Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Per Högselius grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. As a child he dreamed about becoming an astronomer, which led him to study physics at university. In his teens he discovered palaeontology, history and literature. A hopeless romantic, he wished he had lived in the nineteenth century. He became a passionate traveller, targeting not so much the distant corners of the world but the nearby post-Cold War lands of the Baltic Sea region. His journeys there became the basis for his first non-academic book in Swedish, the historical travelogue Östersjövägar (Baltic Sea Paths, 2007). Later on, he fell in love with the North Sea and subsequently with China. Meanwhile Per has pursued an academic career in the history of science, technology and environment. A professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, he enjoys juxtaposing different genres and styles of writing in exploring human experiences with technology and nature. He writes regularly for the leading Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet Agnes Broomé has a PhD in Translation Studies from University College London. Her translations include August Prize winners The Expedition by Bea Uusma, The Gospel of the Eels by Patrik Svensson, and Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren, and the 2022 Petrona Award winner Maria Adolfsson’s Fatal Isles. She is director of the Scandinavian Studies program at Harvard.<p>"In 15 fascinating, expansive essays that encompass wars, religions, crime novels, murders, poets, and much more, he proves his point that "the seashore is a borderland," a place that once "evoked fear and repulsion." The collection is a treasure of assemblage. Högselius deftly unites travelogue, memoir, and contemporary culture with historical facts and stories to tremendous effect. Högselius's curious and nimble mind leads readers down a captivating path. - <b>SHELF AWARENESS, starred review</b></p><p><br /></p><p>"A captivating and innovative book of essays about how the beach as a geographical and mythical space between land and sea has functioned as an arena for death and violence – in literature, art, film and real life."<br /><strong>Borås Tidning</strong></p>
<p>"Deeply compassionate, provokes novel thoughts and fuels introspection."<br /><strong><em>Lundagård</em></strong></p>
<p>"Per Högselius has written an exceedingly interesting collection of essays about humanity’s relationship with the seashore, now and in the past. He brings his reader along to various epochs and examines how shores and beaches have been treated in art, literature, myth and film… It might seem like a collection of loose ends, but Högselius expertly pulls them all together in this well-written book, not least by means of his own experiences as a wanderer on the shores of this world."<br /><strong>Håkan Andersson in <em>Gotlands Tidningar</em></strong></p>
<p>"That beaches are, on the whole, very bleak places, is convincingly demonstrated in Per Högselius' Death on the Beach, a lovely, compact little collection of essays which gives these playgrounds of horror and sorrow a thorough onceover, through the twin lenses of art and literature."<br /><strong>Petter Lindgren in <em>Aftonbladet</em></strong></p>
<p>"In order to explore the densification of darkness that constitutes the cultural background radiation of beach life, Högselius has put together a shifting prism of examples. He skilfully highlights the ambivalence that characterises our relationship with the seashore. The book's chapters each deal with a facet of the larger beach theme: shipwrecks, tides, the dying man's longing for the sea, fleeing from one shore to another, the beach as a place of memory and so on. At the same time, they are filled with so much more than that. As an essayist, Högselius is catlike, he moves nimbly and with admirable agility between historical periods and specific examples. Under his treatment, the vastest distances between subjects and genres, times and places shrink. Before you know it, you have travelled very far, very fast without ever noticing… [Högselius] is a very ambitious stylist. The success of the book also rests on the fact that Death on the Beach isn't just an investigative, analytical text. It is also, like all good essays, the product of a distinctive gaze and character: a piece of reality filtered through a temperament. The texts are characterised by a presence, an author who does things – travels, reads, is astonished, turns pages, observes, embraces, discusses, swims, sleeps, goes for walks. It makes them feel more alive, of course, but it also helps to hold the whole affair together."<br /><strong>Gustaf Johansson in <em>Tidskriften Respons</em></strong></p>
<p>"Högselius' charming musings is one of this captivating book's most outstanding qualities. And as a good essayist, he knows how to balance the universal and the particular, collective culture and private experience, and to add colour to the contours of historical examples with the help of his own personal experiences and unique memories. Like in the chapter entitled 'Flight', where an overarching narrative about the countless corpses that washed ashore to litter the beaches of the Baltic Sea at the end of the Second World War blends with the story of how the author during a stay in Borum on Gotland first sees the photograph of Alan Kurdi's lifeless body lying at the water’s edge. 'Because in the twenty-first century, the seashore remains a place that more than any other reminds us of the fragility of our existence, that everything can fall apart at any moment.'"<br /><strong>Martin Lagerholm in <em>Svenska Dagbladet</em></strong></p>
<p>"The clichéd images of beach sunsets and seaside summer homes fade like sun-bleached wallpaper against the dark coastal horrors Högselius presents in his collection of beach finds from our cultural history. The beach has always functioned as a border against the unknown and decidedly lethal: sea monsters at the edge of the world, ships carrying plagues, sudden storms, rising tides… That is the strength of this book: even though it ranges through the geography of our planet, it doesn't primarily arouse a yen to travel, but to read."<br /><strong>Anna Blennow in <em>Sydsvenskan</em></strong></p>
<p>“Beaches are places of
mystery and contradiction," writes Per Högselius, a Swedish professor of
technology and the history of science, in <em>Death
on the Beach: Essays from a Marginal World</em>, translated by Agnes
Broomé. In 15 fascinating, expansive essays that encompass wars, religions,
crime novels, murders, poets, and much more, he proves his point that "the
seashore is a borderland," a place that once "evoked fear and repulsion."
