Downfall: A Love Story     by Per Olov Enquist, Translated by Anna Paterson Original title: Nedstörtad ängel Original language: Swedish Country: Sweden   Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: 109 pages ISBN: 070430130X List Price: $9.94, £7.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £4.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.94

Provocatively entitled ‘A Love Story’, this extraordinary book is unlike any other, and, coming out in 1985, heralded the significant move in Enquist towards the private and mystical. The question animating the inter-related narratives is: ‘What is a human being, and what attributes and capacities does s/he have to possess to qualify?’ Enquist forces us to realise how much we rely on unquestioned norms, on lazy definitions we have received from others, to answer this. Downfall insists that we confront what convention would term the freak or the misfit — and that we see these ‘abnormal’ beings as fully human, to the point of having passions every bit as strong and dominating as those of more ordinarily blessed folk. Downfall can be viewed as, at the deepest level, the most uncompromisingly anti-Nazi book imaginable.


Here Enquist’s skills as one of Sweden’s leading journalists meet his gifts as a novelist. We encounter in the pages of this book the (true-life) Mexican, Pasqual Piñon, born with two heads, the larger male and the smaller — growing on top of it — female. A love existed between these two heads — and how, in the face of physically observable evidence — dare we deny its validity? Downfall is no less insistent that we accept the emotions of a young schizophrenic murderer (personally known to the author) and those of a figure from cultural history, the deranged Ruth Berlau who fancied that Bertolt Brecht had spurned her, and went around carrying a plaster-cast of his head in a hat-box. And through these stories of bizarre-seeming loves and destinies Enquist weaves recollections of his own life, casting his growing up in rural Västerbotten in that mythological light he developed in his book Captain Nemo, and expressed in poetic prose of extreme near-ecstatic beauty.

‘There were quite white January nights when the moon was white and it was cold cold cold; the telephone wires were fastened to the wall of the house, the house was made of wood and Daddy had built it himself, it was like a gigantic resonating box, and the wires sang.

It was an enormous song brought from the stars, it came night after night when it was cold. It sang in the heavenly harp as if someone out there in the winter's night had drawn a giant's bow over the strings, it sang, a thousand years of sadness and forgiving, wordlessly and sadly, all night long, one end of the wires stuck to a wooden house in Västerbotten County, but the other end hung on far out in space, hung on to dead black stars. The song came from space and was wordless and was about the wordless. do not forget us, it sang, do not forget us.’ p56