Summary of the book:  Daniel Urwind is left alone during a whole year.  His wife, Marie, chemist, is in the US for her work and their two children have already left home.  Daniel Urwind writes a letter to Marie every week in the second hand book-shop he has inherited from his father and where he rather lately finds a refuge than work.  The ur-vind is also the cosmic wind, blowing from beyond the reassuring walls of houses and apartments.  And it is the story-teller's name Daniel Urwind, in whom is focused a wealth of literary and artistic allusions and antecedents that include the Merz-Bau of Kurt Schwitters, the paintings of Cézanne and the fiction of Kafka.   It is his entire existence that he mends together, past and present, reality and dreams in a language that is loaded with emotion and poetry.  The novel is closed by an epilogue where Marie, after this year of absence, departs again, leaving Daniel alone.

Reasons for this choice:  Bo Carpelan in one of the leading Finnish-Swedish writers of this century. He worked as a librarian and literary critic and has published fourteen books of poems, five books of fiction, books for children, and translations.  He has been awarded the most important Nordic literary prizes, i.e. the Nordic Council’s Prize in 1977, the Finlandia Prize in 1993 for his novel Urwind and the Swedish Pilot Prize in 1998.  Carpelan is also a major translator of Finnish poetry into Swedish.

His prose often issues from the uncontrollable subconscious, dreamlike and nightmarish realms whose surrealistic details are visually potent. The author has a continuous dialogue with music and visual arts. He thinks that influences of the other art forms at least as important for him as are the impressions of the so called reality.  The painters that we encounter on the pages of the book have treated the same complicated problems of reality as the novelist.  Carpelan has written a lot on simplicity that however is not simple. Bo Carpelan is a subtle novelist whose philosophical message and skilful art of writing are necessary in the turmoil of today’s noisy world.

Rights holders: Bo Carpelan and Schildts

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email: schildts@schildts.fi