A Fairy Tale Tapa blanda - 2014

Extracto

The television shows images of a dark street, road signs, and snow. Stockholm. A sidewalk has been cordoned off with red-and-white plastic tape, people have gathered behind it. They, too, are standing very still. Some are clasping their mouths. The woman on the television speaks very slowly as if she has just woken up. She says that Olof Palme came out of a cinema not far from there. That he was with his wife, that they had been to see the film The Mozart Brothers and were on their way home.
 
On the gray sidewalk are dark stains that look like paint. The camera zooms in on them. “It’s blood,” my dad says, never once taking his eyes off the screen.
 
We’re back on the street. We walk quickly as if rushing away from the images on the television.
 
I think we’re heading home until we turn right by the closed-down butcher’s. Toward the harbor, down a narrow, cobbled street.
 
My dad sits down on an iron girder; I sit down beside him, as close to him as I can get. The water in front of us is black. A couple of fishing boats are sailing into the harbor; there’s a huge crane to our right, its hook hangs just above the surface of the water. The sky is gray.
 
My dad hides his face in his coat sleeve. I hear loud sobs through the thick fabric. He squeezes my hand so hard that it hurts.
 
“So they got him,” he says. “The bastards finally got him.”
 
I don’t remember ever seeing my dad cry. I ask him if Palme was someone he knew, but he makes no reply. He holds me tight. My feet are freezing in the rain boots.
 
“They got him,” he says again.
 
The wind whips the sea into foam.
 
“I think we’re going to have to move again.”

Reseñas en medios

"If Cormac McCarthy’s The Road offered an actual relationship instead of only an emptiness that readers fill, then it might approach Jonas Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale.  Here are a father and son in desperate circumstances, paired off against the world, but their relationship is rich and strange and intensely human and particular.  This father is one of the best characters I’ve ever read in fiction, and the story is beautifully told." —David Vann, best-selling author of Dirt and Legend of a Suicide

"A unique and brilliantly observed depiction of a father–son relationship, and the perils of unconditional love." — Jon Bauer, author of the IMPAC Award-shortlisted Rocks in the Belly

“With controlled and measured prose, Jonas T. Bengtsson builds subtle suspense, describing the experiences of a young boy, who is at once protected by his father's love while under constant threat of the darkness of their daily reality. A Fairy Tale is a profound and penetrating novel about the unbreakable bond between a father and son.” — Lawrence Hill, author of Someone Knows My Name, winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Prize

"[A] resonant catalogue of life" —Publishers Weekly

"In a mash-up of film noir, fairy tale, and bildungsroman, Danish author Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale traces the unusual and occasionally horrific journey of a boy and his father. Deftly narrated from the child’s point of view, the book takes on the power of myth. Themes touching on the artist/other in society, loss of innocence, abandonment, and the search for identity are subtly woven throughout." —Foreword

“[A Fairy Tale] is...compelling for showing the dark side of seemingly normally things—the city of Copenhagen, theater shows, gardening—and its showing of the bright side of things that are normally seen in their darkest light—strip clubs, shoplifting, and mental institutions....This is a worthy introduction of Jonas T. Bengtsson to the English audience. Those drawn to Updike’s Rabbit Series...will gravitate to A Fairy Tale because it has the underlying rebellious spirit that does not often bubble to the surface in such a collective environment.” –Three Percent

“Danish author Bengtsson’s first novel to be published in the U.S….has an almost hypnotic power to draw readers into the narrative and hold their attention to its melancholy ending.” —Booklist

“The real strength of Bengtsson’s novel lies in his touching exploration of the bond shared between father and son and the way he skillfully transitions from the placid, go-with-the-flow waters of childhood to the rough, jaded chop of teenage life without ever missing a beat.  Child narrators are a notoriously tricky beast to tame, but Bengtsson’s nameless one (and Charlotte Barslund’s translation of his many voices) never feels less than authentic.” –Typographical Era

“[Bengtsson’s] language is truly beautiful…[A Fairy Tale] is an intriguing exploration of the dark side of a family life which will divide opinions.” –Upcoming4.Me

“Enchanting and horrifying.” —Buried in Print

“This can’t-put-it-downer of novel about three generations  of a disturbed family excites and unnerves the reader at the same time that it puzzles and terrifies… Filled with surprises, the action is non-stop, with the author pacing his dramatic moments so effectively that there are no “dead spots” in the novel.” —Seeing the World through Books
 
“[A Fairy Tale] rings with painful authenticity in its examination of the destructive side of love and family…With its wonderfully dark, bleak ending, I really liked this novel.” —His Futile Preoccupations

It is also a novel with a precocious young narrator, and one of outsider culture, and, to complete a series, also a novel of short, "cinematic" chapters. Yet because Bengtsson puts all these aspects to use, draws something interesting and new out of them, they fit together to form a complete work that doesn't rely on tropes as crutches, but as a needed part of the whole.” –Bookslut
 
“A tightly written literary novel, A Fairy Tale is a fascinating study in the way each generation affects the next, and how people shape the story of their lives. It is a strong introduction to the work of Bengtsson for the English-reading audience, and a gripping story in itself.” –The Masters Review

“With just two other previous books to his name, Jonas T. Bengtsson has become one of Scandinavia’s most exciting new writers and A Fairy Tale, which was originally published in 2011, is his first novel to be translated into English. Bengtsson’s sparse but elegant prose seems an appropriate voice for his hero to narrate the story of his life, as we hear the son admire and consequently question the sins of his father.” –Pop Matters

 “[A Fairy Tale] The novel is a drawing rendered slowly over time, a collection of straight and stark lines made by a boy struggling to create a story, and a self, from a life of transience, deception, and pain. The nature of this constant forward motion changes, however, over the course of A Fairy Tale as violence and trauma become a destination the now adult boy can no longer avoid. And we must run with him too, until we can’t.” —Words Without Borders

“[T]his novel—sensitively translated by Charlotte Barslund—so brilliantly demonstrates how, to satisfy the psyche, memory selects, isolates, concentrates and invents. Bengtsson’s is the art of the fable; Et eventyr, his book’s Danish title, evokes Hans Christian Andersen. A Fairy Tale is a powerful journey through archetypal encounters in which the young protagonist reaches a catharsis both emotionally lacerating and spiritually liberating. Fittingly he emerges from it an artist.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A Fairy Tale is as gruesome and as romantic as its title might suggest…The novel’s first and last question remains tied around this notion of a father’s love for his son and a son’s love for his father….Bengtsson answers it with much daring and quite a lot of grace.” —Necessary Fiction

“With this highly moving, symbolic, psychological, and realistic fairy tale about a peculiar otherness, he consolidates the special tone of his prose—something which floors me completely.” —Weekendavisen (Denmark)
 
“A beautifully original novel with a lot of charm. Absolutely recommended.” —La Quinzaine Littéraire (France)
 
“ A brilliant novel about survival, love, and legacy.” —Libération Champagne Dimanche (France)
 
“Jonas T. Bengtsson’s new novel plays with the classic theme of the coming-of-age novel. The young Danish writer creates a convincing portrait of a son: fleeing like his father, fleeing because of his father.” —Le Monde des Livres (France)