His examples are often visually evocative. For instance, before the mid-18th
century, the unfortunate Europeans who had to live by the shore faced their
windows away from the sea, as it was seen as an area of death and putrefaction,
where "Creation itself was incomplete."</p>
<p>The collection
is a treasure of assemblage. Högselius deftly unites travelogue, memoir, and
contemporary culture with historical facts and stories to tremendous effect.
"In the Tidal Zone," for example, begins by summarizing the 2009
movie <em>Marea de arena</em> (<em>Tides of Sand</em>), from the
Mexican director Gustavo Montiel Pagés. From there, Högselius discusses a
cliffside hike he took in Germany with a friend from England; the historical
fear of tides experienced by many Britons; accounts of quicksand in England,
France, and in literature, such as in Victor Hugo's <em>Les
Misérables</em>; then returns at last to the aforementioned film.</p>
<p>While many of
the essays are Eurocentric, some touch on the Middle East, Africa, Central
America, and the U.S. Asia is mostly absent, except for Thailand, as featured
in the ubiquitous novel and movie <em>The
Beach</em>. Regardless of location, Högselius's curious and nimble
mind leads readers down a captivating path. --Nina Semczuk, starred review in SHELF AWARENESS</p>
<p> </p>
"Högselius's curious and nimble mind leads readers down a captivating path." - SHELF AWARENESS, starred review
A walk with Per Högselius, skirting shipwrecks and bodies, relics of war and vanished lives, is a deep-dive into landscape and culture. It leaves us fragile and shows us wonders.
Holidaymakers go to the beach to play. The world's great writers, film makers and artists head there to tread the margins between life and death. In Death on the Beach, Per Högselius leads us in their footsteps.
What do we find? Life-busting ideas, powerful landscapes, scenes to make you shiver, and an entry-gate to some of the most exciting books and films you've never heard of.
Translated from Swedish by award-winner Agnes Broomé (The Gospel of the Eels), this gripping essay collection reveals that longing inside us that continues to draw us to the sea – even when so many have failed to return.
Preface
As far back as I can remember, I've been drawn to beaches.
The beaches of my childhood belonged to Lake Mälaren, their sand dark and coarse. My mother anxiously watched over me as I played at the water's edge. Further out, there was a shipping lane where large boats passed by. I wasn't allowed to swim out that far.
When I was eleven, we took a family holiday on Gotland, the large island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. There, we stumbled across Kvarnåkershamn, a small village where several plots of land were for sale in the coastal pine forest. The cottage my parents quickly had built became my fixed point during the summers that followed. It's where I met my first love and lost myself in longing. But when I was alone, I roved the shingle beaches in search of fossils. The rocks were full of long-since extinct plants and animals: crinoids, corals, trilobites. I dreamed of becoming a palaeontologist, dedicating my days to these creatures that once were.
As it happened, however, my scientific career never really took off. Instead, I increasingly turned my gaze to the sea, towards the foreign beaches hidden somewhere beyond the horizon. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I went to see them. I took to writing about the Baltic Sea region and its eventful past. I was struck by how our new, optimistic era – in which we were said to have reached the end of history – contrasted with the physical state of the Baltic's eastern shores: they were desolately dirty, littered with debris from the Cold War Era. Rumour had it mines were still buried in the sand.
Many years later, I settled in the Netherlands for a while. I wandered the beaches of the North Sea, my daily routine governed by the rhythm of the tide. I still remember the silhouettes of the freight ships out at sea, lying at anchor as they waited to dock in Rotterdam. At the beach cafés, I listened to stories of capsized ships and beached whales. I thought about Doggerland, once a favourite grazing ground for woolly mammoths between the Netherlands and the UK, now swallowed by the sea.
Beaches are places of mystery and contradiction. And over time, I've come to see more of their dark side, not only in my own explorations, but also through my encounters with the seashore in literature, film, art, and music – as well as in the daily reports from every corner of the world relayed to me by the newspapers.
Where does it come from, this dark side? Is there a way to find out? I remember a faded old photograph my mother once showed me. She's standing on a Black Sea beach, a smiling young woman, with her arms around a tall, lanky man who is about to become my father. She doesn't know it yet: that she's pregnant. That a child is growing inside her. The sea glitters behind them, the sea that was named for blackness, even though it's so blindingly bright in the summer sun.