Stories of Happy People

The ""happy people'' in these 10 short stories, originally published in Sweden in 1981, include a research engineer who is the only person in the town of Trummelsberg to know the latitude and longitude at which he lives and an elderly woman in a nursing home in Koping who struggles with strong memories and the imminence of death. In ``What Does Not Kill Us, Tends to Make Us Stronger,'' a Swedish professor of literature living in Houston contemplates ``what Saint-John Perse had called `time crests,' the experience of finding yourself in a civilization at the moment when it reaches its fullest development, when its most secret energies come into bloom.'' Exploring the 20th century time crest appears to be Gustafsson's goal; if at the end of these stories the reader is stirred but has the feeling that something has been left unanswered, it is only because the questions are so wise. (May)