The Days of His Grace

by Eyvind Johnson

Book by Johnson, Eyvind This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814906818
• ISBN13: 9780814906811
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Vanguard Press
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

No, It's NOT a Book about Dictatorship....

... not a parable nor a satire of Stalinist Russia, not a 'political agenda' book at all, and if Johnson's leftist pals turned against him because of this novel, it must have been a matter of sour grapes or envy. "The Days of His Grace" is a historical romance, set in Lombard (Langobard) Italy between 775 and 825 AD. The 'history' in it is based on sound scholarship -- pedantry, to be blunt about it -- but the romance is too sourly frustrated, I fear, to appeal to the usual readers of the genre. There are brilliant passages of description, scenes of high drama, vivid characters, even a few touches of what a Swede might take for humor, but the whole novel is awkward, dour, and at times pretentious. Johnson did indeed win the Nobel Prize, but he isn't a writer of the caliber of other Scandinavian winners such as Par Lagerkvist or Halldor Laxness. There is a curious 'ethnographic' agenda to the book, one which troubles me as an occasional historian. Johnson is plainly fascinated by the Langobards because he wants to believe that they migrated originally from Sweden, or at least from the Scandinavian Peninsula, and that therefore they were "us" -- proto-viking Swedes -- with all our virtues. I've encountered the same daydream among Japanese who visit the Hopi/Navajo reservations in Arizona; 'they' are evidence of 'our' cultural energies. To paraphrase another Johnson, "nationalism is the last refuge of egotists." This isn't such a bad book, though. If you like historical novels with fairly authentic detail, you'll probably enjoy it, but don't be fooled into looking for depths.

Whatever you call it - it is still a dictatorship!

This book is dictatorship and the struggle against it. The dictator is Charlemange, and the opposition is led by newly conquered Lombard nobles. It is not a book about ninth century Europe - it is a book about our own times. Dictatorships are all the same, even if they are known by different names. The struggle against them is also timeless; even an oppressed nobleman is still oppressed! The methods of dictatorships remain the same also: torture, disappearances, secret police, concentration camps, etc. The book could rank with 1984, George Orwell was also an apostate from communism. This book got Eyvind Johnson in trouble with the cultural elite in Sweden: they saw it as an attack on the Soviet Union. The author had been an ardent communist, but after visiting Stalinist Russia he denounced it as just another dictatorship, and that communism was a sham. The treatment he received form his former friends forced him to commit suicide.

highly recommended

This is a gravely underappreciated work of art by one of Sweden's finest novelists (if not the finest). The story is about hope, life, death and foresaken love in the realm of Charlemagne. A tribute, one might say, to the survival of intellect in the midst of unfettered violence and raw power.