Garden

Long description: This novel is based on the life of Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century, Swedish enlightenment figure famous for his taxonomy or scientific classification still used in biology. It principally concerns the different ways Linnaeus and his gardener interpret the world around them. The gardener perceives plants for what they are in themselves and Linnaeus for what they are in relation to other things. They never understand each other and the dialogues are wonderfully inconclusive.

"Large stretches of Florin's precise prose read less like a narrative than like a magic theatre from the early days of the Enlightenment, an odd and cruel eighteenth-century goggle-box, a screenplay for the cinema in our heads. Its tense is not the imperfect of the novel but the watchful present. What Florin lets us see is the lustre and eventual downfall of an infinite Enlightenment optimism, and, in enchanting and dazzling verbal images, its transformation into a dark mysticism." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 May 2013 "The reader will be reminded of the once well-tended, narrow flower-beds of the Nouveau Roman, or perhaps of the rather more colourful beds of Kurt Vonnegut or Italo Calvino - beds, not for novels with a bent towards realism or psychology but for blooms dedicated to the adventure of thought and its grounding in the emotions." Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 7 November 2013 "Magnus Florin's The Garden, which was published in Sweden in 1995 and which has long been regarded there as a classic of contemporary literature, is about not only the erosion of the doctrine of the Creation, but even more about the painful loss of the comforting certainty that went with that doctrine, and, most of all, about the unpredictability of the world. - Magnus Florin, literary director at 'Dramaten', the national theatre of Sweden, has cultivated a distinctive poetic tone in his books, at once elegant and austere and distinguished by a strong musicality." Die Welt, 18 May 2013

Magnus Florin, who was born in Uppsala in 1955, was first published in 1989 with Berattelsens gang (The Narrative Flow). This was followed by Tror du pa denna historia? (Do you believe this story?) in 1992, and both were collections of short prose pieces and poems. He then published this novel Tradgarden in 1995, as well as Syskonen (Brothers and Sisters) in 1998 and Cirkulation (Circulation) in 2001. His latest novels, Leendet (The Smile) and Randerna (The Stripes) were published in 2005 and 2010. Florin has also worked as a librettist for the operas Goya (Gothenburg Opera, 2010) and Hemligheter (Secrets) which was about Swedenborg (Malmo Opera, 2011). An opera staged the Drottningholm Theatre in 1999 was based on The Garden. He has worked on dramatisations, including Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time for Swedish Radio in 2009). From 1980 to 1990 he worked as dramaturg (literary consultant and researcher) at Sweden's leading theatre, the Dramaten in Stockholm. From 2000 to 2006 he was the head of radio drama at Radio Sweden, and in 2009 he returned to the Dramaten as chief dramaturg.