The Fly Trap

When you're standing in a ditch or a field all afternoon holding a long pole with a net at the end of it, you've got a lot of time to think about things.  All sorts of things. The rare hoverflies you're trying to catch, yes, but also modern literature, environmentalism, the importance of "disturbed" natural areas, the lure of collecting things, the value of limits, and how to respond to passing tourists who ask you what you're doing. 

The Swedish adventurer and entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg has spent his time well. He has also developed a knack for stringing such musings together in a comfortable pattern and giving a breezy, self-depreciatory flavor to the mix. The result is a book-length essay that flows effortlessly from one topic to the next, full of humor and wisdom, switchbacks and surprises, tidbits of trivia and expressions of understated joy in the face of the marvels the natural world spreads at our feet, or in the shrubbery above our heads, just out of reach.  

Sjöberg's career as an entomologist figures prominently in the exposition, though he never makes it clear exactly what kind of a "career" that is. It's hard to imagine why anyone would pay him to catch or study flies on a small island in the Stockholm Archepeligo. It might well be nothing more than a lifelong hobby. He makes passing reference to experience in the jungles of Africa, and near the end of the book he writes "after thirteen months of travel around the world, I was now finally on my way home, tired and disillusioned," but he offers no clue as to what he was up to during that time.  

"Anyway, [he writes] the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don’t know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold." (p.12)

One of the central beams of Sjöberg's construction, which he returns to repeatedly and dilates on at considerable length, is the career of Swedish entomologist René Malaise, who invented the fly trap referred to in the title in 1934. It revolutionized the practice of catching flying insects and is still in widespread use today. Sjöberg resisted buying such a device for years, mostly out of vanity, it seems. It wasn't his style. He now attests to its great value as a tool, but he's less interested in the trap itself than in the career of the man who invented it. Malaise was an adventurer and researcher in an era that has long since given way to helicopters and video cameras. He spent ten years in Kamchatka, some of them with the famed Swedish author, researcher, and femme fatale Ester Blenda, whom he married there. She returned to Sweden but he remained, trapping sable to earn a livelihood and eating bear for dinner, and he later studied insects in the wilds of upland Burma with his second wife, returning home with thousands of new species. Sjöberg claims that now, seventy years later, they still haven't cataloged them all. 

Sjöberg moves on to other subjects, including a analysis of a novella by D.H. Lawrence and an encounter in the brush with an Englishman looking for yew forests on his tiny island, but a few chapters later he returns to Rene Malaise. In later life Malaise's renown as an explorer faded, and he eventually became an academic laughingstock for denying the theory of plate tectonics while pursuing researches into the location of Atlantis. Sjöberg admires his tenacity and conviction, if not his quasi-scientific theories. And as if that weren't enough, Sjöberg spends a good deal of time near the end of the book investigating Malaise's art collection, a few pieces of which were stolen immediately after his death and never recovered. Like so much of the rest of the book, it seems slightly irrelevant—a brand-new line of inquiry interjected so near the end of the book?—but it makes a good story, and it sheds a gentle light on themes that Sjöberg has brought up before: the collector mentality, the difference between grand and modest achievement, the fleeting nature of fame amid the vagaries of history, and the appeal of personal conviction and unbridled enthusiasm. In our day many such portraits are laced with mordant irony, but Sjöberg presents his in the spirit of simple romance and wonder.

Malaise and Ester Blenda

And speaking of romance ... did Malaise really love Ester Blenda, or was his first marriage a matter of convenience, to make it easier for the couple to travel together in the then-newly created Soviet Union? An entomologist friend advises Sjöberg that  the answer lies in the specimens Malaise collected. He never named a wasp or fly after Blenda, though he did name one after Ester's  brother, a famous entomologist himself. But Sjöberg does not find that argument conclusive; Malaise named many of the species he'd discovered during the 1930s, long after his marriage to Blenda was over. More telling, in Sjöberg's view, is that Malaise named one of the many insects he discovered during his trip to Burma after his second wife, Ebba Söderhell.

"As usual, what I found in the end was not what I was looking for. Ebba soederhalli. A sawfly from Burma. Malaise had finally found love. An unmistakable case."

Though Sjöberg mentions his own wife and children only once or twice, in one longish passage he sheds some light on the origins of his own romantic bent. After acknowledging the importance of genetic factors in shaping an individual's character, he goes on to make a case for the importance of early childhood imprinting in a particular environment. He attributes his own "pronounced romantic temperament" to Sweden's long summer nights. 

