We hear about the poor, the underprivileged, and the ghetto bound in our country: lives, so we hear, without hope. And we hear antidotal reBook Review
We hear about the poor, the underprivileged, and the ghetto bound in our country: lives, so we hear, without hope. And we hear antidotal reflections on hard work, free will, an education and personal responsibility as alternative agents to such hopelessness, suggestions typically made by the successful and privileged. There is truth in both statements - the latter offered as medicine to the former - and yet a giant abyss separates the two. Can the one without hope make it to the other side? Does he or she even want to enter into hope?
David Joy, the author, asks these fundamental questions in this debut novel. "It's the idea that for some people, life is set in stone. The people who would deny a statement like that are typically people of privilege." It is precisely because you do not have hope that you will turn away from it and face in the other direction with the abyss that separates you from salvation well behind you. That moving forward for you is entering further into the darkness. That to face hope, that to cross over to the other side can get you killed. This notion is central to David Joy's Where All Light Tends To Go:
There was never a moment in my life when I bought into the idea of light at the end of the tunnel. That old adage rests entirely on the direction being traveled. Out of darkness toward the light, folks might find some sort of hope in moving forward, some sort of anticipation for what awaits them. But, my entire life I'd been traveling in the opposite direction, and for those who move further into darkness, the light becomes a thing onto which we can only look back. Looking back slows you down. Looking back destroys focus. Looking back can get you killed.
[image]
Written in clear, often brutally unadorned and noir-like prose the story opens with Jacob McNeely seated at the top of a water tower that gives him a grand but solitary view of the Walter Middleton High School graduation ceremony far below. Having quit his education in 10th grade and having resigned himself to his king-pin, meth-dealing father's wishes, witness to a mother addicted to crank and mired in the hopelessness that have marked his life thus far, Jacob had come to witness his last vestige of joy: a young girl named Maggie who in Jacob's eyes represents the other side of the abyss. Her graduation ceremony, he knows, marks the point of her departure from his small town. She was set to traverse the abyss and climb out of it into hope. She would go to college and never come back.
Maggie was different. Even early on I remember being amazed by her. She'd always been something slippery that I could never seem to grasp, something buried deep in her that never let anything outside of herself decide what she would become. I'd always loved that about her. I'd always loved her.
And so begins Jacob's journey into further darkness. David Joy's debut novel is not light-hearted. It is dark and spirit deprived. Joy brings us a powerful story-line juxtaposing altruism and individualism, fate and free will, hope and hopelessness, peace and violence, with the beastly McNeely bloodlines leading Jacob unwillingly away from the good.
The crank-addicted mother:
My mother was the definition of rode hard and put up wet. Her eyes were bulbous, her face sunken in, just a thin layer of skin stretched tight over bones. Hair that was thick and brown in old pictures strung greasy down her neck now. She was absolutely pitiful.
Home:
Dogs were tied strategically across the property so that anyone making their way onto McNeely land would have to know a dance consisting of precisely thirty-four two-steps, fourteen ball changes, and a chasse to get anywhere near the door without being mauled.
The king-pin father:
By the time I was nine or ten, Daddy had me helping him break down big bags of crystal into grams, never anything smaller […] Birthdays brought on new responsibilities, and by the time I'd hit 10th grade, I was staying up half the night working for him. I went to school to keep child services off his back…
Deluged by family betrayals, greed, small-town corruption and horrific murders, Jacob gallantly tries to keep his head above water in spite of it all…until one final betrayal culminates in Jacob's decision to rest his laurels with either the darkness or the light. This novel is well worth the read. It moves quickly and keeps one's attention razor-honed. It's not a pretty story, though it has beauty within its pages. It is brutal but gives those who attempt to instill hope an understanding of why the hopeless have no choice but to move further into darkness.
David Joy was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte also happens to be my home town. The setting for his novel Where All Light Tends To Go also just a few hours from where I live. After leaving college, Joy taught English for a while. That was followed by a three year writing stint for a newspaper. During the writing of his debut novel David worked at the Cashiers historical society during the day and at the front desk of a fitness center at night. These days, he writes full time.
