"Hoverflies are only props. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what I don't know." - Fredrik Sjberg.
It takes skill to enamor a reader while convincing the same reader you don't know exactly where you're headed or even what your subject matter is. But this is exactly what Fredrik Sjberg does in his small volume, "The Fly Trap."
A Swedish entomologist specializing in hoverflies (think bee/wasp imposters with one set of wings as opposed to two), Sjberg, of course, writes about flies, but he also explores the virtue of limitations. He talks about the "ability to read landscape as if it were a language almost as if it were literature" - about wanting to "understand the fine print." He writes about slowness. He writes about history. He muses on the environment in unexpected ways. And running throughout the entire book is entomologist René Malaise, "a madman who invented a trap and then went off the tracks" - a man Sjberg claims he didn't intend to write about.
Sjberg seems distracted by all kinds of tangents and unexpected connections. But don't be deceived; this is the craft of writing at its best. Just when you begin to wonder where the conversation is going, Sjberg pulls everything together and you think, "Of course, how could I have forgotten, that's what we've been talking about all along."
Is "The Fly Trap" biography? Memoir? Natural history? Popular science? Or is it something else all together? I'm still not sure. The thing I do know is that when I closed the book, I laughed a little in delight, wished I were an entomologist on an island in Sweden and felt compelled to read "The Fly Trap" once again.
Paula Schlute is the marketing coordinator at Missouri River Regional Library.