next night

Author's name: Karl-Henning Wikmark

I had never felt so desperately alone as I did at that moment. The forest, which had been so peaceful until then, had become a kingdom of death. A northern kingdom of death, that was the feeling I had. The bare trunks, the gray light, the bare vegetation. Silent as before, but a silence of a different kind.

***

Carl-Henning Wikmark (1934–2020): The Swedish novelist and thinker who was better known abroad than at home. He studied philosophy and worked as a university professor before embarking on his literary project in the late 1950s, which diversified between translation, novels, criticism, and theater. Swedish cultural circles saw him as an embodiment of the idea of ​​the "outside," both visionary and influential, despite the critical acclaim his works received.

His novel won the August Prize, Sweden's most important local award, as the best literary book of 2007. It's a tale of life's end and a contemplation of the ultimate questions, through which Haasa, the novel's narrator and main character, settles his account of his past, with everything he's missed—the disappointments and criticisms—until the moment when he meets three men who share his fate in Hall 5, or the "death ward," in a Stockholm hospital: a stranger from the ends of the earth, hidden from view; Bariya, the gambler betting on eternal life; and Harry the tramp, the only one among the sick and healthy there who, at a crucial moment, embodies the quality of nobility. All four are facing an inevitably victorious enemy, but each has a strategy they're already preparing for that confrontation.