Given that debut novels often contain auto-biographical tidbits, Joy admits that Jacob's mistrust of people and his sense of impending doom are characteristics he shares with his leading character. That aside, Joy says: "[Jacob's] story however, is not mine." Appalachia to most is a tourist destination filled with beautiful landscapes, photos, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and lovely nestled towns shielded by the mountains. Reserved towns, quiet towns, places where we all wish to live in order to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life. But, there's an under belly to that world, aspects those who come here would rather not accknowledge. Joy admits he had to be careful in fictionalizing certain aspects of the town, given that Cashiers is a real town in North Carolina and that he didn't want to piss people off. I, for one, noticed that local reviews of the book (though not gushing, had to admit it was a great novel :-)
Joy says of his debut novel: "It is a story with which I'm familiar, having grown up around people who, very early on, were surrounded by drugs, and whose lives were pretty much determined form an early point. It wasn't on a level like Jacob's, but in Charlotte, North Carolina, there were a lot of kids I knew whose parents weren't around. They grew up on the streets where drugs and violence were everywhere. Drugs were the economic means of survival." But then again, that's Jacob's story. "In reality," Joy says, "I grew up in a privileged household in the sense my parents loved me, and would have done anything to ensure my success."
David Joy has completed his second novel (currently being edited) and it will be out sometime in 2016. Of this second novel, Joy says: "The novel is about three characters dealing with traumas from the past; the things we carry with us in this life; and how those things govern our decisions."
I for one, am looking forward to reading it....more
There was sunlight somewhere. It played in flickering moments of fancy through still air that hung heavy with dust suspended in sharply defBook Review
There was sunlight somewhere. It played in flickering moments of fancy through still air that hung heavy with dust suspended in sharply defined shafts. But there was fog, too, obscuring the light. Rolling in from the sea like a summer haar to obscure all illumination.
[image] The Crofters
Twitter conversation between myself and the author:
Me: Peter, if I enjoyed the Lewis Trilogy (a lot) what would you recommend as my next read of yours? Haven't read any of your other books.”
Twitter has its perks. Why wonder if you can get it directly from the horse's mouth? Especially after I established The Lewis Trilogy as my criteria. So, Entry Island was next on my list. Should you be interested, you can read my reviews of The Lewis Trilogy here: The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man and The Chessmen.
Peter May's Entry Island may well have been one of the more difficult books to write from an authorial perspective. To combine the historical, the romantic, the literary, the tragic and the mystery/detective genres into one novel while simultaneously suspending disbelief is a formidable task. Suspending disbelief is a constant struggle where the impossible is massaged by the author to the point where the reader a) admits it as possible, or b) allows disbelief because it's a great story, or c) puts the book down because it's a show stopper. Entry Island, for this reader, is a combination of a and b.
”They say that history is only written by the victors." He raises his head, drawing phlegm into his mouth, and spitting into the flow of water that tumbles dow the hill. "But I heard it from my father, who heard it from his. And now you're hearing it form me."
The story starts with investigator Sime Mackenzie who investigates a murder that seems by all accounts to be a mere formality. He travels to the murder scene, a destination that lay in the Gulf of St. Lawrence - to Entry Island. The evidence appears to indicate a crime of passion, until Detective Mackenzie meets the alleged perpetrator. The minute he lays eyes on her he is enveloped by a profound knowledge that he knows her, in spite of the fact he has never met her. Riddled with insomnia, Sime’s intellect and reasoning is assaulted by haunting images of a time and place 3,000 miles away. A history he, to all intents and purposes, should know nothing about.
And so we have Peter May's plunge into history and romance, weaving a tale of a crofter's son and a landlord's daughter across time. Entry Island, in this context, contains the story of the forced Scottish migration into Canada following the potato famine in 1846. Potato crops were blighted by a fungal disease and the crofters of the time were very dependent on it as food. Often working in appalling conditions, starved and severely weakened, the crofters were forcibly evicted by their landlords from the land on which they'd lived for generations. Fleets of ships were hired to migrate the Hebridean crofters to Canada to the point where today some 15% of Canada's population claims full or partial Scottish descent.
