The Wandering Pine: Life As A Novel

Per Olov Enquist

MacLehose Press, £19.99

Some life. Some novel. Per Olov Enquist is the acclaimed, award-winning, Swedish-born novelist and playwright. One of his plays was staged on Broadway. He has twice won the August Prize for Fiction, Sweden's most coveted literary award, and his novel, The Visit Of The Royal Physician, took the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

He has in his time been an athlete - he narrowly failed to qualify for the high-jump event at the 1960 Rome Olympics. He has been a noted journalist. He was present at the 1972 Munich Olympics and witnessed an attempt to rescue the Israeli hostages. He was in Prague, and Wenceslas Square, in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

But Enquist has also suffered from alcoholism, and during his most vulnerable years he came close to death on a number of occasions. A depressed and destructive alcoholic, he was subjected to tough treatments at a hospital in Sweden (where the head nurse strangely resembled Nurse Ratched, from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) and at a facility set in an endless snowy Icelandic plain.

It is a remarkable story, and Enquist is remarkably frank in narrating every last detail in these memoirs. Told in the third person ("out of honesty," he once said, so that he could say anything), it was published in Sweden in 2008 but is only now seeing the light of day here.

We follow, in painstaking detail, Enquist's childhood in a remote village called Hjoggbole, in Norrland, the northernmost part of his native land - "the primeval forest of deepest Norrland," as he describes it.

His father died when he was six months old. There was a "ghost boy" - a brother who was born with the umbilical cord around his neck and lived for a few moments. Per Olov was raised by his mother, a devout schoolteacher who "is in principle the very essence of goodness". Their village, he observes, was split into two halves - the godless and the God-fearing.

In time, after military service and Uppsala University, Enquist becomes a writer. "He never understands why. Was it in the genes? He doubts it. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that he would be stricken by an addiction to writing. Nothing in his family. Smallholders and lumberjacks. Honest, hard-working people. Not a trace of poetry. Almost no trace."

Yet Hjoggbole - in reality, a cluster of villages around a lake - will in time give rise to no fewer than five writers. Six kilometres away lay his grandmother Joannna's farm; a hundred metres further away, at the Larssonsgarden farm, lived the father "of the young Stieg, who will go on to write crime novels".

Enquist grows up to become an esteemed writer, enjoying a highly visible role at the centre of political and cultural life in Sweden. His fame spreads: his play, The Night Of The Tribades, is staged on Broadway, but receives an adverse review from the New York Times' influential theatre critic. The section devoted to this episode is one of the finest in the book.

Enquist lived as an exile for many years, in Berlin, Los Angeles, Paris and Copenhagen. His drink problem, however, gradually came to dominate his life, and almost ended it. The author's unsparing description of his alcoholism, and the treatment it necessitated, is painful to read; we can visualise, almost, the "ants crawling all over my body" as he experiences withdrawal symptoms.

He had not written for more than a decade but on his fifth night in his third treatment centre, his laptop to hand, he began work on what would eventually become his novel, Captain Nemo's Library. "He had thought his drinking had destroyed his ability to write. That it had gone, for ever, but now he could feel that he was writing as he did before: it was a miracle."

The words, to his delight, continued to pour out of him. Essays, and novels, theatre plays, a children's book - and this wonderful, brave, evocative memoir, which if nothing else makes you want to ferret out those of his novels that exist in English translation.