The Fly Trap: A Memoir

by Fredrik Sjöberg, Thomas Teal (Translator)

Overview

For years, entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg has collected, cataloged, and obsessed over the hoverflies that populate the remote Swedish island he calls home. As confounded by his unusual vocation as anyone, here Sjöberg explores what drives the obsessive curiosity of collectors, along the way finding time to muse on everything from art to lost love, and drawing on sources as disparate as D. H. Lawrence and the fascinating and forgotten naturalist René Edmond Malaise. 

A mesmerizing memoir, The Fly Trap is one remarkable individual’s meditation on the unexpected beauty of small things and an examination of the history of entomology itself. Weaving a fascinating web of associations, histories, and personal memories, Sjöberg revels in the wonders of the natural world and, through indelible images and stories, opens up into it a dazzling, irresistible pathway.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101872284
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/09/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Fredrik Sjöberg is an entomologist and lives with his family on the island of Runmarö, in the archipelago east of Stockholm. He is also a literary critic, translator, cultural columnist, and the author of several books.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 3
A Trap in Rangoon

Many years ago, before the island and the theatre, I took a passenger barge up the mighty Congo River. What an adventure! What stories I would tell! About freedom! But it didn’t happen. I never managed to say much more than that the forests were vast and the river as broad as Kalmar Sound. And that I’d been there. So it goes when you travel for the sake of something to say. Your eyes go weak. All I could have written were endless disquisitions about homesickness. So I kept my mouth shut.
 
It’s a different story with Ladäng Creek, I thought aloud to myself one morning among the bird-cherry blossoms. Then something remarkable happened.
 
I was in the process of rigging up my big California fly trap between a couple of over-blooming sallow bushes down by the creek—a complicated manoeuvre—when suddenly a complete stranger appeared as if from nowhere. He just stepped straight out of the lush June greenery and addressed me politely and apologetically in English. A wood warbler sang its silver song somewhere in the trembling crown of a nervous aspen, and a pike splashed in the shallow water of the creek. The mosquitoes were stubborn in the shade. He said it was me he was looking for.
 
“I’m looking for you” were his exact words.
 
I tried to accept this as the most natural thing in the world, as if strangers could be expected to seek me out wherever I might be. But I failed completely. Instead I stood there like an idiot among the sedge tussocks, amazed and speechless.
 
This man was in fact, and still is, the only person I’ve ever encountered by Ladäng Creek. If you want to be left in peace, it’s a good place to go. Islanders never go there, and the summer people don’t know the place exists. The paths that once led there have now vanished. The name of the creek is not even on the map. For that matter, it’s not much of a waterway, more of a ditch—overgrown, silted up and periodically dry. The meadow barns that are said to have stood there are long gone, as indeed are the meadows. Slowly but surely they’ve been invaded by fir, aspen, birch and alder. All the same, it’s a very pretty place, as rich and spacious as a cathedral when the marsh marigolds bloom in the spring. Deer meet down by the creek, sometimes moose, but never people. Except that day.
 
In the Middle Ages, Ladäng Creek was the channel boats used to sail to a village at the far end of the bay, which rising land elevations eventually turned into a freshwater lake. The village is still there. It’s where we live. How old it is no one knows, but there were probably people living here as early as Viking times. The inner parts of the long bay, where the humus-brown water is very deep, must have made an ideal harbour—a sanctuary that seafarers with base intentions surely hesitated to venture into. The granite cliff drops straight into the water. The village was easily defended against attackers from the open ocean to the east.
 
What ships anchored here outside my window? Who rowed up the creek where today a pike can hardly make its way?
 
“I’m looking for you.”

Editorial Reviews

One of the Best Books of the Year
The New York Times * Kansas City Star

“Seductive . . . a quirky and wide-ranging meditation on the deep pleasures of collecting, obsession and the natural world.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A charming, off-the-beaten track, humorously self-deprecating memoir. . . . Filled with delightful observations. . . . The Fly Trap stands as proof that great writing can lend a buzz (sorry!) to even the most unlikely subjects.” —NPR

“The Geoff Dyer of Sweden: Funny, astute, intellectually voracious, simultaneously self-absorbed and self-critical.” —Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
 
“Mesmerizing. . . . A shimmering and elusive grace pervades Fredrik Sjöberg’s evocation of his life and work as a hoverfly expert.” —Nature

“Sjöberg traces a sort of erratic flight path of ideas and associations, at once whimsical and yet laden with erudition and a deep feeling for the natural world and our place in it.” —Financial Times
 
“[A] wry, at times poetic memoir.” —The New York Times
 
“The writing is whimsical, digressive and pleasingly devoid of anything too weighty or purposeful.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Delightful . . . at once informative and often humorously digressive. . . . A humane man of wide-ranging curiosity, [Sjöberg] writes with infectious passion.” —The Independent
 
“Full of charm, the insects are almost incidental. . . . It’s really a book about how to find meaning in life.” —The Times (A Nature Book of the Year)
 
“Poetic . . . [Sjöberg] transforms a niche subject into one of widespread appeal, musing on the pleasures of country life and the line between avocation and obsession.” —Kansas City Star
 
“An intriguing defence of the selfish, even hedonistic pleasures of natural history. —The Times Literary Supplement
 
“As much about life as about entomology. . . . One of the pleasures of Sjöberg’s book is that he honestly explores the psychological motives behind collecting.” —Santa Fe New Mexican
 
“I often return to The Fly Trap; it remains close to my heart. The minute observations from nature reveal sudden insights into one’s life. Sometimes I almost think that [Sjöberg] wrote it for me.” —Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
 
“Charming . . . and original. . . . A bit like dinner with a witty European intellectual—wry, digressive and packed with fantastically clipped observations.” —The Guardian
 
“Sjöberg . . . thrives in the indistinct boundary between science and literature. . . . The real message of the book . . . is the quiet pleasure to be found in reading the fine print of knowledge.” —New Scientist
 
“[A] completely charming memoir. . . . The Fly Trap isn’t just a series of artful ruminations on the timeless quest to understand the natural world (although that would be enough, wouldn’t it?). Sjöberg is a genuinely funny guy.” —The Daily Beast
 
“It is hard to believe, given the lucidity of his book, that [Sjöberg] could be a better entomologist than he is a writer.” —Sydney Morning Herald
 
“Insightful . . . [Sjöberg] approaches, at his best, the familiar, intimate and wistful power of that other Scandinavian literary giant, Karl Ove Knausgård. . . . [He writes] in a manner that oddly emulates those same elusive, beautiful, imitative hoverflies he has devoted so much of his life to.” —PopMatters

From the Publisher