The Dead Falls: A Story

Hallström, Per, 1866-1960Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5

Word count: 219K words
Chapters: 22

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Döda fallet: En berättelse by Per HallströmAuthor: Hallström, Per, 1866-1960,Language: Swedish, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Apr 8, 2015

Editor's review

This work is a novella by the Swedish author Per Hallström and a notable piece within the Nordic literary tradition. Hallström served as permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, and his fiction is known for its measured narrative pace and its exploration of the relationship between nature, human character, and fate. The book is short and written in Swedish, making it a suitable introductory sample for understanding Swedish narrative literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers will readily notice how the author mirrors landscape and psychology, with the narrative relying less on dramatic conflict than on atmosphere and detail. For Chinese readers, this is a foreign-language original requiring some linguistic threshold, better suited as supplementary material for language learning and literary study than for casual reading. The Project Gutenberg edition is convenient for searching and reading on the go; a dictionary and background materials are recommended alongside it.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Language learners with intermediate or higher Swedish reading ability
University students and faculty studying Nordic or Swedish literary history
Readers interested in the narrative style of late nineteenth-century Swedish fiction
Readers who wish to practice close reading with short foreign-language originals

Not a good fit for

Readers with no Swedish foundation who can only read Chinese
General readers expecting strong plot conflict and fast-paced narrative
Beginners who need Chinese annotations or bilingual editions

Reading tips

Read through once to grasp the plot and character relationships, then a second time to look up unfamiliar words and grammatical structures
Consult background materials on late nineteenth-century Swedish society and physical geography while reading
Read introductory articles on Hallström's other works to understand his place in Swedish literature
Take notes on passages where landscape description corresponds to character psychology for comparative analysis

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

What language level is needed to read this book?

The original is in Swedish; intermediate or higher reading ability is recommended, with the capacity to understand longer sentences and literary expression. Beginners may work through it paragraph by paragraph with a dictionary, or start with translated works by the author before returning to the original.

Is this work suitable for learning Swedish?

It can serve as advanced reading material. It is moderate in length and linguistically standard, but strongly literary, with sentence patterns that are not fully colloquial. It is best used after mastering basic grammar, alongside a dictionary and grammar reference, and avoiding word-for-word translation.

What are the practical features of the Project Gutenberg edition?

This edition is a free e-book, easy to download, search, and read across devices, and suitable for annotation and excerpting. It usually has no Chinese annotations or introduction, however, so readers must supply background materials themselves, and the reading experience depends on their own language preparation.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Hallström, Per, 1866-1960 Author · Swedish · 1866–1960

Per Hallström (1866–1960) was a Swedish poet and writer. He was elected a member of the Swedish Academy and took part in the selection of the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years. His works include Döda fallet: En berättelse, and one of his works is held in this collection. Public information about his life and writing is limited, and existing accounts focus mainly on his role in Swedish literary circles and in the Nobel Prize in Literature deliberations. His subjects and style may be understood in the context of Swedish literary tradition; as both poet and novelist, his narrative writing is literary in character and concerned with the relationship between people and their environment. As an Academy member, he had a certain influence on Swedish literary criticism and prize deliberations in the twentieth century.