Quicksand
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
In January 2014 Henning Mankell was informed that he had cancer.
However, Quicksand is not a book about death, but about what it means to be human. Mankell writes about love and jealousy, courage and fear, about what it is like to live with a fatal illness.
This book is also about why the cave painters 40,000 years ago chose the very darkest places for their fascinating pictures. And about the dreadful troll that we are trying to lock away inside the bedrock of a Swedish mountain for the next 100,000 years.
It is a book about how humanity has lived and continues to live, and about how Henning lived his own life.
And, not least, about the great zest for life, which came back when he managed to drag himself out of the quicksand that threatened to suck him down into the abyss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This final volume from Mankell the Swedish dramatist, theater director, and creator of the bestselling Kurt Wallander novels (and many other books) includes 67 short essays written in the last two years of his life; he was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 65 and died in 2015. His intelligent eye focuses on predictable topics such as chemotherapy, but he also reflects on art that moves him (a deeply human interpretation of G ricault's La M duse, for example), the environment, and social justice, which is the major theme of his life's work (he calls the developed world's refusal to eliminate abject poverty "criminal"). He explains that he wrote about crime "because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of human life." Just as morality is a major theme, so is mortality. In the essay that gives the book its title, Mankell writes of a childhood fear of "death by quicksand," and how his cancer rekindled "that same feeling of terror." But a few weeks after his diagnosis, he realizes that death need not induce panic or resignation, and he notes near the end of this elegant, unflinching volume, "I live in anticipation of new uplifting experiences."
