- Published: 01/04/2010
- ISBN: 9781847082831
- Granta Books
- 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.
£18.99
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 remarkable blend of quotation, historical record, interpretation and reinvention. It's also an opportunity to rediscover an 18th-century eyewitness account of colonialism whose outrage can feel shockingly contemporary
