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Odysseus Returns Home
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17124 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
1,765 Words |
| Author
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John Weinstock
John Weinstock is chairman of the Department of Germanic
languages at the University of Texas at Austin. His books
include The Nordic Mind (with Frank Anderson) and The Hero in
Scandinavian Literature. |
SANGEN I TRADET (The Bed in the Tree)
En Barock hostoria (A Baroque tale).
Christian Stannow
Stockholm: Atlantis, 1989
295 pp.
Author Christian Stannow is keenly interested in ideals and in the progress of Western culture. He avidly reads books on a wide variety of topics, from belle letters to history of science. This reading inspires his meticulous preparation for the outstanding documentaries he has produced for Swedish television - programs on contemporary writers and on intellectual giants of the past such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Emily Dickinson. He travels widely to produce these films, exploring the locales and researching the periods in which his subjects lived.
When not filming documentaries, Stannow expresses his ideas in literary form; he has written thirteen novels and collections of poetry. His books frequently tell us that we could profit from lessons learned in the past, and this is indeed evident in his most recent novel.
"Finish. Return. Begin again? That is one course what everything finally is about…. This eternally repeating story about how the very first man peeked out from his mother's womb and without hesitation immediately chose life." The first man in this Christian Stannow novel, The Bed in the Tree: A Baroque Tale, is a Swedish documentary filmmaker by the name of Hans Jorgen Kineman (literally, "filmmaker") who is employed by the state bureaucracy. He is Odysseus; or for that matter he might be you or I, for we are dealing with cyclic, repeating events as one of the story's saying indicates: Everything is bound in rings (Gutasaga).
As is well known, Odysseus finally returned home to Penelope, having been delayed by many unforeseen events; Hans Jorgen too is on his way home, to Sweden, to a wife, to the normal and at times drab life he leads there. He has been to the island of Ithaca, to Texas, to Arizona, to the Caribbean, and elsewhere while making a film he has aptly titled The Hero's Return. Hans Jorgen is a middle aged, middle-class Swede whose Danish grandfather was one of the early silent filmmakers. Fortunately, this grandfather married into a family with money because many of Hans Jorgen's film ventures have failed. He even made a film of The Odyssey with the island of Faeroe in the Baltic serving as
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