Gregorius
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In 1905 Hjalmar Soderberg published his diary novel, Doctor Glas, a literary tour de force which has remained one of the masterpieces of Swedish literature. It is a complicated love triangle, which culminates in the murder of Gregorius, an apparently repulsive and hypocritical priest, by Doctor Glas, hopelessly in love with Gregorius’ young wife. It is the story of one man’s decision to take another man’s life, and a study of what is defensible in the interest of the common good. Bengt Ohlsson, one of Sweden’s most successful young writers, has responded to Doctor Glas with Gregorius, which gives Gregorius himself a voice over the course of what could be his last and fateful summer. It is a compelling study of loneliness, longing and the nature of love; of the desires that bring people together and the fears that keep them apart.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Silvester
Mazzarella
Silvester is a literary translator and biographer.
Literary Tranlsator and Biographer, born 1936: English mother and Italian father. In the early 1920s my mother read English at St Anne’s (then ‘Oxford Home Students’). When I became an undergraduate at the Hall we visited the Chapel together, and she told me she used to go to the Hall for tutorials with Hall’s pioneer English don Ronald Fletcher (1890-1950), since commemorated in the Antechapel floor; apparently he asked her to marry him (see my articles in SEH Magazine 2000-2001 pp 162-3, and 2002-2003 pp 72-4).
I matriculated in 1956 and followed my mother in reading English at the Hall, scraping a Second in 1959. As a lecturer in the English Department at Helsinki University, Finland and reviewer of British books for a leading Finnish newspaper (1965-88), I took a special interest in Finland’s second language, Swedish. Back in England from 1988, I read Italian at the University of Kent in Canterbury, taking a First in Italian there in 1995, It was only after 2000 that I started translating books into English, first from Swedish and later from Italian.
By then I had also researched and virtually completed writing a biography of my mother’s uncle Filson Young (1876-1938), a once well-known and controversial miscellaneous writer (novelist, war correspondent, editor, BBC radio pioneer, essayist and much more). This book has yet to find a publisher, but my full text can be read on the internet (Google “Filson Young Silvester Mazzarella”).
Silvester is a literary translator and biographer.
Literary Tranlsator and Biographer, born 1936: English mother and Italian father. In the early 1920s my mother read English at St Anne’s (then ‘Oxford Home Students’). When I became an undergraduate at the Hall we visited the Chapel together, and she told me she used to go to the Hall for tutorials with Hall’s pioneer English don Ronald Fletcher (1890-1950), since commemorated in the Antechapel floor; apparently he asked her to marry him (see my articles in SEH Magazine 2000-2001 pp 162-3, and 2002-2003 pp 72-4).
I matriculated in 1956 and followed my mother in reading English at the Hall, scraping a Second in 1959. As a lecturer in the English Department at Helsinki University, Finland and reviewer of British books for a leading Finnish newspaper (1965-88), I took a special interest in Finland’s second language, Swedish. Back in England from 1988, I read Italian at the University of Kent in Canterbury, taking a First in Italian there in 1995, It was only after 2000 that I started translating books into English, first from Swedish and later from Italian.
By then I had also researched and virtually completed writing a biography of my mother’s uncle Filson Young (1876-1938), a once well-known and controversial miscellaneous writer (novelist, war correspondent, editor, BBC radio pioneer, essayist and much more). This book has yet to find a publisher, but my full text can be read on the internet (Google “Filson Young Silvester Mazzarella”).
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
This is an outstanding story about a human mind, from an important and really gifted storyteller, the novel is taking up a secondary character in Hjalmar Soderberg’s “Doctor Glas”
In this rewrite of a Swedish Classic ( Doctor Glas by Hjlmar Soderberg) the perspective is shifted and the roles redefined. The former villain is not enlarged as a hero but brought to life as an ordinary man.