The half-life of a refugee
A wartime child refugee from Poland, and fostered into a Swedish family, Lars Andemening is living a half-life. Now middle-aged, he is the survivor of two failed marriages and writes nondescript book reviews for one of his adopted country’s daily papers. His star is easily outshone, and left with little on which to hang his identity, he uses his orphaned status to conjure a past worth owning.
His father, he decides, was the legendary Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, one of the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century, who was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942. Quickly then, this obsession consumes Lars, to the point where he even learns Polish in order to be able to read his “father’s” work in its original form. But there is one gaping hole in the picture: a decades-lost and almost mythical novel, ‘The Messiah’, that Schulz had been working on at the time of his death.