Using third person for present day events and first person (brilliant) for historical events - brilliant in that the use of first person lends immediacy to a story that took place over a hundred years ago - the author lends context to the cyclical nature of history: the adage being that indeed, history repeats itself. And it seems to do so until we get it right. And if anything, Entry Island is all about getting it right.
A warm sun slanted out of the autumn sky, transforming every tree into one of nature's stained-glass windows. The golds and yellows, oranges and reds of the fall leaves glowed vibrant and luminous, backlit by the angled rays of the sun, turning the forest into a cathedral of color. Sime had forgotten just how stunning these autumn colors could be, his senses dulled by years of gray city living."
As was the case with The Lewis Trilogy Peter May has a talent for invoking a sense of place, of people, and time using a distinctly literary sense. The descriptive passages emulate the context in which the characters find themselves. There is no liberal and excessive use of literary passages as we often find in modern novels to hide the absence of a story. For example: in the above paragraph Sime, the main character, experiences an almost spiritual reaction to nature as he nears a resolution to both the crime he is investigating as well as a resolution to the psychological depression that has haunted him into permanent insomnia. It is experienced by the reader as a spiritual and glorious waterfall of colors in a seemingly innocuous descriptive paragraph. But make no mistake. Everything in a May novel fore-spells the events taking place.
He felt, too, a strong sense of grief. He had lived through passionate moments in the skin of his ancestor. In his dream he had sacrificed everything to try to be with his Ciorstaidh. And here she lay, dead in the earth, as she had done for a very, very long time. He stood up quickly. Impossible, he knew, to tell tears from rain.
History, in its clinical detachment, often harbors the utmost cruelty and overwhelming empathy and passion harbored within the humans who make up such a history. Peter May, in this book, captures that magnificent journey towards a final resolution in which man is tested against time, must make decisions about fate and his capacity for volition, and that such a man must come face to face with the struggle that makes his existence worth every second it is lived.
---------------------------------------------------- About the author
[image] Peter May
Peter May has a prolific career in writing, starting out at the age of 21 when he won the Scottish Journalist of the Year Award. But, Peter's childhood dream was to be a novelist and that dream was accomplished at the young age of 26. That novel was to become a major BBC television drama series and that temporarily changed the direction of his writing career as he became one of Scotland's most prolific and popular TV dramatists.
With the approach of the new millennium May quit television and returned to his first love: novels. What is particularly interesting is the meticulous research May implements for his novels. For example, Peter spent 5 years on The Isle of Lewis, befriending its inhabitants and photographing the island and inhabitants as research for his novel The Blackhouse.He embarked on a series of thrillers which took him half-way across the world, to the land of China. There he made contacts and gained unprecedented access to the forensic science set ions of Beijing and Shanghai police forces and studied the work of Chinese detectives and pathologists. His efforts won him Elle Magazine's Best Crime Novel in 2005 and the Prix Polar International in 2008. His China thrillers feature Beijing detective Li Yan and a Forensic pathologist from Chicago, Margaret Campbell. China even made him an honorary member of their Chinese Crime Writer's Association.
There's another MacLeod hero featured in his books. Enter Enzo MacLeod, a cold cases crime series set in France where the author lives.
As a visitor myself to Second Life, I find it especially interesting that in researching his setting for the 2010 thriller Virtually DeadPeter May setup a virtual detective agency in Second Life, created his own avatar, Fick Faulds, and explored the metaverse: handling real Second Life investigations from paying clients (Second Life has its own denomination and yeah, it takes a credit card to convert dollars into their currency).
Next came the Lewis trilogy. Interestingly enough, the British Isles were not impressed and all the major publishing houses (to their current dismay) rejected to publish his first in the series: The Balckhouse. It was France that hailed it as a masterpiece and it was in France that it was fist published which led to the Prix des Lecteurs and the world's biggest adjudicated readers' prizes, the Prix Cezam. Finally, an upstart publishing house in the UK (Quercus) published The Blackbook and the rest is history. The Lewis Series became an instant best-seller in the UK, France if not worldwide and finally landed on US shores to win the Barry Award for Best Mystery Novel in 2013.
