The Marriage Feast
1955
First Published
3.90
Average Rating
222
Number of Pages
This collection of stories written over a period of more than thirty shows the deep seriousness and astonishing versatility of Par Lagerkvist's imagination. From the commonplace charm of the title story, to the searing futuristic satire of "The Children's Campaign, " to the disquieting fantasy of "The Lift That Went Down to Hell, " we see that Lagerkvist admits no settled boundaries between fact and fable. In this he is a poet for whom fantasy permeates the actual and "reality" can take on the dimensions of the fabulous. Life is, to him, a system of dark paradoxes; but there is also the good — "a quiet, everyday radiance that mankind always had difficulty noticing and setting a value on."
Avg Rating
3.90
Number of Ratings
87
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
1%
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Author
Par Lagerkvist
Author · 21 books
Lagerkvist was born in 1891 in southern Sweden. In 1910 he went to Uppsala as a student and in 1913 he left for Paris, where he was exposed to the work of Pablo Picasso. He studied Middle Age Art, as well as Indian and Chinese literature, to prepare himself for becoming a poet. His first collection of poetry was published in 1916. In 1940 Lagerkvist was chosen as one of the "aderton" (the eighteen) of the Swedish Academy. Lagerkvist wrote poetry, novels, plays, short stories and essays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951 "for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind."
