The Fly King Speaks

So I’m reading The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg, a slim book by a writer I’ve never heard of, and I’m riveted for reasons I can’t explain. I honestly have no idea what the book is about. The author begins by talking about the time he worked as a prop man for a Swedish stage production of Sam Shepard’s Curse of Starving Class, amazed that one of the actors could urinate on stage every night on command, as the script calls for.

The author moves to a tiny Swedish island and learns his real talents lay with collecting flies that hover around flowers. “That’s a fate that takes some getting used to,” he admits. He says he’s an entomologist but really more of a writer, although he’s not entirely sure what his story is about. “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 the landscape.”

Then he goes into a rhapsodic passage about a Finnish entomologist who investigated insect wing frequencies. I learn a “pooter” is a plastic tube that