If you look over the list of Nobel Prize winners for literature, it’s amazing how many vowels you’ll find, and how few of those unpronounceable names you’ll recognize. I haven’t seen so many umlauts since the Huskers were passing out promos at the hardcore show at Fender’s in Long Beach, and I came back from that with a broken nose and a strange sense of euphoria. But I digress. Every now and again, I get a momentary inspiration to check out some of those foreign “greats,” and usually find myself waking up on the couch with the book splayed across my chest and dark spittle crusting at both sides of my mouth. Mojo usually sounds like a pretty good alternative at that point.

Not so, however, with this week’s try, Par (umlaut city!) Lagerkvist’s Barabbas, the story of the man who, allegedly, when Pilate asked the crowd of screaming Jews whom they would free, they chose instead of Christ. For some, Christian anti-Semitism is born here, as the blame for crucifixion shifts from the Romans to the Jews. It’s Mel Gibson’s favorite Christmas story. His kids get a big kick out of it. Anyway, Lagerkvist, who won the Nobel in 1951 after publishing this short novel/parable in 1950, evidently struggled with faith throughout his life and delivers this brief, imaginative post-exoneration life for the man Christians believed should have died instead of JC. Barabbas, who secretly witnesses Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha and sees the skies turn black when he finally dies on the cross, tries and fails his whole life to truly believe. We follow him back from that scene to the bed of his fat lover, who wallows in his body and takes pleasure in his emotional apathy. We see his return to the cave of his fellow bandits, who find him so changed and so strange that they secretly plot to kill him before he disappears to their great relief. We see him enslaved and then chained to a true believer, whose childlike innocence and purity of belief torment the faithless Barabbas. And finally we see him exuberantly join in the burning of Rome, which he mistakenly believes is Christ bringing an end to the world and delivering the kingdom. In prison awaiting execution, he's offered one last chance at salvation, and the next day's crucifixion will determine his final choice.

You can read this on a number of levels, and I’m guessing that both devout Christians and godless existentialists could swing a thesis out of it. I’m also guessing that’s Lagerkvist's intent. It’s a haunting work that’s effecting in indefinable ways, so if you want something you can read in an afternoon that allows you to ponder some of the big questions without shoving them didactically down your throat, head for this dark, cobblestoned Swedish street.