Hash - Softcover

Torgny Lindgren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071563299X ISBN 13: 9780715632994

Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2005

Synopsis

The main ingredients in the recipes for Swedish hash differ widely. The meats, offal, and grain that go into its preparation—an elaborate process of boiling, pickling, steaming, and stewing—can range from the heinous to the dangerous, and the results can be alternately emetic and sublime. The search for the most delicious dish of hash—the ultimate hash—forms the backbone of this blackly comic, marvelously innovative new novel from one of Sweden’s most esteemed and bestselling authors.

In a small town where an epidemic of tuberculosis rages, two very different men arrive to a scene of stoically accepted suffering. Robert Maser is a traveling garment salesman whose accent and demeanor betray the fact that he is actually Martin Borman, the fugitive Nazi leader. He engages the local schoolteacher, Lars, on the bizarre quest to find the world’s best hash. As they wander the Swedish countryside, inviting themselves into peasant homes to sample the variety of humble family recipes, it becomes clear that their goal is much more than a culinary marvel, and that what they’ve really been seeking is the force of life that must present itself even in the darkest of times.

Their adventures are narrated in a faux-naïf style by a 107-year-old newspaper reporter, who was witness to the events as they occurred in 1947, and has waited to confront his own relationship to life and death, happiness and suffering, and the power of art to express life’s ambiguities.

About this title

About the Author:

Torgny Lindgren is widely hailed as one of the most prominent literary figures on the world scene today. He has been awarded the August Prize, the Swedish National Book Award, and the Nordic Prize, and his novels have been published in more than twenty-five languages. In 1991, Lindgren was elected to the Swedish Academy, the eighteen-member committee that selects the honorees for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From Publishers Weekly:

Two seekers pursue the perfect plate of hash, and, by extension, the force of life in Lindgren's sparkling novel (after Bathsheba and The Way of the Serpent). In 1947, a newspaper reporter is fired for fabricating stories ("The dramatic week-long struggle to rescue an elk from Hob™ck Marsh," his editor accuses him, "never took place.... [and t]here has never been a turkey farm ravaged by a bear in your district") and forbidden to write another word. For more than five decades the reporter doesn't put pen to paper. As a 107-year-old inmate in the Sunnybank Rest Home, he returns, after his editor dies, to the story he left unfinished, which concerned two newcomers to the Swedish village of Avaback, site of a tuberculosis epidemic. Schoolteacher Lars Hogstrom picked the post ("pulmonary tuberculosis [is] closest to my heart," he quips) while Martin Bormann was an escaped Nazi war criminal then calling himself Robert Maser. United by their love of music and passion for hash, Maser (posing as a traveling fabric salesman) and Hogstrom had set off on a quest to sample all of the region's hashes, a journey at once comical and sublime. Hash, whose foul ingredients (hooves, offal, entrails, grain, etc.) add up to a surprising delicacy, symbolizes life, love, art and mercy. Tuberculosis a "fickle" disease that leads, Maser suggests, to "[m]odernist poetry. Atonal music. Anarchic political programs.... pure and simple idiocy," represents, among other things, death's power to make life more precious. Above all, this sly and gleeful novel is about storytelling itself, about how fiction even fiction cooked up from a recipe of grotesqueries and absurdity can contain fundamental truths.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 071563299X
• ISBN 13: 9780715632994
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240