“I wanted to create the image of a modern man faced with the need to use violence to prevent even more violence,” wrote the author of the novel “The Surf and the Shores”—Eivind Younson, a Swedish prose writer and the Nobel Prize laureate for 1974.
The book’s plot is based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” but the familiar Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus from childhood are stripped of any heroic aura. The heroes aren’t needed—now it’s the businessmen’s time. Conscience, honor, fidelity… have become anachronisms. And Odysseus—who survived the Trojan War and swore never to kill again—takes up arms once more.