Does every hypernaturalistic author have a dream-fantasy inside them that they're longing to let out? I found out earlier this year that that was the case with Flaubert. His reputation, of course, rests on the so-real-you-can-touch-it Madame Bovary. L'Education Sentimentale is similar in constructio...
A 1001 CBYMRBYGU.Alfie is a baby who doesn’t want to go to sleep, a baby who has great skills at keeping himself, and his dad, awake. From Sweden, but the story is quite universal.
The early Alfons books are simply amazing - some of the best small children's literature ever written. I wouldn't hesitate to compare them with classics like Peter Rabbit. This was #11, and about now it started to go wrong. I don't think it was so much that she got tired, or ran out of ideas. It was...
Some subjects are so frightening that there is a de facto taboo on mentioning them at all. I understand, for example, that before Ibsen tackled the subject of hereditary syphilis in Ghosts, people refused even to talk about it, and the play prompted an outcry. In this book, Gunilla Bergström bravely...
As people will have noticed, my new reading project is Norwegian. I'm now in the middle of my fourth Norwegian novel this year, and I feel I'm coming up to speed. I've been asked several times how confident I am that I'm getting the Norwegian. I speak Swedish fluently, and the two languages are very...
Didn't you just hate it when you were a little kid, and the big kids said you were too small to do things? That's Alfons's current problem. Dad has parked him with Grandma for the afternoon. Which would be fine, since Grandma always offers good home-baked cookies, but his big cousins are also there....
One of the best books for small children that I've come across. Every time my 4 year old nephew Samuel comes to visit, I have to read this aloud to him in improvised English translation. Unlike most stories for that age group, it is a genuine miniature novel, with character development and an intere...
One of the two best goodnight stories for small kids that I know. (The other one is Astrid Lindgren's Jag vill inte gå och lägga mig!). Alfons runs his pushover dad ragged with a stream of excuses about why he can't possibly go to sleep yet.This is another book that my four-year-old nephew Samuel re...
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