‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg’s brief, dark and wonderfully atmospheric 12th novel, The Tempest. Islands play a special role in our literary imagination. They are crucibles, havens, prisons and escapes, places of magic and mysterious transformation, worlds that can be shaped and owned. There is a rich history of island-writing, from D.H. Lawrence to J.M. Barrie, Compton Mackenzie to Aldous Huxley, William Golding to John Fowles. Behind them all sits Shakespeare’s late, troublesome, self-reflexive play of creativity and destruction, forgiveness and retribution.
Sem-Sandberg’s island is one of a small archipelago sitting in a fjord on the Norwegian coast. Andreas Lehman, the tale’s principal narrator, grew up there, and now, years later, returns to clear out the house in which he and his sister Minna were raised by their alcoholic foster father, Johannes. From the off, we are alerted to the strange otherness of island life.
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