Novel
Stolen Spring
Det forsømte forår
Hans Scherfig · 1940
Synopsis
One spring evening, the lektor Blomme, a dreaded Latin teacher at a large Copenhagen school, takes his walk sucking one of his malt lozenges and finds it bitter. Twenty-five years after their baccalaureate, nineteen former pupils, now men of standing, meet to celebrate the anniversary, and the novel goes back with them over their seven years of school: lessons learned by heart, beatings, humiliations, and what each has become.
Context
The author had written a first version of the book when he was still a pupil at the school he describes, the Metropolitanskolen, where future jurists, doctors and senior civil servants were trained. The novel opens like a detective story, jumps to the reunion of former pupils, then goes back over the school years; it takes up characters from his 1938 novel. Peter Schrøder made a film of it in 1993, with Frits Helmuth in the role of Blomme, and the book has also become a rock musical.
Who it is for
About two hundred pages, short chapters and a continuous irony. No French translation; the English translation bears a title that is not that of the Danish.
Prizes and reception
Having become a modern classic in Denmark, the great novel of the authoritarian “dirty school”, regularly reissued.
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