The cranes fly south: What is the value of Lisa Ridzéns international bestseller?

We have read the phenomenon novel from Sweden, an international bestseller. And it’s devastating.

There is a very particular category of sad novels: those with a dog that dies. Here’s an even more heart-wrenching variant. The dog in this book, Sixten, is very much alive. But his owner, Bo, 89 years old, is nearing the end. To preserve him, his son Hans wants to take away the animal, which he considers a burden. “Sixten snuggles against me. […] He doesn’t want to. I don’t want to. But what I want or what he wants doesn’t matter. Our opinion hasn’t mattered for a long time.”

To claim that a book has sold over 300,000 copies in Sweden, the author’s country, and 100,000 in the UK, that it has been translated into 45 languages, that it is number 1 in sales in Germany, and that a film adaptation is in the works is not enough to defend it. Some best-sellers do even better and are worthless. But this international craze is absolutely justified. Reading this novel, published by the beautiful editions of La Peuplade, guests of honor at the Comédie du Livre, overwhelms us with emotion.

Vulnerability

Lisa Ridszel captures the ordinary catastrophe of aging, the unspeakable upheaval of a life falling apart and whose memories persist. Bo keeps in a jar the scarf carrying the scent of his wife, interned and demented, who he misses, and to whom he speaks. “It’s not you who stays here, with a whole life of memories in a body slowly fading.” Everything is in the book: the childhood wound, the violent father, the childhood dog killed, the love for this lively granddaughter who visits her old grandpa, the shame of the failing body, the tenderness of the home helpers, the discreet dialogues with a friend who is just as dying.

The son, absurdly old himself. The eternity of fatherly sentiment: “I would like to put my hand on his head to ruffle his thinning hair.” An existence, stretched between its two most vulnerable extremes: childhood where you are hurt by not being protected enough, and old age where you are hurt by being protected too much.

“The cranes fly south,” by Lisa Ridszel, translated by Catherine Renaud (La Peuplade, 432 pages, $23).