Utvandring Till Paradiset: Berattele

Stockholm: Bonnier, 1979. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). 207, [2] pages; 22 cm. About fine with personal owner signature, in near fine+ jacket now in archival mylar. Hardcover. ISBN: 9100439487; 9789100439484

In Swedish. Writer, poet and Swedish Academy member Artur Lundkvist (1906–1991) wrote this short historical novel, which he presents as growing out of old documents he found on a visit to Trinidad. According to these papers, a seventeenth-century Swedish king considered acquiring and colonizing neighboring Tobago after a Courland prince offered to sell him the island. The frigate Frimodigheten ("Boldness") sailed with several hundred hopeful emigrants. When it came back three years later, every settler was dead, said to have been eaten by Caribs whom the Dutch had supposedly sent against the colony so they could take the island for themselves. From this scant record, which Swedish history had never told, Lundkvist builds an evocative narrative of the brutal destruction of a dream of an earthly paradise free of hunger and fear. The book belongs to the run of historical imaginings he wrote late in his career, alongside Slavar för Särkland (1978), and it came out in the same year as his critical survey Fantasi med realism.|| Caribbean