Pär Lagerkvist

From Today in Literature:

Pär Lagerkvist, born on this day in 1891, won the 1951 Nobel. His most well-known novel may be Barabbas, published the previous year and hailed as a modern parable, but in presenting its award the Academy offered an autobiographical event from an earlier short story "as a symbol of the theme that dominates Pär Lagerkvist's work." In "My Father and I" a young boy and his father are walking in the Swedish countryside when it suddenly becomes very dark. To find their way home, they travel the railway tracks until a train surprises them, forcing them down the embankment:

All the lights in the carriages were out, and it was going at frantic speed. What sort of train was it? There wasn't one due now! We gazed at it in terror. The fire blazed in the huge engine....sparks whirled out into the night. It was terrible. The driver stood there in the light of the fire, pale, motionless, his features as though turned to stone....I stood there panting, gazing after the furious vision. It was swallowed up by the night....

My whole body was shaking. It was for me, for my sake. I sensed what it meant: it was the anguish that was to come, the unknown, all that father knew nothing about, that he wouldn't be able to protect me against. That was how this world, this life, would be for me; not like father's where everything was secure and certain. It wasn't a real world, a real life. It just hurdled, blazing, into the darkness ahead....

Lagerkvist is one of my favorite novelists, for Barabbas in particular though I've pretty much loved everything of his I've read. He had a wonderfully lean, spare prose style which leaves plenty unsaid, requiring the reader to formulate one's own interpretations.