Döda Fåglar Flyger Inte. Om gränser; för det mänskliga. (Dead birds do not fly. On limits of the humane.): Else-Britt Kjellqvist. Stockholm:  Carlssons, 2000.

A young man once asked the Finnish novelist, Erno Paasilinna: “Tell me how to be a novelist”. The answer to the serious question was: “One must lead a novelist's life.” Else-Britt Kjellqvist has led the life of a novelist, but she is an analyst too, and a poet. A tool common to all those three vocations is language. Else-Britt's language is Swedish. In her latest book, she describes how arduous a task it was for her to find her tool. She had to set out on the enormous task of reading. Her main interest seems to be the human existence and especially the conditions when hope is in danger of fading away.

Kjellqvist was anxious to grasp what others have experienced when caught in their despair. She has got her own too; despair is an issue she really knows, and when going down to the depths of suffering described by other writers, she could compare their experiences to her own, and she found the words for which she had first embarked upon her journey. The tool received its shape in her hands and now she was able to express what she really felt. When Else-Britt Kjellqvist describes the paths of despair in human existence, at the same time, she invites the reader to share her gratitude over her miracle: her finding of a personal language.

In Döda fåglar flyger inte, the fragments of the author's own story and the ones of others are interlaced so that when I closed the book they merged in my mind to one single experience, and I got an odd feeling: I knew this kind of book had always been and perhaps I had been a co-writer of it.

In the book's subtitle, the author promises to describe the border districts of humanity. To accomplish this task she needs her rich life experience, her own analysis, her practice as an analyst, her ongoing self-analysis and over 160 references to others' experiences of what humanity is and what the signposts are when that which makes us separate human beings is near to disappearing or has disappeared.

Only a psychoanalyst can compile a book like this,