Recent novels have fixed Peter May's legacy as one of the finest mystery and historical writers of our time. This author is worth every second you spend reading him. ...more
Third in The Lewis Trilogy, The Chessmen brings us to the conclusion of the trilogy. This time, the crime bears some resemblance to the TheBook Review
Third in The Lewis Trilogy, The Chessmen brings us to the conclusion of the trilogy. This time, the crime bears some resemblance to the The Lewis Man, in that a cold case appears to have been unearthed as a small airplane bearing the body of a murdered musician is uncovered from a Lewis Island loch (lake) some seventeen years later.
What struck me in this reading as well as the previous novels is May's dedication to the art of writing a novel. The man spent five years on the island in order to write his trilogy, an outsider in a world where inhabitants would be suspicious of anyone inquiring into their lives (see links below pointing to some videos of that endeavor). This dedication comes across quite clearly in the beautiful passages that describe the Hebrides. There's an art to writing descriptive passages, to write them so that readers not familiar with the geography can quite clearly envision something with which they are not familiar and infuse such passages with delicate descriptions mirroring plot events to come. It comes across in the deep characterization and psychological motivations that spark the events in the novels so that the reader is mesmerized and being prepared (like food in a slow cooker) for the climactic ending. Masterful story-telling, in my opinion.
I've read some reviews where bringing in unknown characters, former friends of Fin's, disconcerted some readers as they'd have preferred the characters mentioned in the first two in the trilogy. This concept of character focus, according to the author, was a deliberate move as he wanted to focus the second and third in the trilogy on other persons from Fin's life, to move the focus away from Fin's story as it were while maintaining his narrative voice. To accomplish this, I've noted Peter May's use of cold cases to unearth these formerly unknown childhood strings into Fin's life as each cold case places the focus on a different set of characters from Fin's life. Personally, this did not bother me at all. On the contrary, I thought it an excellent authorial device. Lewis Island and subsequent Hebrides islands, though a bubble set apart from the rest of the world, nevertheless are inhabited by a substantial number of people. Couple that with Fin's knowledge of a lot of it, to have introduced characters in previous books that were not directly tied to the crime would have been to needlessly introduce insignificant details that would have detracted, rather than add to the novels in question. Whistler for example, a significant character in this novel, had no close ties to Artrair the main adversary in The Blackhouse, nor had he close ties to the characters in the second, given his solitary life. Primary characters throughout the three novels remain, of course, part of this novel.
I'm happy with this being a trilogy. All good things must come to an end (there are some series authors that might learn from this). I will be interested to see how I'll receive some of May's other books as I intend to read them. With some trepidation, I might add. Too often it is the case that authors known for an excellent series fall flat when attempting something else. We'll see.
Here are some links to videos you might be interested in after reading this trilogy along with some samples of Gaelic music. I do not recommend viewing these before a reading, as inevitably you will lose some of the magic in May's descriptive prose with preconceived notions because of having viewed the videos first. I’ve also included the link to a video from which May took his characterization of the formidable “Whistler”.
The Lewis Man Trilogy is a triumvirate of crime novels coalescing the life of Fin Macleod, an Edinburgh Scottish policeman, who upon his return to the island of his birth some eighteen years later discovers he has in many ways never left Lewis Island. If you are so inclined to pick up this crime series be prepared for an extraordinary journey into Gealic culture: its remoteness from mainland life, its Gaelic music, customs, lifestyles, religion, and its fascinating look into the Hebrides islands' psychology and people.
Haunting in its retrospective, the trilogy moves its readers into the harsh conditions that encompass Fin's youth growing up on Lewis Island and onward into his life as as a policeman who answers the call of the Hebrides where his Gaelic roots make him the obvious guy for the job to uncover the truth behind a heinous murder that has taken place on Lewis Island. The Blackhouse marks the return of Fin MacLeod to his birthplace, a move marked with significant trepidation on Fin's part. He never intended such a return, did not wish it, were it not for suspicious similarities to a murder he was investigating in Edinburgh. What follows is an intricate exposition across three books where the personal reasons of why Fin MacLeod left the island and refused to return to it are studied and laid bare for Peter May’s readers.
