A sense of fatal sublimationwas also to be found in Flowering Time. The light and shade of theStockholm archipelago form the setting for the story of a teacher (GerdHagman) who struggles to maintain a nostalgic bond with her ghostlysailor-lover, ultimately to marry a land-bound colleague. "Both(Flowering Time and Home from Babylon, see September 15) deal withBovary-like cases of self-delusion; both are ironical in espousingconventions of cheap fiction only to expose them, as it were, betweenquotation marks; both present Sweden as an island, diseased with thevery neutrality that protects it." (Edgardo Cozarinsky)