"We in Sweden have the world’s loveliest summer nights, he writes. Even a short distance down into Europe the nights become gloomy, pitch-black conveyances from dusk to dawn. Tropical nights can build into tre­mendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas cel­ebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later. It doesn’t come close to the endless beauty of a summer night in Sweden."

Sjöberg had been around a bit, in other words, and he's got a few exotic points of comparison.

"Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong—the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?

Sjöberg  was also blessed with parents who gave him free reign as a child to enjoy those nocturnal hours to the full.

"In the superficially darling town by the sea on the outskirts of which I had my childhood, I was the only kid allowed to run free at night. You can’t send a moth-hunter to bed, no matter how young he is. And my parents were—still are—touchingly unsuspecting people who never even considered the possibility that their little boy did anything but catch moths under the nearest streetlamp.

I was constantly out at night. I listened for marsh warblers, spied on badgers, stole strawberries and threw pinecones at girls’ windows. Of course I also collected moths, lots of them, and was almost always alone. It was only when I was older that I rode my bike into town and drank like a Polish translator, but that’s not relevant here. The imprinting was already irrevocable.

Ever since, I have regarded all warmish summer nights as my personal property."

Sjöberg refers in passing quite a few times to the loneliness that an entomologist is likely to experience—very few people are interested in bugs—and of the ties that develop within the field, and also across time through the published works of famous explorers and backyard enthusiasts. The field is so vast, however, that he's long since recognized the importance of establishing limits to one's area of research. He's the unquestioned expert on the hoverflies on the small island where he lives, and has rediscovered seven or eight species that had been considered extinct, and has also found quite a few new ones. 

The author with some of his collection

Sjöberg makes it clear that he collects and studies hoverflies merely for pleasure. He knows that people would take greater interest if he tied his studies to some grand environmental project, but as he puts it, "It would be a lie." He compares his situation to that of Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. DeQuincey could have devoted his entire book to the devastations wrought by opium, just as any modern insect collector could expound at great length on environmental devastation and its effect on insect populations. But that isn't Sjöberg's point. He finds the world of bugs fascinating in itself. As with De Quincey, "the rapture of intoxication seeps in between the lines." Sjöberg also believes that some of the richest and most interesting environments are precisely those—pastures, urban gardens, roadside ditches—that have been disturbed and modified by humans.

Chrysotoxum vernale 

One of the book's most interesting chapters, "The Legible Landscape," comes near the end. He admits that beyond the pleasure that insect collecting provides, he thinks it would be a good thing if people—his readers, you and I—developed greater "landscape literacy." He suggests we ought to approach nature the same way we approach literature or art. Of course, everyone can appreciate a beautiful sunset or a field of poppies, but Sjöberg is suggesting we would benefit from developing the specific knowledge that would allow us to go deeper into the relationships that bind the natural world.

"To recognize a Chrysotoxum vernale when you see it, to know why it’s flying in just this place and at just this moment, is a source of satisfaction not all that easy to account for."


A page or two later he delivers an extended and rhapsodic account of the delight he experiences in the field. His points of reference are insects, not surprisingly, but any botanist or ornithologist would understand.

"On a gentle slope at the edge of a wood, between a hayfield and an av­enue of high-voltage towers, there is a large stand of broad-leaved sermountain growing among the oaks and hazels, which, when the sun is at its zenith, attracts fantastic hordes of insects to its large, white umbels. I usually see the noble chafer there, Gnorimus nobilis, and out on the hayfield, without a care in the world, are Burnet moths, to whose odd colour only Harry Martinson gives full justice: 'The prime colour of the wing is a dark, inky, blue-green blue; carmine-red spots shimmer against that background.'

"On that slope, every summer, I also see the puz­zling bee fly Villa paniscus, a darting tuft of wool that no one knows anything about and that was thought to be extinct until last year, mostly because few if any people could tell it from Villa hottentotta (yes, that’s really its name). Bee flies are really for extra credit, but there’s something about that slope that attracts me for the sake of reading something other than hoverflies."

The more extreme environmentalists he knows worry him. "They are severely tormented by nightmares of extermination. You can see it in their eyes."

While he admits there is cause for grave concern, Sjöberg reminds us here, and in many other parts of the book, what it is we should be caring about. "No one learns to tell the song of the woodlark from that of the skylark in order to make it easier to detect approaching catastrophe," he writes. References to beauty, pleasure, even joy appear infrequently and hesitantly--as if to say the word would destroy the magic--but they're scattered throughout the book. And he passes those feelings on to us not only by the scattershot yet strangely coherent unfolding of his many fields of interest, but also by the leisurely, unmannered charm of his prose.