Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases

by Lars Gustafsson

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Critical Overview

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Although Gustafsson’s work is not as widely known in the English-speaking world as his admirers might like it to be, the translation of his short story collection Stories of Happy People did receive some positive reviews when published in 1986. In Studies in Short Fiction, Daniel P. Deneau selected “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases” as one of the two memorable stories in the collection. He described it as “an absorbing account” of a mentally retarded person, in which, at the end, “in lyrical prose we learn of his feeling of oneness with the universe and his understanding of the great mystery of which mankind is a part.” Deneau quotes Gustafsson’s statement that “Nobody really knows what a human being is,” and comments that in all his stories, including “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases,” “[Gustafsson] quietly illustrates mysteries rather than certainties.”

In the September 7, 1986, New York Times Book Review, Eric O. Johannesson noted that the book was a collection of “10 delightful and significant narratives.” Although he does not mention “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases” directly, his general comments can be applied to it. According to Johannesson, the book “celebrates possibilities. In their efforts to cope with particular situations, Mr. Gustafsson’s characters are generously granted sudden insights, epiphanies or sorts.” In a fictional world that “seems inherently valueless, value is conferred by a shift of point of view, of perspective. Thus new possibilities are offered. It is a joyous, life-enhancing philosophy.”

Charles Baxter, in his introduction to the story in the anthology, You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe, describes it as “something of a miracle: it induces in the reader a bit of a trance, and in this trance it convincingly portrays its subject as mysteriously exceptional, godlike.” Baxter also has praise for Gustafsson’s “very tricky maneuver,” in which the protagonist’s manner of perceiving the world “must come to us through words and a literary language that the boy and subsequently the man do not possess.” Baxter praises the narrator for not taking pity on the mentally retarded character and for granting him “nobility, free from condescension.” However, in illustrating how the narrator accomplishes this, Baxter misreads the entire paragraph beginning “In a world that had no center, he reigned like a quiet monarch,” which in fact describes the young teacher at the institution rather than the protagonist.

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