The Journey Of Anders Sparrman

I have spent too long on plants and animals. Now it is time for human beings.' This haunting novel is based on the life of Anders Sparrman, the eighteenth-century naturalist and disciple of the pioneering classifier Carl Linnaeus. Despite his humble beginnings, Sparrman joined Captain Cook on his second voyage to Antarctica and Tahiti and later made an unprecedented journey to South Africa. What he saw on these explorations made him a dedicated scientist and abolitionist, but it was not until he returned home to Sweden that a love affair dispelled the loneliness that had haunted him. In this magical, poetic novel, set between the end of the Enlightenment and the dawn of Romanticism, Wastberg's narrative combines intellectual precision with real emotional power.

About the Author :
Per Wostberg is the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature. He founded the Swedish Section of Amnesty International in 1963, and was deeply involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. From 1976 to 1982 he was the editor of Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. He was president of International PEN from 1979 to 1986. He is the author of fifty publications, including novels, poetry, essays and works on African politics and literature.

Review :
Wästberg evokes the landscape, and the sights, smells and texture of daily life, both in Sweden and on Sparrman's travels, with lyrical precision. It's a breathtaking endeavour - an attempt not just to capture a life that history reveals only in glimpses, but a whole universe ... As a historical chronicle, the novel can't be faulted Achieves something quietly innovative and original ... [it is] a work that cleaves closely to a biography but with all the imaginative freedom and prose style of a work of fiction ... the book is a subtle, breathtaking achievement. As historical fiction it effortlessly and magisterially prises open worlds unknown. As prose it achieves a luminosity and precision that is the true domain of poetry. Make no mistake, this is a great European novel A splendid novel ... a marvel of literary creation, with a sinewy muscular style and some passages of shimmering lyrical beauty ... The Journey of Anders Sparrman is a superbly evocative, lovingly crafted work of literature "unlike any one has read before" as Nadine Gordimer remarks on the dust-jacket. In the scrupulous artistic hands of Wästberg, the ghost of the great Anders Sparrman finally triumphs over his contemporary detractors A remarkable blend of quotation, historical record, interpretation and reinvention. It's also an opportunity to rediscover an eighteenth-century eyewitness account of colonialism whose outrage can feel shockingly contemporary In Per Wästberg's vividly reimagined life of Anders Sparrman, the great 18th-century discoverer at long last finds the sensitive biographer he has deserved for so long The novel's deep wisdom questions what is important in life ... Underpinning the prose is both Sparrman and Wästberg's humanity ... Wästberg has rescued a beguiling soul from oblivion while subtly reminding readers that we are what we do In this absorbing fusion of biography and imagination, Per Wästberg has movingly taken us inside the head of a remarkable man. He evokes a figure of great compassion and curiosity, whose life was one of both scientific and moral discovery: of Antarctic icebergs, of unknown species of plants and animals in Africa, of the cruelties of slavery, and finally, unexpectedly, in middle age, of the warmth of love. As a reader, I'm grateful for his discovery of Anders Sparrman; as a writer, I envy it What can one say about a work of literature unlike any one has read before? In a long life of reading I have never encountered anything quite like this sweepingly original symbiosis of scientific knowledge and curiosity, sensuality, narrative of human ethos and personality, research into form and significance of nature, written with thrilling grace. Not only is Per Wästberg a profound thinker who has followed in our times and world a roving, engaged drive which has led him to this creation of a novel which is also a biography (or is it a biography which is also a novel) he has been enabled to achieve this because he is himself a poet, with the poet's endowment of capturing in words what would seem out of their reach. In this account of Anders Sparrman, no figment of imagination but a Swedish explorer in the eighteenth century, to turn the pages is not only to follow Anders' perilous journeys with Captain Cook, and his own in Africa, it is to experience - this is what it would have been for me to see, with the perception sharpened as student-disciple of Linnaeus, what no one outside the Antarctic or interior of ancient Africa had ever seen before. And that, in its genre, is what this book is: what no one has discovered the way to write before It is a tribute to the richness of Wästberg's literary portrait that you end it with your sense of the ultimate mystery of Sparrman heightened ... Thanks to Wästberg's art ... Sparrman's vanguard qualities now receive posthumous salutation This fictional biography by one of the grandees of Swedish letters charts the life and career of this brave man, seamlessly interviewing original source material with poetical prose Per Wästberg has written a winner with The Journey of Anders Sparman ... Wästberg's beautiful prose takes you on an immense journey capturing the almost mystical experience that early explorers must have had. It's a brilliantly researched adventure story and the writing is sublime Scandinavian fiction still scales the heights ... or, from Sweden, Per Wästberg's sweeping saga of ideas and identities in shipboard ferment with Captain Cook (The Journey of Anders Sparrman) A rich composite and the man that emerges is a modest free-thinking, moral and sympathetic hero