The Art Of Flight

Description

Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started. In this follow-up to The Fly Trap, Sjoberg continues to explore the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world. Calling on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and following the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the U.S., Sjoberg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.

Reviews

Digressive, discursive and delightful. -- Michael Kerr Telegraph A joy ... Fredrik Sjoberg's best-selling memoir The Fly Trap marked him as a maestro of the episodic. Here, he completes a trilogy. Nature By his own admission Sjoberg has a "butterfly mind"; the effect of his narrative excursions amounts to a sort of Sebald-lite, albeit without the fictional element. What insures this approach against triviality is the author's patient alertness to pattern, to telling correspondence. -- Nat Segnit Times Literary Supplement Delightful, at once informative and often humorously digressive ... a humane man of wide-ranging curiosity, Sjoberg writes with infectious passion. Independent

Author description

Fredrik Sjoberg collects hoverflies on the island of Runmaro, in the archipelago east of Stockholm. He is also a literary critic, translator, cultural columnist and the author of several books, including The Fly Trap and The Raisin King, which form a trilogy with The Art of Flight.