At this distance it is difficult for me to be anything like objective about this book, which was my introduction to the mad Swede August Strindberg, who would go on to have a ... well, let's just call it an impress, on my life for some time. If you know anything about Strindberg the person, you know that this is not necessarily a healthful thing.

The plays, though ... are by turns shocking, "naturalistic" (with S you have to put that word in quotes because while he pays lip service to naturalism, everything is always a bit more ... intense than that), fevered, dream-like and confounding. I will never forget my first encounters with "A Dream Play" or "The Ghost Sonata." Because I don't read Swedish, I can't comment on the quality of Sprigge's translations, though they always read well to my mind. Some of these may seem more successful as experiments than finished works to you, but ... what experiments!

The second Sprigge volume is also good, especially because it contains both parts of "The Dance of Death," which is NUTS. ( )