Shadows We Carry
It’s 1947. Stig Dagerman, the young Swedish author on everybody’s lips, is feverishly working on a play, his third. Marty’s Shadow, as Stig will call it, will be his best-known play, and the most frequently staged both in Sweden and abroad.
The play is inspired by real people: the Viennese-Jewish writer Etta Federn and her sons Jean and Michel. Stig Dagerman and his wife have visited Etta in Paris just weeks before he sits down to write the play.
Some sixty years later, unknowingly and independently of each other,
Lo Dagerman and Nancy Pick are pursuing research. Lo is in search of her father, the star writer who committed suicide when she was only three; Nancy is in search of her distant cousin Etta, the anarchist, feminist, journalist, force of nature, and role model; both are driven by a need to understand the persons whose absences from their lives bear such significance for their identities today.
The play brings Lo and Nancy together on their quests. And the brutality of it almost tears them apart. Why did Stig paint such a cruel and garbled portrait of Etta and her family? Lo and Nancy’s pursuit of who Stig and Etta really were imbues the book, and pieces of the puzzle are fitted together along the way.
Shadows We Carry is a personal book and winding road back in time and into the minds of two extraordinary and fascinating people.
Lo Dagerman has lived and worked in the USA for 30 years. As the daughter of Stig Dagerman and actress Anita Björk, Lo has devoted a significant part of her life to making Stig’s legacy better known in the world. She runs the English webpage dedicated to his works and has produced two short films…
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About the book
It’s 1947. Stig Dagerman, the young Swedish author on everybody’s lips, is feverishly working on a play, his third. Marty’s Shadow, as Stig will call it, will be his best-known play, and the most frequently staged both in Sweden and abroad.
The play is inspired by real people: the Viennese-Jewish writer Etta Federn and her sons Jean and Michel. Stig Dagerman and his wife have visited Etta in Paris just weeks before he sits down to write the play.
Some sixty years later, unknowingly and independently of each other,
Lo Dagerman and Nancy Pick are pursuing research. Lo is in search of her father, the star writer who committed suicide when she was only three; Nancy is in search of her distant cousin Etta, the anarchist, feminist, journalist, force of nature, and role model; both are driven by a need to understand the persons whose absences from their lives bear such significance for their identities today.
The play brings Lo and Nancy together on their quests. And the brutality of it almost tears them apart. Why did Stig paint such a cruel and garbled portrait of Etta and her family? Lo and Nancy’s pursuit of who Stig and Etta really were imbues the book, and pieces of the puzzle are fitted together along the way.
Shadows We Carry is a personal book and winding road back in time and into the minds of two extraordinary and fascinating people.
