The Journey Of Anders Sparrman | Granta

  • Published: 07/04/2011
  • ISBN: 9781847081759
  • 129x20mm
  • 352 pages

The Journey Of Anders Sparrman

Per Wästberg

Translated by Tom Geddes

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, Wästberg’s narrative combines intellectual precision with real emotional power.

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

Christina Patterson, Independent

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

Neel Mukherjee, The Times

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

Terry Eagleton, Lancet

The Author

Per Wästberg is 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.

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