Strindberg: A Life by Sue Prideaux (PDF)

Description

Novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist, and hellraiser—August Strindberg was all these, and yet he is principally known, in Arthur Miller’s words, as “the mad inventor of modern theater” who led playwriting out of the polite drawing room into the snakepit of psychological warfare. This biography, supported by extensive new research, describes the eventful and complicated life of one of the great literary figures in world literature. Sue Prideaux organizes Strindberg’s story into a gripping and highly readable narrative that both illuminates his work and restores humor and humanity to a man often shrugged off as too difficult. Best known for his play Miss Julie, Strindberg wrote sixty other plays, three books of poetry, eighteen novels, and nine autobiographies. Even more than most, Strindberg is a writer whose life sheds invaluable light on his work. Prideaux explores Strindberg’s many art-life connections, revealing for the first time the originals who inspired the characters of Miss Julie and her servant Jean, the bizarre circumstances in which the play was written, and the real suicide that inspired the shattering ending of the play. Recounting the playwright’s journey through the “real” world as well as the world of belief and ideas, Prideaux marks the centenary of Strindberg’s death in 1912 with a biography worthy of the man who laid the foundation for Western drama through the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Thought it was brilliant, and very well researched.Kevin

⭐Superbly written. A balanced account. One gets a real sense of who the man was and the struggles he encountered. The book has led me to begin reading Strindberg’s plays.

⭐Great insights to this insane, robust, erratic playwright. What a mind and what a lesson for anyone studying theatre arts.

⭐I had hoped that this book would supersede the standard biography of Strindberg by Michael Meyer (1986), which is hugely informative, but gets rather bogged down in secondary details, and irritates me by its frequent disparaging remarks about Strindberg’s novels and autobiographies, which I hugely admire; if you really think that Strindberg is at his best only in a few plays, why write about him? However, this new life by Prideaux doesn’t directly compete with Meyer, because it is in a quite different genre – that of the racy popular biography. Yes, it `reads like a novel’. As such, it will meet the tastes of most readers much better than Meyer’s. But there is a downside. The writing is flashy, full of vivid little details, out of the writer’s head, to bring the page alive. But such details are in danger of being misleading or hackneyed. Prideaux describes the Pietist preachers of the Stockholm of Strindberg’s youth as `rabble-rousing’, presumably because this is the word in her vocabulary to describe dissenting preachers. Novelists are not historians, and so we have the statement that `the land on which St Petersburg stands’ was Swedish territory down to 1809 (how can the reader of the Yale University Press have let this through?). And Voltaire is said to have written a life of Charles XII of Sweden because he so admired him, when in fact the work is a brilliant hatchet-job; but for Prideaux, to write a biography and admire its subject are two ideas automatically connected. Accuracy improves when she gets on to Strindberg, though I would trust Meyer more for the facts, and he gives many more of them. But in a popular biography none of this matters. For this remains a hugely readable book, which brings out vividly Strindberg’s bizarre and tragic personality and many episodes of his life. Well done to Sue Prideaux for drawing him to the attention of today’s readers! In the centenary year of his death this is just the book to read. – And having read it, I would urge you to proceed to Strindberg’s own `The Son of a Servant’, one of the great autobiographies.

⭐I read this book for two reasons.One,I’d read the authors terrific Nietzsche biography .Two , I’ve long been interested in Strindberg and have read some of his writing besides the plays.This book is interesting but almost surprisingly less interesting than the Nietzsche book.The reason I say that is that by any standard Strindberg lead a more eventful life than Nietzsche – and by the way the two were correspondents at one time.I’d always suspected Strindberg was a bit “odd” but I wasn’t quite ready for his notion that Edvard Munch was trying to kill him via psychic means.Or that he was having spectral sex with the succubus of his third wife.He also used to play music with Paul Gaugin.So there are definitely some good stories here .This is not a critical biography.In other words it doesn’t go into his work in great detail.Also this edition has very small print.So the text weighing in at 300 pages(excluding footnotes, index and bibliography) is more like 400 pages in normal print.The book contains reproductions of a number of good photographs and paintings.

⭐Book is brilliant, quick delivery and well packaged, very pleased.

⭐excellent biography of a great writer

⭐Excellent.

⭐Ich bin kein Literaturwissenschaftler, sonder Psychologe und auch kein Strindberg-Spezialist. Ich weiss auch nicht wie einseitg diese Biographie ist, die Gott sei Dank von einer Frau geschrieben, wirklich ist. Aber wer ein differenzierteres Bild des überaus kreativen und schwierigen Menschen bekommen will, sollte dies Buch unbedingt lesen. Langweilig wirtd einem nie, Interesse an Literatur, Theater und psychiatrischen Problemen vorausgesetzt.This biography is really a stunner. It doesn’t need me to sing the praises of this great Swedish playwright, but I am more that happy to say that this is the kind of biography that I can imagine Strindberg himself would have appreciated.It is clear, concise and admirably detailed with a veritable wealth of illustrations. There is no padding whatsoever, and although not in any way a thriller, it is, nevertheless, action packed. For anyone who, like me, knows nothing about the life of Strindberg, yet would like to, here’s the answer to your prayers. A thoroughly fascinating book which brings its subject matter to life with pizazz.Obviously I shall have to keep my eyes open for the next offering from Ms Prideaux.

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