The title — The Death of a Beekeeper — lets readers know right away that this will not be an overly cheerful novel. It is a moving story, eventually a beautiful one in its slightly off-kilter way. Which is only fair because the beekeeper, one Lars Lennart Westin, often called “Wiesel,” is a slightly off-kilter man.
The book begins with a few pages of framing story from a first-person but unnamed narrator, presumably Gustafsson himself. He is in the Chisos Mountains in the Big Bend country of Texas, with a friend who is a professor of Old Icelandic at the University of Texas. When I first read the frame, I thought that the friend gave the narrator the notebooks that form the rest of the novel, but checking again I see that that it not true. The main thing that this story does is to introduce the motto that Wiesel will write numerous times in the notebooks that chronicle the last months of his life: We don’t give up. We begin again.
(The frame was odd for me to read because I think I have been in the exact spot that Gustafsson describes, looking out across the border into Mexico, and it is a very long way from anywhere.)