The Marriage Feast

This collection of stories written over a period of more than thirty shows the deep seriousness and astonishing versatility of Par Lagerkvist's imagination. From the commonplace charm of the title story to the searing futuristic satire of The Children's Campaign to the disquieting fantasy of The Lift That Went Down to Hell we see that Lagerkvist admits no settled boundaries between fact and fable. In this he is a poet for whom fantasy permeates the actual and reality can take on the dimensions of the fabulous. Life is to him a system of dark paradoxes; but there is also the good -- a quiet everyday radiance that mankind always had difficulty noticing and setting a value on.