Funeral Music for Freemasons [Hardcover]

Lars Gustafsson (Author), Yvonne L. Sandstroem (Author, Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This novel opens with the arrest of Jan Bohman, an expatriate Swedish poet turned tourist guide living in Senegal. In prison he ruminates on his past, reviewing early literary successes at home, friendships and loves, particularly a triangle between himself, the young opera singer Ann-Marie and the physicist Hasse. He remembers how the bonds connecting the three unraveled, and through these characters the novel seems to comment on aging: young people of the hopeful, innocent '50s fall into a mediocre, dispirited if benign middle age. Unfortunately the narrative structure is confused and incoherentshifting from one character to another and jumping backward and forward in timewhich keeps the reader at arm's length. The confusion is exacerbated by the murky prose ("For time is mostly for those who are still hoping"), stylistic poverty and sloppy syntax ("the river, with a smell suddenly gray . . . desires hardly anything"), which may not do justice to the original Swedish.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English, Swedish (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 151 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811210170
• ISBN-13: 978-0811210171
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,127,110 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Lars' Best Book But Worth A Look, November 29, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Funeral Music for Freemasons (Hardcover)

Lars Gustafsson is a treasure in American writing, but many of his books were written in Swedish first and we have to go through different translators to get to the meat of what he's saying and doing. Yvonna Sandstroem doesn't do him many favors, either here nor in the poetry she's done, everything sounds really weird, almost the way the members of ABBA pronounce English, as though at a distance.

In Funeral Music the narrator tells a kind of ABBA tale (think of "The Winner Takes It All") about the melancholia of having once been young, and now the freshness of youth, its dreams and hopes, is all swept away. Set in prison in a dingy African cell in Senegal, the narrator remembers how once he had a wonderfully talented soprano girlfriend, Ann Marie (as well as a number of more sexual adventures with white and black men and boys) -- women are theology, he says, men are philosophy. Their youth together was filled with promise, and now their lives have fallen apart--cue up the ABBA tune, "Knowing Me, Knowing You." I really enjoyed the book, but it isn't half as original as some of Lars' other titles.