What the Swedes Read: Pär Lagerkvist

• LAUREATE: Pär Lagerkvist (Sweden, 1951)
• BOOK READ: Barabbas, translated by Alan Blair

I’d never heard of Pär Lagerkvist before embarking on this project, but as I bummed around town with Barabbas, one of his most celebrated novels, two friends of mine said, “Oh, I read that.” That hadn’t happened with, say, books by Carl Spitteler or Harry Martinson. Though book and author had been completely unknown to me, others apparently were fully engaged with Lagerkvist and Barabbas, right under my nose.

It’s like Christianity in this way. Jews like myself can sometimes forget just what a big deal Christians are. Well, that’s not quite putting it right—we aren’t blind to the Pope, or Santa Claus, or other manifestations of the Gentile Juggernaut. But if you don’t grow up learning the basic precepts of Christianity, you end up knowing the trappings but not the theology of, in the West at least, the dominant culture. Even reading the New Testament won’t let the story of Christ sit in the brain the way it does in the Christian psyche. I’m someone who wishes I’d had more religion in my public schooling, if only so that, in college, when we were all studying Jonathan Edwards, I didn’t have to say, “OK, remind me. They roll the rock back, and…?”

That was my handicap with Barabbas, which derives its title from a minor character in the Christ story. At least, I think he’s minor. For those of you on equally weak footing, Barabbas is a thief, scheduled to be crucified along with you-know-whom, only to have his sentence lifted in a gimmicky vote by the gathered crowd. Though only briefly mentioned in the original texts, Barabbas has cast an enduring shadow across Christian culture, as far as I can tell. Some scholars propose Barabbas as one of the cornerstones of Christian anti-Semitism—although in my view anti-Semitism will take any old cornerstone lying around—while some have adopted him as a symbol of Christ bestowing grace even on those who deserve it least.

Barabbas tells the thief’s side of the story, and thus is something of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for a reader, in this case, who doesn’t know all that much about Hamlet. The book begins at the moment of crucifixion, with the freed thief watching Jesus’s last moments—I mean, you know, for now—and feeling that “there was something odd about him,” which sounds a bit like the part in a biopic where people have a funny feeling that the movie’s subject is really going to make a mark. There’s even a special effect, a sudden darkening of the sky,...