During this period, he also traveled extensively, among other places to Australia, Singapore, Japan, Israel, and the United States.
John Updike described Gustafsson as "the enviably ideal conferee, a red‑bearded fish never out of water, loving books, ideas, and discourse equally, and everywhere adept.
[6] In May 2009, Lars Gustafsson declared that he would vote for the Pirate Party in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
[7][8] However, in August 2010 he left the Pirate Party in protest of its cooperation with the WikiLeaks portal, which he accused of delivering death lists for the Taliban.
By 1990, he had already received a dozen major literary awards including the Prix européen de l'essai Charles-Veillon [fr] in 1983, Una Vita per la Letteratura in 1989, as well as the Swedish Bellman Prize in 1990.
Gustafsson's novels and poetry have been translated into fifteen languages, the most often translated being the novels The Death of a Beekeeper (En biodlares död), Bernard Foy's Third Castling (Bernard Foys tredje rockad), and Afternoon of a Tiler (En kakelsättares eftermiddag).
Harold Bloom includes Gustafsson in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994, p. 557).
The book's innovative structure allows Gustafsson to explore identity through its expression in a variety of forms: imagination, memory and even the mundane details of life.
"[14] The novel was re-published in 1984 as the last in a five-novel sequence Sprickorna i muren (The Cracks in the Wall), the other volumes being Herr Gustafsson själv, Yllet, Familjefesten, and Sigismund.
The book takes place 40,000 years into the future, when humans are extinct and the galaxy is populated by artificial intelligences.
"[13] In 2003, Yllet, the second novel in The Cracks in the Wall (Sprickorna i Muren) series was made into a feature film, directed by Jimmy Karlsson and starring Magnus Krepper.
[17] While the problem of identity has been the defining theme of Gustafsson's writings, his social criticism often vexed the Swedish cultural elite.