672 
THE AMERIC AN-SC AN DIN AVI AN REVIEW 
like a shuttle between the various worlds and persons in the book. 
Henning Berger s work is a remarkably vivid picture of the 
troubled and disastrous years immediately after the war. Because 
ol its varied contents, changing scenes, and excellent portraits, it at¬ 
tracts immediate attention and holds it to the end. It is one of the 
most fascinating books of the year. 
Whenever an author has reached a certain age, it seems that he is 
overcome by the urge of his memories and he writes the story of his 
childhood and early youth. We have Strindberg’s flaming, brutal con¬ 
fessions in The Bondwoman’s Son; we have Hjalmar Soderberg’s bald 
lyrically pathetic life in Martin Birck’s Early Years, and there are 
many others. As a rule the author gazes at the events of his child¬ 
hood through the prism of the years that have gone by, and this gives 
the various events in these books a peculiar charm of their own. Gustav 
Hellstrom s Day-dreams (Dagdrommar), published just before 
Christmas, is also the story of his childhood. It is intended to be the 
first volume of a cycle of novels called The'Man Who Lacked Humor 
fMannen utan humor). But Hellstrom does not wish to give us a 
poetic iei isioii of the experiences of his childhood; he prefers to present 
the events in their own true light and not in the light of his memories. 
Day-dreams is a book which deals with the struggle for existence, not 
the battle with circumstances, but the inner struggle of the soul’ It 
is a description of the child’s and youth’s consciousness of his own 
importance, coupled with his feeling of inferiority and incompetence. 
Stellan Petreus is the only son of an officer in a small town in southern 
Sweden. Having lost his mother at an early age, he grows up to be a 
di earner and a recluse. We get some interesting glimpses of his first 
contacts with life; the wickedness of his comrades, his first childish 
infatuation for Rose, the little Jewish girl, and the brooding and doubt 
of adolescence at the time when he is being prepared for confirma¬ 
tion. There is an air of naturalness, of sincerity and truth about this 
stoi y of child life, so that the book has real value as a psychologic 
document. But it is told in a dry, lifeless manner and at times shows 
a complete lack of the artistic touch. 
It is a far cry from Hellstrom’s The Man Who Lacked Humor 
to Hjalmar Bergman’s latest book, Grandma and the Lord (Farmor 
och Far Herre, Albert Bonnier, 1921), which is a vivid, rollicking 
description of an old Swedish woman, a diamond in the rough, who is 
highly humorous in a somewhat coarse way. Grandma belongs to the 
hardy race of Swedish peasantry. She is one of the people born to 
work and to command, to bear their own burdens as well as those of 
others, and to keep their sorrows to themselves. She is related, if some¬ 
what distantly, to “ma chere mere” in Fredrika Bremer’s Neighbors 
(Grannerna) and to the major’s wife at Ekeby in Gosta Berlinqs 
Arttffl. V\ bile still very young she marries Jonathan Borch, an insi'o-- 
