A contemplative and lyrical travel narrative from the author of "Long John Silver."
Bjorn Larsson was born in central Sweden in 1953, and was soon smitten by an irresistible wanderlust. At the age of fifteen he spent a year at high school in Arizona. As he puts it himself, "I only went back to Sweden in order to sit my exams, to collect my study loans, and to go to prison." Bjorn Larsson has published several academic and technical volumes, ranging from a treatise on the use of French adjectives to an instruction book for deep-sea diving, but he has now achieved considerable success as a novelist, and may soon have to decide whether to give up his day job and devote himself full-time to his boat and his writing. His first literary book was a collection of short stories, Splitter (Splinters, 1980). But he really made his mark in 1992 with The Celtic Ring, a novel whose main character Larsson says is his boat Rustica. That may be tongue-in-cheek, but it is set largely in Scotland and Ireland where he and Helle spent a year on board Rustica (wintering in Kinsale) before sailing over to Brittany, the Bay of Biscay and Galicia. A key theme in the book is the desire of the Celtic nations to break free from England and form a federation of their own. It is interesting to note that Larsson started to write the novel before the Berlin wall came down, and before devolution came to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. He seems to have anticipated a trend that became widespread throughout Europe -- but as he says, it is our good fortune that the process has proceeded rather more smoothly in northern Europe than in Yugoslavia. That was not obvious in 1991 when The Celtic Ring was being written. Freedom and the seafaring life was also at the heart of Bjorn Larsson's second novel, Long John Silver (1995).
