Here
you can read two short stories he wrote and some excerpts from his books.
The excerpts are pieces of his writing that meant more to me.
I'll probably keep adding more as i keep reading him...
 |
Stig Dagerman (1923 - 1954) Novelist, Short Stories Young Swedish suicide who prefigured many of the facets of French existentialism, such as alienation, fear, and despair and the necessity to face these facts of modern life in order to overcome them and live an authentic existence. He wrote novels and short stories with a sparse prose working within the modernist movements of realism, symbolism and expressionism. |
Biography
| Born October 25, 1923 Älvkarleby, Swed | Ethnicity Swedish | Residence Stockholm, Enebyberg |
| Died November 4, 1954 Enebyberg, Swed | Nationality Swedish | Language Swedish |
Stig was the illegitimate son of a young quarryman and a telephone operator, who, once they could not settle their differences, gave Stig to his father's parents to raise. Stig's mother walked out on him and he didn't have a relationship with her he was an adult. Stig enjoyed a happy childhood with his hardworking, religious grandparents on their farm, where he witnessed the hardships of rural life and enjoyed his experiences with the tramps that his grandparent's occasionally sheltered. At age 12, Stig went to live with his father and his new wife in the Stockholm, where he witnessed the miserable conditions of working poor trying to achieve a middle class lifestyle. Stig was devastated when he his grandfather was murdered by a madman and his grandmother died a short time thereafter. This inspired 16 year old Stig write his first poem and therefore find his calling: to be a witness to the loneliness, misery and tragedy of human life. This conviction was hardened when his good friend was killed two years later in a skiing accident. Stig entered a period of extreme loneliness and despair where he would visit train stations just to be around people. Around this time, Stig became involved with the Syndicalist socialist movement, which believed in a decentralized government and promoting the rights of the working class. Here Stig found a sense of belonging and a place for his first literary and journalist efforts in their journal, Arbetaren. Stig also met his future wife, Anne Marie Götzes, a German refugee and daughter of Spanish Civil War veterans. The couple went to live in an alcove in her parent's apartment, where Stig become further involved with the plights of the downtrodden. Now 20, Stig did a sporadic stint at the University before being drafted into the Army. The strange stillness and fear surrounding his army experience made a profound impact on Stig and became the subject of his first novel, which was published when he was 22. Stig embarked upon an extremely productive time, sometimes writing as much as 60 pages in a night. By the time he was 26, he was editor of the Syndicalist youth paper, and the author of 4 novels, 4 plays, a book of short stories, a travel journal and hundreds of poems and pieces of journalism. He was financially well off and was considered the rising star of Swedish literature. A year later, his marriage dissolved and he suffered a mental breakdown. The following year, he went to live with a famous Swedish Actress, Anita Björk, who aided his recovery and brightened his personal life. However, Stig was mired in a terrible fit of writer's block, where he would be carried away with the initial enthusiasm of idea, but was unable to finish anything more than small pieces of the whole. He married Anita Björk in 1951, but his writer's block worsened as did his finances and his moods became blacker. He would often feel an overwhelming compulsion to be alone and drive out in the night. Suicide attempts soon followed, both a razor and gas. Some have speculated that Stig suffered from Schizophrenia, but Stig rarely let people see his darker side. He was shy, courteous and yet still impassioned, growing in confidence as he grew older. On November 4 1954, Stig was found dead in his car which was left running in the garage.
| Influences August Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, |
Themes: Alienation, fear, despair in modern life. Poor conditions of working class and the cruelty and ignorance of capitalism. Virtues of country life vs. the misery of city life. Strains and disintegration of family units, especially when faced with death.
Style: Short spare sentences that carry a stillness that deceptively come together to make his point resonate. The stories often end without a comforting resolution a sudden ending that leaves the reader with an uncomfortable quiet. Dagerman favors intense psychological descriptions of his characters which he accomplishes sometimes literally, but often with the use of techniques of expressionism and symbolism.
Major Works
The Island of Doom (1946)
Five men and two women wash ashore a deserted, waterless Pacific
island inhabited only by blind birds and aggressive lizards.
Each character represents one aspect of human failure and each
meet there own peculiar, but appropriate deaths.
The Snake
(1945)
A novel appearing as a collections of short stories, which tells
the tales of the men in an army barracks. Each tale centers around
the various manifestations of fear, exemplified with the symbol
of the snake.
Copyright 2001 (http://www.littlebluelight.com)