We have some more pre-reading for you this week, ahead of the Anglo-Swedish Society’s Selma Lagerlöf – A Wonderful Adventure event and Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth).
Part of our Lagerlöf in English series and translated by Linda Schenck, Banished examines what happens to an individual rejected by society, and what happens to a society that realises – too late – that the living are more important than the dead, and that it is suffering a crisis of values and priorities. What does war do to us and to our outlook on the world?
Lagerlöf struggled with these issues throughout World War I and experienced a mental block in writing about them. Then she found an opening and produced a thought-provoking tale of love, death and survival that grapples with moral dilemmas as relevant today as they were a century ago.
An extract of Banished is available to read here, which covers some unexpected guests – thought-provoking preparatory reading if you are Zooming in to the Anglo-Swedish Society’s salon next week, and eerily resonant of these times of post-travel quarantine.
If this has made you curious to add the complete book to your summer reading tower, you can buy it here.
