Though Sven Delblanc's reputation rests primarily on his novels, he also wrote radio plays, stage dramas, television scripts, memoirs, and many essays of literary criticism. This enormous productivity in various genres and media contributed to his overall impact; Delblanc's work reached wide sections of the Swedish population. He is, nevertheless, anything but a "popular" writer in the pejorative sense of the term. Many of his novels and plays explore complex, unsettling moral and philosophical issues, sometimes in an historical context--he was especially drawn to the eighteenth century--and sometimes in an allegorical or futuristic setting. A consummate stylist who often cultivated a rhetorical flair, Delblanc employed a prodigiously large vocabulary. Best known among the prose works are two interlocking novel series, each comprising four volumes, the first depicting the environment of his childhood and youth and the second the experiences of his maternal grandfather and his descendants. Concurrent with...