Fredrik Sjöberg lives on Runmarö, an island off the coast of Stockholm, and collects hoverflies.
His oblique memoir is a meandering treatise on the benefits of not going much further than your immediate environment. Sjöberg diverges from his obsession with flies to write about collectors in general (a strange breed), the father of classification systems - Linnaeus, loneliness, slowness (via Milan Kundera's novel of the same name) and how to "read" nature or a landscape. But another life also emerges from Sjöberg's own: Swedish entomologist Rene Malaise, famous in the trade for his work on Asian sawflies. The Fly Trap is a very original digression which avoids many of the pleading platitudes familiar to readers of modern nature writing but still makes the case for taking the individual out of the swarm: the "world of literature may be full of flies, but they are always almost anonymous - just flies." Sjöberg accomplishes his task of giving the hoverfly an identity of its own.
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