I move on to a Swedish novel and another translator I like a lot, Sarah Death, This book arrived on a day I got another book that had a large black bird on the cover. I remember how odd that seemed. other book was Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa.

The Ravens, strangely enough, arrived the same day as Crow Blue, a book I reviewed last year. I had noted how strange it was to get books named after birds in the same family of birds. In fact, they also share coming-of-age narrators but unlike Crow Blue, Klas is a young boy on the cusp of manhood.

Klas lives in a rural farming community, His family farm isn’t doing great. This means his father, Agne, is struggling and is in fact going down a spiral into depression and woe. So, Klas has to live in this world with his parents’ constant worry of how they are going to get by. They expect him to one day take the family farm over.

Klas is discovering the world around him, girls and also he loves the nature around him especially birds. Klas struggles to order his life and how it is going to turn out, for he sees beyond the farm and the life that has seemingly been mapped out for him. But as he is so young, his father despair wears off on him, and he wonders if he is going mad himself.

I loved this book. It reminds me so much of Black Swan Green, a young man’s struggle to grow into adulthood .I loved Klas’ world. In some ways, Sweden in the seventies with Klaus’ mentions of the world around him remind me of my own childhood .I could also associate with his feeling of despair at times as he sees adults struggle as I saw this many times in my own family growing up .Then there are the birds. Klas is a keen birdwatcher, this drove me right back to my childhood. I was a member of the YOC, Young Ornithologists Club, a junior club for birdwatchers. I so loved how Klas connected to the world around him and know why he did it as sometimes opening your eyes to the natural world can make your own world disappear. I hope this is a book that people pick up for in fact I felt as a story of a boy struggling into manhood it beats Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell hands down, which is saying something !!!

Writer Tomas Bannerhed:

Tomas Bannerhed, born in 1966, grew up in Uråsa village in the province of Småland in southern Sweden, and now lives in Stockholm. In 2011, his debut novel, The Ravens (Korparna), was awarded the prestigious Swedish August Prize (Best-Book-Of-the-Year-Prize), and has since received several other prizes. Foreign rights haven been sold to seven countries (including the UK, France and Germany). The UK edition was published by Clerkenwell Press.

Translator Sarah Death:

Sarah Death studied Swedish at Cambridge University and University College London (PhD 1985) with shorter periods at the Swedish universities of Uppsala and Växjö. She is active as a freelance literary translator since 1987 with many full-length published works to her name. She is a mentor, editor and reviewer. Three times she has been a winner of the George Bernard Shaw Prize, most recently in 2021 for ‘Letters from Tove’, the correspondence of Tove Jansson. Awarded the Swedish Academy Translation Prize 2008 and the Royal Order of the Polar Star 2014. Sarah has been a director of Norvik Press since 2011.

#TranslationThurs guest curator:

This post is by Stuart Allen, the blogger behind the blog, Winstonsdad. Stuart is a lover of translated literature and world cinema. He started the #translationthurs hashtag on Twitter and his blog is rated the #1 translated literature blog in the world by Feedspot