Free The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjoberg Page A

soon finds himself entangled in a formless struggle with capricious malevolence. “He recognizes every sound and knows every plant and animal, so if he heard or saw anything strange, he would consider it impermissible.”

    I wonder what would have happened if he’d caught sight of what I saw in the sucking peat moss right at the edge of the lake. An American purple pitcher plant. For a moment, nothing was heard but the rustle of a dragonfly’s wings.
    An alien, carnivorous plant, several feet tall, as imposing as if it had come straight from John Wyndham’s classic thriller The Day of the Triffids . Just one lonely, magnificent plant. How it got there no one knows, and I can assure you that there’s no truth to the rumour, widespread among botanists, that I put it there myself. It’s true that it could have been me, but it wasn’t. Which hasn’t kept me from entertaining very warm feelings for the purple pitcher ever since that day, not because it catches flies in its fluid-filled leaf cups, or because it’s so rare, but rather because, in the manner of naturalized intruders, it breaks a pattern and astounds. Biological xenophobia is widespread but almost always unwarranted.

    A little havoc, if only in the form of a garden, seldom does any harm. It goes awry only when the scale gets too large. That was one of the few things that travel taught me.
    …
    Tropical rain forest is at its best on television. Of course it sometimes happens that the jungle is both beautiful and enjoyable in real life, up close, but believe me, it is more often a kind of disgusting orgy where everything pierces and bites and your clothes stick to your body like cling film. You see nothing of the sun because rank foliage arches over the trail like a musty cellar ceiling and torrential rains turn the path to a slippery drainage ditch where only blood-sucking leeches can get a foothold. You are attacked by malaria-infected mosquitoes, and the mere thought of snakebite and broken bones and dysentery sinks your spirits like a stone, since the distance to the nearest road begins to be measured in days, as is often the case in the tropics. Visitors from northern lands, initially so headstrong and adventurous, stand in the dusk on the sodden, rotting floor of the rain forest, downhearted, drained, and speak of nothing but the consistency of their excrement and, beyond that, manage to think only very short thoughts. Get me out of here. Get me a beer.

    But you couldn’t write about that, not in the early ’80s when all the miseries between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn were measured, ridiculously, in units of football-fields-clear-cut-per-second. And if I nevertheless ventured to say something to the effect that Central Africa might benefit from some motorways and pulp mills, people dismissed it as my way of being provocative, which it was not, or else they said that I was just trying to get attention, which wasn’t true either, except maybe a little.

    Narcissus poeticus spreads its fragrance in the spring evening. Narcissus flies sing in the undergrowth like tuning forks. The high-frequency hum of their wings is like a footnote that makes the experience all the richer for those who know the sound.
    …
    The last thing I needed was a house in Ydre, especially not in Svinhult, but that’s where it was, walking distance from nowhere in Småland.
    I saw the ad by chance. Late-seventeenth-century log house in need of renovation. The lot was large and the price so ridiculously low that my imagination, which needed somewhere to live that day, occupied the place from the moment I saw the ad and sank in its jaws just long enough for curiosity to begin morphing into a desire to possess. The house was really cheap. If it had been on the island, the price would have been twenty times higher, at least. I called the broker, in Tranås, but he knew very little and explained that at that price he wasn’t interested in doing much more than running the