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Gentlemen
 
 
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Gentlemen [Hardcover]

Klas Ostergren (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Book Description

April 13, 2007
Beaten up, bruised, and scared, a young writer hides in a Stockholm apartment, writing the story of its disappeared inhabitants: the flamboyant and charismatic Morgan brothers.

It all began a year earlier, when he was rooming with Henry Morgan, a boxer, piano player, composer, bartender, and old-fashioned gentleman with a Gatsby-like capacity for turning life into a feast and absolutely no talent for keeping secrets.

The two friends led the high-life in Stockholm until the day Henry’s younger brother Leo – a star poet, drunk, political provocateur – showed up. Leo drags them into a scandal involving illegal weapons and gangsters, and soon the three men find themselves unwittingly and irreversibly trapped in a dangerous plot.

Written with an intense regard for storytelling and style, Gentlemen is the most important literary work to emerge from Sweden in the past thirty years – simultaneously celebrating and mourning the post-WWII era with its jazz music, poetry, hidden treasures, and espionage.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

...dazzling, uninhibited storytelling...A breathtaking performance. --Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy

Gentlemen is one of those classic, almost unlikely tall tales, that one only thought literary giants like Steinbeck and Faulkner were capable of producing. --Borås Tidning

Gentlemen captured me from the first line. --Nerikes Allehanda

About the Author

Klas Östergren was born in Stockholm in 1955 and is the author of several novels including the landmark Gentlemen (1981) and its sequel, Gangsters (2005). A leading star of Swedish literature for nearly three decades, he has won the Piratenpriset and the Doblougska prize from the Swedish Academy. A founder of the rock band Fullersta Revolutionary Orchestra, Östergren has also worked as a playwright, scriptwriter for television and screen, and translator from French and English. His translations include works by J.D. Salinger, Charles Baudelaire, Henrik Ibsen, and Harold Pinter. He now lives with his wife and three children in the seafront town of Kivik in southern Sweden.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 375 pages
  • Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing; First Edition edition (April 13, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1596922060
  • ISBN-13: 978-1596922068
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #899,406 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Oh, brothers, April 17, 2007
By 
This review is from: Gentlemen (Hardcover)
(Originally published 1981 in Swedish)

Gentlemen is the story of two brothers, Henry and Leo Morgan, and their chronicler, Klas Ostergren, who shares his name with the author. Klas meets Henry Morgan at the moment when he is not out of house, but definitely out of home, having been robbed of nearly all his possessions. Henry's personality is big, and his adventures are wide-ranging and large as well. He takes Klas into his home, helps him find work, and introduces him to a cast of characters that runs the gamut from the Mysterious Woman to the Guys Down The Block Who Are Digging a Tunnel to Treasure.

Over the course of Year of the Child as Ostergren repeatedly reminds us--Klas observes Henry, and later his troubled brother Leo, and their many friends, lovers, and acquaintances over the course of many months. Henry lives on a grand scale, financed by selling off his grandfather's rare book collection, cadging free lunches, and occasional work as a film extra. Leo tries to live on as small a scale as possible, to keep his fragile sense of sanity untroubled. Klas attempts to understand it, enjoy the largeness of it, and ultimately put it into a recognizable shape to explain it.

Behind the adventures lurks a bigger theme--of international scheming and intrigue, politics and business, and large forces at work that nevertheless touch Henry, Leo and Klas. By the end, Klas is living a hermit life, abandoned and unsure of what was real or imagined or forgotten in the time he spent with him.

This is a classic formulation of young man observing (slightly) older and much more experienced men at play in their own lives, existing just on the edge of what might be danger or could be farce, and then disappearing from view with no neatly wrapped-up answers or even what questions to ask.

Reading works in translation always leaves one longing for fluency in the original language, but an accomplished translator like Nunnally assures you that the translation is faithful to the original in tone, content and style. The novel moves along fairly quickly despite its length (514 pages), and you'll be intrigued by the conclusion, perhaps irritated by the open-ended finish, and amused by it all.

Armchair Interviews says: If you're looking for an unpredictable trip with fantastical characters, try Gentlemen.
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