten-year-old Reine decides to miss summer camp so that he can stay in Stockholm by himself and devote his last summer before the confusion of adolescence to solving life's major problems. In the process Jersild defines many aspects of urban life in the 1970s and shows the failure of modern society to meet human needs. As in The Animal Doctor (1975) and After the Flood (LJ 1/86), Jersild blends high readability with poignant social interest. Recommended. Ulla Sweedler, Univ. of California Lib., San Diego
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sick, twisted and realistic,
By Ashtar Command "Seeker" (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Children's Island (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation) (Paperback)
"Children's Island" is a Swedish novel by P.C. Jersild. I've only read the Swedish original, so I can't vouch for the American translation. This review, for all its worth, is therefore based on the original version.
I read "Children's Island" already as a kid. I shouldn't have. It's not a children's story. Rather, it's a sick, twisted and bizarre novel for adults. Even the contents are very "adult". My father mistook the novel for a children's story, probably because of its appealing and childish cover (different from the American cover pictured here). In fact, many of Jersild's novels are macabre, and border the surrealistic. There is also a streak of perverted sexuality running through the stories. "Children's Island" is no exception. The main character of the novel, Reine, is a 10 year old kid. He runs away from home, and meets a string of absurd characters, most of them adults. For a while, he gets a job at a kind of undertakers' firm, run by an old refugee from the Soviet Union. He gets in trouble with his mother's lover, a real bum named Stig Utler who apparently hates kids. Later, Reine joins a hypocritical, left-wing theatre company, who talk a lot about "solidarity" and "anti-fascism" while actually being fiercely competitive. Reine also encounters a strange subculture known as "raggare", often seen as menacing when the novel was written (today, they are usually considered harmless and quite cool). The "raggare" are criminal and cultish, vandalize an amusement park and carry out a strange ritual during which they demolish Reine's bike. Reine then meets a bald-headed young woman and her old lover, who turns out to be crazy, and attempts to torture Reine in a gynaecologists' chair! During the final part of the story, our childhood hero meets a group of criminal boys at a boat in the Baltic Sea. They consider the clean-cut Reine to be "upper class" and steals his toy monkey (he eventually gets it back). As for Reine himself, he is obsessed with perverse sexuality and frequently delusional. His private thoughts are more like those of a disturbed teenager or adult than those of a child. Reine comes across as a quite unsympathetic character, a kind of petty little sociopath who hates his parents, wants to become world dictator and believes that he is the only person in the universe. He is convinced that UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold is his real father. Despite being so young, Reine is also quite street smart and something of a survival artist. And no, he's definitely not upper class! "Children's Island" was first published in 1976. The plot is set in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, during the summer of 1975. When I re-read the novel this week, I was struck by the fact that many places described in the novel still look exactly the same, 35 years later! Sweden seems to have been caught in a time warp. Does nothing ever change around here? Despite the absurd character of much of the storyline, "Children's Island" nevertheless gives a very realistic impression (at least to Swedish readers). I haven't bothered checking all of the places, but I know that the flower shop mentioned in the novel still exists (or at least there is a flower shop at exactly the same spot). Incidentally, Children's Island is also a real place, although not an actual island. It's a summer camp area north of Stockholm. (Poor Reine never reaches it.) I'm not sure what the point of "Children's Island" really is. Is Reine Jersild's alter ego? Is he a symbol of wayward children? Is the story a critique of adult-children relationships in the post-Woodstock West? The novel ends with Reine apparently going back to school and his grey, everyday existence, making you wonder whether his odyssey through Stockholm was some kind of dream. Honestly, I didn't get this one. But then, Jersild's other oeuvres are even stranger! Stay tuned...
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