![]() ![]() Consider this passage, about a young boy (Pelle) who is often anxious, and whose anxiety begins to focus on the end of the family’s summer on the island: Lindgren handles all this as deftly, as if there were no trick to it at all. One of the text’s many pleasures is its quicksilver pivoting among points of view: from omniscient to close third persons (many of them) to the first-person text of one character’s diary. It is a beautiful book, rendered in an entirely fluent English translation by Evelyn Ramsden, and certainly for adult readers as well as the children to whom it could be read. A month later I read it again, perhaps even more deliberately. ![]() ![]() When I read it for the first time this spring (it has just been brought back into print by The New York Review Children’s Collection), I liked it so much that I consumed it slowly, like a savored cake. But to my surprise, Astrid Lindgren’s Seacrow Island (1964), an idyll about a family and a village set in the Stockholm archipelago in the mid-twentieth century, has enchanted me. I usually have no patience for “happy family” literature, not to mention the contemporary habit of adults reading mediocre books for “young adults,” whoever they might be. Astrid Lindgren with Inger Nilsson (right) as Pippi Longstocking, during the filming of Pippi in the South Seas, Sweden, 1969 ![]()
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