A Fairy Tale

by Jonas T. Bengtsson

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In a Europe without borders, where social norms have become fragile, a son must confront the sins of his father and grandfather, and invent new strategies for survival

A young boy grows up with a loving father who has little respect for the law. They are always on the run, and as they move from place to place, the boy is often distraught to leave behind new friendships. Because it would be dicey for him to go to school, his anarchistic father gives him an unconventional education intended to contradict as much as possible the teachings of his own father, a preacher and a pervert. Ten years later, when the boy is entering adulthood, with a fake name and a monotonous job, he tries to conform to the demands of ordinary life, but the lessons of the past thwart his efforts, and questions about his father’s childhood cannot be left unanswered.

Spanning the mid-1980s to early-twenty-first-century in Copenhagen, this coming-of-age novel examines what it means to be a stranger in the modern world, and how, for better or for worse, a father’s legacy is never passed on in any predictable fashion.

Release date: March 25, 2014

Publisher: Other Press

Print pages: 464

Sample

The television shows images of a dark street, road signs, and snow. Stockholm. A sidewalk has been cordoned off with red-and-white plastic tape, people have gathered behind it. They, too, are standing very still. Some are clasping their mouths. The woman on the television speaks very slowly as if she has just woken up. She says that Olof Palme came out of a cinema not far from there. That he was with his wife, that they had been to see the film The Mozart Brothers and were on their way home.
 
On the gray sidewalk are dark stains that look like paint. The camera zooms in on them. “It’s blood,” my dad says, never once taking his eyes off the screen.
 
We’re back on the street. We walk quickly as if rushing away from the images on the television.
 
I think we’re heading home until we turn right by the closed-down butcher’s. Toward the harbor, down a narrow, cobbled street.
 
My dad sits down on an iron girder; I sit down beside him, as close to him as I can get. The water in front of us is black. A couple of fishing boats are sailing into the harbor; there’s a huge crane to our right, its hook hangs just above the surface of the water. The sky is gray.
 
My dad hides his face in his coat sleeve. I hear loud sobs through the thick fabric. He squeezes my hand so hard that it hurts.
 
“So they got him,” he says. “The bastards finally got him.”
 
I don’t remember ever seeing my dad cry. I ask him if Palme was someone he knew, but he makes no reply. He holds me tight. My feet are freezing in the rain boots.
 
“They got him,” he says again.
 
The wind whips the sea into foam.
 
“I think we’re going to have to move again.”