P C Jersild Books In Order

Novels

  1. Children’s Island (1976)
  2. After the Flood (1986)
  3. House of Babel (1987)
  4. The Animal Doctor (1988)
  5. A Living Soul (1988)

Novels Book Covers

P C Jersild Books Overview

Children’s Island

First published in Sweden in 1976, Children’s Island increased the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild. The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone, has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger s The Catcher in the Rye. Children s Island is told from the point of view of a ten year old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in not going to summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty, sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy he needs to find the answers to life s dilemmas. He lulls his divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the task of supporting his love for McDonald s hamburgers. What he finds in Stockholm a kind of Children s Island all its own is a series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define contemporary society. It s a society of isolation, violence, and aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening to Reine s psyche and well being than the changes taking place within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls Children s Island an extremely entertaining, extremely funny, and very serious book.

House of Babel

In House of Babel Babels Hus, the experience of a heart attack victim illustrates the depersonalization and outrageous cost of medical treatment today. Formerly a doctor, P.C. Jersild brings a powerful realism to his picture of a modern hospital. His literary gifts are apparent in a narrative that maintains dramatic intensity while it suggests solutions to an urgent social problem. This edition marks the novel’s first appearance in English.

The Animal Doctor

Set in an imaginary medical institute, The Animal Doctor Djurdoktorn describes a not unforeseeable world dominated by administrative science and social technology. The human beings and the research animals face the same predicament: both can be observed, controlled, and thrown into mazes. When Evy Beck joins the institute as a veterinarian she innocently enters into combat with a wily and impenetrable bureaucracy. She has the considerable help of P. C. Jersild. His first novel, published in Sweden in 1973, has not lost its bite in this English translation by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul.

A Living Soul

The protagonist of this mild satire is a human brain floating in an aquarium The bodiless Ypsilon, expected to be an unemotional intellect, feels lonely. Beause he is lovesick over a pretty lab assistant, Ypsilon chooses not to respond to elaborate educational regiments With the aid of a chimpanzee and a detached human hand, he makes detailed plans for an impractical escape Amusing and phantasmagoric.” Publishers Weekly. ”Thanks to Lesser , Ypsilon has become as convincing and many facetted to the English speaking audience as he is to his Swedish readers, and the ethical and wider human problems posed by his situation have become just as urgent.” Swedish Book Review.

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