Secrets Between Lovers

Dick Olsson is a successful advertising executive who, like Gustafsson himself, comes from the Swedish province of Västmanland and now lives in Austin, Texas. Twice a week, a woman who calls herself Eleonora comes to clean his villa. She was born in Colombia and belongs to a different world: the world of the outcasts, the world of poverty. Although Eleonara's bony frame and bird-like profile do not confer a conventional beauty, Dick feels strangely drawn to her, but the beginning of an affair is stalled by news of his mother's death in Stockholm. Simultaneously, he receives an offer of an important consulting job: one of the former Soviet republics needs his public relations skills to draw attention to its plight. On his travels, from Stockholm to Berlin and the Mark Brandenburg, Olsson thinks about his life, develops a new advertising strategy, ruminates on the nature of compost, complains about morose taxi drivers and gets to know a charming businesswoman rather well. And still he cannot drive Eleonora from his mind. Have the authorities finally ordered her deportation, or will she be waiting for him at home?

Dick Olsson is a worthy brother to Gustafsson's Beekeeper and Tiler: Nearing sixty, he has more memories than he can use, yet has remained a stranger to himself and is, at bottom, a lonely man. Now even his soul seems to fly away from him when he drops a twenty dollar bill into the box of Tetzel, the old seller of indulgences. Yet his curiosity for life and for love have not deserted him.