Gustafsson's short novel Funeral Music for Freemasons (1983; English translation, 1987) tells the story of what has happened to three people who knew each other at the University of Uppsala in the 1950s. One is a poet who later works as a tour guide in Africa; another tries but fails to establish a career as an opera singer; and the third becomes a successful nuclear physicist at Harvard.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), besides being considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, is interesting because of its treatment of Benjy Compson, a severely mentally retarded individual who narrates the opening section. Benjy cannot talk and is eventually sent to an asylum. The novel as a whole traces the decline of an aristocratic Southern family from 1910 to 1928.

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937) is a somber...