NORSTEDTs ageNcy

Fiction
Vi ses igen i nästa dröm
We’ll meet again
by Carl-Henning Wijkmark
September 2013, 139 pages
Senior Editor: Susanna Romanus
Rights sold to:
Møller Forlag, Denmark
Option publishers:
Rode Kamer, the Netherlands • Pelikanen, Norway
Éditions Cénomane, France • Iperborea, Italy
We’ll meet again
Frank Larson, a Swedish university professor
who has lived and worked in the United States
most of his life, visits the old country to participate
in an academic symposium in the town where
he attended university when he was young.
The morning after his arrival, tired and jetlagged
after his long trip, he takes off for the
conference hall where he is supposed to give
one of the first speeches. There is a good size
crowd in the room but none of the colleagues
he expected to see are there; a young
man is standing at the podium and he starts
lecturing on an entirely different topic to an
audience of tie-clad students.
Confused, Frank leaves and when he can’t relocate
his hotel, only a vacant lot where the
hotel used to be, he suspects that he has had
some kind of stroke. As he walks through
the city he realizes that something has happened
that has deprived him of his place in
time; he has lost his era. He decides to try
to accept this transfer to what turns out to
be the fall of 1924. He refrains from finding
a doctor because he’s afraid that he wil be
taken into custody for being crazy. Cell
phone and credit cards, passport and money
are useless, his luggage has disappeared with
the hotel. All he owns are the clothes on his
back, a watch and a briefcase with the manuscript
for the lecture he was going to give ninety
years later, in addition a few rings and
cufflinks that he immediately pawns. For the
money he buys a new suitcase, a few clothes
and a ticket for the express train to Rome.
A number of surprises soon sneak up on the
reader, and the journey takes us to, among
other places, an archeological dig in Spain,
where the first-person narrator also conducts
some mental archeology and, inspired
by two women, one mythical and the other
real, steps back into his own personal origin,
the beginning before the beginning of his
existence.
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