Arne Sand was almost always out of time. Back then, it seemed as he was always lagging behind, but much later we can think of him as someone before his time. He appears to be an paradigmatic author of the 1950s with his interest of the character and means of fiction.
The main character of the Windmills is an art critic, Donald Johansson, that comes to the family Martstad to study their Jugend mansion and falls in love with the daughter and then her mother. The novel consists of conversations that are hard to follow because however brilliant they do not make sense, which creates a distance. It has been mentioned as the first Swedish non-figurative novel and the most daring experimental novel of the 1960s. The novel alludes to Cervantes, Shakespeare and Kafka but most of all it reminded me of the surrealistic L’écume des jours of Boris Vian from 1947.
