Customer Reviews

The Death of a Beekeeper

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

when i took the book from the library i thoght it would be a real burden. I think it's the best book i have ever read and I really recommend it.The story is so sad but contains some of the greatest qotes ever. Lars is a great author that can really reach out and grab you- sometimes when you least expect it and sometimes he can really make you cry.

The author cleverly uses a series of notebooks in this existential exploration of death. From the initial diagnosis to the apparent end, the reader journeys through the beekeeper's life through a series of reflections and painful ruminations in the present. While avoiding his reality, the beekeeper discovers the joys and sorrows of his journey in an exploration of the self.

The book begins with an explanation of the notebooks. This is helpful to the reader's understanding the flow of the book. Before his death, the beekeeper kept notes in three notebooks. These notebooks are arranged in a way that tells the beekeeper's story. The author tells his story beginning with adolesence and continuing with a failed marriage, an abandon teaching career, and new life as a beekeeper. While many of his thoughts are enlightening, no role is more important to the book than his being a "beekeeper". Particularly in seeing the death of bees and their ruination, we seen the beekeeper's true insight to life as his body and profession wither.

On many levels, "The Death of a Beekeeper" is a clever book. Yet on some levels, the storyteller holds back too much. Perhaps the author's sense of realism in writing this book prevented him from revealing too much. As well written as it is, the reader can not help but wonder what more there is.

As the previous reviewer said, this book is a very powerful story of a man trying to deal with cancer and at times can make you cry, but also laugh. Lars's descriptive powers are incredible. There is one part where a friend of his dives to the bottom of deep stream, and by the end of the chapter, I could feel the cold and wet of the stream. Overall excellent book- HIGHLY RECCOMENDED!!!

Lyrical, spare, captivating. Think you won't care about a Swedish beekeeper dying of cancer? Guess again. Gustafsson makes his narrator's world our world, and when we're faced with losing it, we do care.

I was hoping for great things having read Tale of a Dog and thoroughly enjoying it. Death of a Beekeeper showed some promise initially but never managed to deliver losing direction about a third (?) of the way in. Banalities take precidence: 'You can never truly appreciate things until you are in danger of losing them' blah, blah, blah...soap operas suffice for such insight. Otherwise, the remainder of the novel, written as fragments in the notebooks of the protagonist, resembles fragments in the notebooks for the idea of a novel by a writer who never quite puts the effort in to fully flesh them out. There are some beautiful passages but overall, the novel is aimless and not particularly coherent.

As the previous reviewer said, this book is a very powerful story of a man trying to deal with cancer and at times can make you cry, but also laugh. Lars's descriptive powers are incredible. There is one part where a friend of his dives to the bottom of deep stream, and by the end of the chapter, I could feel the cold and wet of the stream. Overall excellent book- HIGHLY RECCOMENDED!!!

"Kind readers," this novel begins. "Strange readers. We begin again." And so I began this book, again, for probably the fifth or sixth time. Like Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, The Death of a Beekeeper is a book I return to every couple of years when I am in need of something quiet and beautiful. The protagonist is one Lars Lennart Westin, who once taught at "the local elementary school in Ennora on the northern shore of the lake." By the time this narrative comes into our hands, Westin is dead, but during the writing of the three notebooks that comprise the novel, he is very much alive. The Yellow Notebook is concerned with beekeeping and household expenses; the Blue Notebook is a commonplace book of sorts, containing "newspaper clippings, excerpts from Westin's readings, and his own stories;" the Damaged Notebook contains telephone numbers and brief notes about the progression of Westin's cancer.

The physical and mental impact of pain, the intricate lives of bees, the frozen landscape of North Vastmanland, and the mysterious workings of a fictional galaxy called Aldebaran are detailed in equal and exquisite measure. I admire the gentle precision of Gustafsson's prose, the author's eye for odd and interesting trivia, the novel's meditative nature. This is a book of ephemera that cannot be easily categorized, a book of lists. For example, page 106 features a "Table of art forms according to their level of difficulty." Art form number one (the least difficult) is eroticism; at the other end of the spectrum is artillery (number 28). The art of the novel is, according to our protagonist, less difficult than squash, weight lifting, high trapeze, bicycle acrobatics, and the building of fountains, but slightly more difficult than surfing and significantly more difficult than poetry, which weighs in at a humble 3.

I enjoyed Gustafsson's observations on life and its ending, but I can't say I came away with a clear notion of what he is saying. The writing is poetic. His observations of himself, particularly, are wonderful. His description of his pain and the significance of that pain are thought-provoking. I finished the book with a positive feeling about life and death but I'm not sure the message I got was the one intended. Perhaps as it marinates in my mind, it'll get clearer. Glad I read the book. It gets you thinking....