Diversions that delight

Publication of this book is timely, though the publishers make nothing of it on the jacket. This year is the centenary of the founding of the US National Parks Service, that great project, as Sjöberg has it, designed to ensure that “virgin reserves should be placed here and there throughout the country, like Sundays in a landscape of weekdays”.

I’ve read a lot of pieces commemorating the anniversary, but none, so far, has reflected on the role played by a couple of Swedes. Sjöberg, in his eccentric way, gives his countrymen their due.

The Art of Flight is actually two books: the one bearing that title is followed within the same covers by The Raisin King. Together they form a loose trilogy with The Fly Trap, published in Britain in 2014, in which Sjöberg demonstrated a talent for making bestsellers out of the little things in life. The Fly Trap is ostensibly about catching hoverflies on one tiny island east of Stockholm but for Sjöberg, a literary critic, translator and entomologist, the hoverflies are really props. His mission is to “say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation”.

In The Art of Flight, he traces the life and works of Gunnar Widforss, a wilderness artist virtually unknown in his native Sweden but revered in the United States for watercolours of nearphotographic detail (there’s a Widforss Trail and a Widforss Point at the Grand Canyon and his paintings sell for more than $100,000 at auction).

In The Raisin King, he follows the journey from Sweden to California and New York of Gustav Eisen, who was an expert on worms before becoming a winegrower. Eisen was a key figure in the San Francisco Academy of