THE ROAD

by Harry Martinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 1956

Harry Martinson, a Swedish writer of a some eminence, is also the cigar market Bolloe who took to ""the road"" in this book which is not so much a novel as a sequence of scattered interludes and an exchange of the nomadic philosophy which pervades the loose pattern of what is to a great extent a poet's work. Here, walking the roads and the woods, dreaming, wondering, is the life of a free spirit, but it is not altogether a happy vagabondage for Bolle knows the price of continual censure and the ill wind of fear. With Bolle you will spend many years begging for food, shivering in hayricks, and even sentenced to hard labor after an arrest by the police. You will meet his mentor, Sandemar, who gathers his disciplines in a kiln where he will eventually burn to death; you will visit incurable invalids; and there will be the two week hiatus with the ""woman of the wilds""... As always lyrical, sometimes a grotesque journey into ""the obscurity of the strayed"", this communicates, more than anything else, the mystique of the vagrant..... Very special- and presumably very limited in its appeal.

Pub Date: April 19, 1956

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1956

Categories: FICTION