The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
“The Fly Trap” is the first volume of Fredrik Sjoberg’s autobiographical trilogy, “En Flugsamlares Vag” (“The Path of a Fly Collector”), and the first to be published in English. A hit when it appeared in Sjoberg’s native Sweden in 2004, the book makes for seductive reading, a quirky and wide-ranging meditation on the deep pleasures of collecting, obsession and the natural world.“No sensible person is interested in flies,” Sjoberg writes. An amateur entomologist, he lives on Runmaro, a small island in the Stockholm archipelago, with his family, a library “large enough to withstand a Russian siege” and a collection of hoverflies impressive enough to be shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The island setting, the fresh air, the languorous days, as well as the disarmingly straightforward prose, fluidly translated by Thomas Teal, all bring to mind Tove Jansson’s wonderful “The Summer Book.” But where Jansson’s vividly drawn characters are summer people, seasonal residents on their island, Sjoberg has made his home year-round on Runmaro since 1986, and when visitors interrupt his narrative they usually do so as irritants, asking foolish questions and generally getting in the way.
These, though, are some of only a very few bad-tempered moments in “The Fly Trap,” and they have the paradoxical effect of increasing the intimacy created by Sjoberg’s leisurely style. Because who among us, spending his or her time cultivating the rather philosophical pleasures of slowness through the self-consciously useless activity of chasing flies and then fixing them with tiny pins “as capricious and flexible as a French verb” on an island “like a Sunday afternoon,” might not also feel the urge to swat aside an overly intrusive and opinionated tourist?
Not that Sjoberg particularly cares what we think. He’s also opinionated — although in an unorthodox, contrarian and often thought-provoking way. He has little time for utilitarian views of nature or for proselytizing: “Of course I could name a number of very good, very sensible reasons why a person ought to collect flies,” he writes, but “I’m no missionary.” Instead, he takes us on one of many brief excursions, into the dangerous pleasures of intoxication via Thomas De Quincey, which eventually leads to an extended and passionate defense of gardens, meadows, churchyards, ditches and the creatures that dwell there. “For me,” he says, these places “are wilder and richer and much more fun than nature undisturbed by human beings.” This is a characteristically unfettered moment, and it’s more than merely refreshing: Sjoberg’s forthright and unapologetic unpretentiousness is close to liberating in an age when nature writing is so often quasi-theological, veering routinely between awe and homily, sometimes even in the same sentence.
These two themes — the passions of collecting and the recovery of the forgotten outsider — fully animate “The Fly Trap.” As in the second and third parts of his trilogy, Sjoberg brings them together through the story of an adventurous and renegade figure, somehow marginal in the annals of natural history, whose life obliquely intersects and parallels his own. He has a gift for identifying fascinating and unconventional careers and rendering them in ways that bring out a deep and affecting longing, a longing for love, beauty and connection that appears to drive not only his protagonists but Sjoberg himself.
In the later volumes of the trilogy, the forgotten mavericks are the Swedish painter of North American landscapes Gunnar Widforss and the earthworm specialist Gustav Eisen. Here, it’s René Malaise, the inventor of the gigantic flytrap (the Mega Malaise) that Sjoberg is wielding when we meet him in the woods near his home. All entomologists know the Malaise trap, but few, apparently, know much about its creator. Sjoberg follows Malaise on his early-20th-century decade of collecting, his subsequent expedition to Burma and the unexpected celebrity that greeted him on his return, through his various love affairs, his descent into obscurity, his untimely rejection of plate tectonics and obsession with the lost civilization of Atlantis, and, most intriguingly, into his extensive collection of dubious old master paintings. Sjoberg relates all this with the vigor of a detective story, unearthing scraps of detail and speculating on their meaning, talking to Malaise’s relatives and associates, and freely psychologizing to create a memorable portrait of a man of unusual energy and originality about whom there was something “boundless,” a portrait that is also an insightful and generous reflection on the trials and rewards of collecting.
The straightforwardness of “The Fly Trap” is the product of the skill of its author and the sophistication of its structure. Somehow, Sjoberg carries you along on his many excursions and detours, always interesting but often only loosely associative, maintaining the momentum, pulling together a digressive skein of stories across centuries and continents, gently but determinedly insisting by example that calm, patience, good humor, care, attention and open-mindedness are their own rewards.
THE FLY TRAP
By Fredrik Sjoberg
Translated by Thomas Teal
278 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95.
