Hjalmar Bergman
1883–1931
Biography
Hjalmar Bergman was a Swedish novelist and playwright. He was born in Örebro in 1883, the son of a banker, and died in 1931 at the age of forty-seven. He briefly studied philosophy at Uppsala University before giving it up to live as a free writer. He married the daughter of the actor and stage producer August Lindberg. For years the family patriarch sponsored him generously, but after his death in 1915 the family business was found to be heavily in debt, and Bergman had to earn his living by writing. Alcohol and drug abuse damaged his health in his last years.
Much of Bergman's fiction and drama is set in a small town in central Sweden. The fictional town of Wadköping, the setting for many of his stories, is modelled on Örebro, his hometown, and in it the hidden scandals of interlinked families gradually come into the open. His tone mixes a bleak outlook with grotesque humour, so the comedy and the melancholy are always present together. Markurells i Wadköping (1919), usually known in English as God's Orchid, is the best known of these books, and it was later adapted for the stage and for film.
Vi Bookar, Krokar och Rothar, published in 1912, is the book on this site. It appeared during the most productive decade of his career, when he was writing for a living. Its subtitle, 'Ur en stadskrönika' ('From a town chronicle'), places it in the small-town world that Bergman returned to again and again. A reader coming to him through this book will meet the same mixture of melancholy and comedy that runs through the rest of his work.
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Books
Vi Bookar, Krokar och Rothar: Ur en stadskrönika
by Hjalmar Bergman
In the north of a Swedish market town lies Blekängen, a stretch of common ground that the town's families, the Bookes, the Kroks and the Rothes, cannot leave alone. Hjalmar Bergman's comic chronicle follows their feuds, fortunes and children as the town grows, and ends in a…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.