Vilhelm Moberg - Din stund på jorden

Vilhelm Moberg left his Småland homeland when he was in his early twenties, but he never left it in his writing. The novels set outside the Värend region almost always deal with the longing to return there, to the soil, to the origin. Din stund på jorden (1963) can be read as a farewell to the emigrant world that occupied Moberg for more than ten years. In the early 1960s, businessman and Swedish American Albert Carlson sits in a hotel room in California, trying to make sense of his own life. The roar of the Pacific mingles in his imagination with the murmur of Bjurbäcken, next to the family home, and Carlson remembers his beloved older brother Sigfrid, who died when they were boys. His brother's urging to make the most of life, of "din stund på jorden" (your time on earth), becomes the novel's melancholy credo.