Quicksand: What It Means to Be a Human Being

by Henning Mankell Narrated by Sean Barrett

Overview

In January 2014 I was informed that I had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death and destruction, but about what it means to be human. I have undertaken a journey from my childhood to the man I am today, writing about the key events in my life, and about the people who have given me new perspectives. About men and women I have never met, but wish I had. I write about love and jealousy, about courage and fear. And about what it is like to live with a potentially 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 I have lived and continue to live my own life. And, not least, about the great zest for life, which came back when I managed to drag myself out of the quicksand that threatened to suck me down into the abyss.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Surely one of the most moving and intriguing farewell notes ever written.... Intensely beautiful in its spirit.” —Alexander McCall Smith, New Statesman
 
“An extraordinary book.... Profoundly moving.” —The Guardian

“Quicksand defines life not by its ending but by the creative and humanitarian content that filled—and fulfilled—Mankell’s life.... The essays sharpen with resounding poignancy.” —Financial Times
 
“An extremely moving swansong.... The reader realizes that Mankell has never really been driven by anger but by the tiny, fragile hope that his words and deeds will help in the fight for a fairer world.” —The Independent (London)
 
“[An] absorbing addition to the work of Sweden’s most internationally famous writer since August Strindberg.... Quicksand, a hybrid of essay and memoir, reflects knowledgeably on art, religion, childhood, and the ‘final insensibility’ that is our dying. Rarely has a writer contemplated the mystery of the end of life with such a wide-ranging curiosity.” —London Evening Standard

“Uplifting and, as a memoir, as unusual a creation as [Mankell’s] Nordic detective, Kurt Wallander.” —GQ (London)

“Elegant, unflinching.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Kirkus Reviews

2016-11-01
Diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life in 2015, the creator of the Kurt Wallander mysteries (An Event in Autumn, 2014, etc.) casts an impassioned eye on life and death.Readers looking for either a narrative autobiography or a memoir of the Swedish novelist's last illness will need to adjust their expectations. What Mankell offers instead is a commonplace book in which memories of things he's seen or felt over the past 60 years inspire fiercely philosophical ruminations. Mankell retrospectively decides to date the onset of his fatal illness, which he likens to a pit of quicksand, to a car crash he walked away from a week before he first noticed the pain in his neck that sent him to the doctor. He likens cancer therapists to the fraudulent psychic Uri Geller. He recalls examples of appalling cruelty he saw in Budapest and Maputo. He speculates about the biological foundations for the different reasons men and women get jealous, and he confesses how troubled he is "that I shall be dead for so long." Although Mankell's reflections are deeply personal, readers will learn little about the details of his life because he remains resolutely extroverted, a keen observer of the world whose illness encourages him to take the long view. He describes the future ice ages climate scientists have predicted for 10,000 years, 20,000 years, and 60,000 years from now and repeatedly returns to the dim prospects for the Earth and its people, who have come to depend on the integrity of systems to dispose of nuclear waste that is expected to remain dangerously radioactive for 1,000 centuries. "I have written about crime because it illustrates more clearly than anything else the contrasts that form the basis of human life," writes Mankell. After digesting these piercing intimations of mortality, readers will suspect that some subjects illustrate those contrasts even more clearly.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169382402
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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