The trilogy encompasses three crimes, each the focus of its respective novel. Briefly, the first involves the discovery of a disemboweled man hanging from the rafters of a boat house on Lewis Island. The second focuses on the discovery of a young man found pickled and preserved in the bogs some fifty years later, again on Lewis Island. The third takes place when a loch (lake) on Lewis Island suddenly drains itself of all water only to reveal a long submerged airplane containing the body of a famous Gaelic musician who had mysteriously disappeared some seventeen years earlier.
Critical to an understanding of the trilogy is that the Hebrides is presented as a sort of bubble in which nothing changes. It is to this bubble that Fin, who was determined to escape the harsh island life to go to university in Glasgow, returns eighteen years later in the first of the triumvirate novels. Marked with tragedy, Fin’s life orbits forward by this very return to his roots. The first centers itself around Fin MacLeod, the second and third novels though told from Fin’s perspective center themselves on the characters from Fin’s childhood, characters who continue to live unchanged within the bubble. Fin, no longer a policeman but with the heart of an inspector, slowly unravels the mysteries in full concert with his boyhood friends, lovers and foes. The powerful psychology of its characters, the delicate tapestry and ethnographic study of the Hebrides, the beautiful and descriptive passages that open the imagination of its readers, and the incredible story that is unveiled throughout the three novels make this trilogy one of the best I’ve read. ...more
Second in The Lewis Trilogy, Peter May once again invites his readers to explore the islands known as the Hebrides, off Scottland. The storBook Review
Second in The Lewis Trilogy, Peter May once again invites his readers to explore the islands known as the Hebrides, off Scottland. The story continues with Fin MacLeod's fascinating story. We got to know Fin in May's spectacular first in the trilogy: The Blackhouse as he once again returns to Lewis Island in search of his Gaelic roots. You can find my review of that novel here.
I've become a huge fan of Peter May's work in this trilogy for several reasons. First: I find his study of the Hebrides islands to be an irresistible journey into ethnography written in a way so as to capture the attention of the reader. And, capture it in a way that a straight-forward ethnographic study will not. The reader is invested into learning more of the Gaelic culture as a means to understand the central character, Fin MacLeod, as well as the crime that has taken place. This is done in such an original and captivating manner that the reader does not even realize the amount of information he or she takes in as Fin attempts to solve the Lewis riddle. Moreover, the information is being passed onto the reader using exquisite descriptive passages that serve more than one purpose: yes, the passages are seen as descriptive but they are also deceptively laden with clues as to plot, character, and motivation.
Second: I am always cognizant of what type of hero the author chooses for his main character. Does the author create a malevolent and torn hero (or anti-hero), or does he subscribe to a more Romantic Realism style, where the hero is a good guy that wins in the end? As an example of the first, we might think of the fabulous Harry Hole, the hero created by author Jo Nesbo whose flaws contribute as much to the story as anything else. As to the second, we can think of the 40 or more novels by author Dick Francis where we can relish in a true admiration for the hero. The Lewis Trilogy is an example of the latter. What I feel for Fin MacLeod is the same as what I would feel for, let's say Sid Halley, one of the recurring heroes in the Francis series (Dick Francis, by the way, is my favorite of all authors I've read within the genre). A Francis hero is personable, like able, full of integrity, rational, non-violent but delivers swift justice using his mind rather than physical force.
Third: Plot, for me, is essential. Plot involves the causations and consequences of human choices made based on the values they hold. Choice, free will, is specifically a human characteristic and along with conceptualization contributes in large part as to what makes us human. To omit plot from a fictional novel that involves people is like severing the humanity of what is being expressed, let alone what I derive from reading it. Plot is the exposition of volition. I know meta-fiction enthusiasts will scoff at this preference of mine, but, as I said, it is my personal opinion and merely addresses what it is that I find pleasurable in my reading and in large part it is what moves me in the direction of crime novels where plot is tantamount. In this regard, Peter May is a master story teller. Woven into the fabric of its ethnography, the Hebrides islands, the peat and crofts that pervade the islands, its people and Gaelic culture, and within the fabric of the novel's descriptive passages is a delicate but strong plot line that moves the reader from chapter to chapter. Peter May understands values and what they mean to the choices people make, especially as that pertains to the crime: to end another human life for all the wrong reasons.
What Fin encounters upon his return to Lewis Island is what some might call a cold case, at least fifty years old. A young man is found in the bogs, perfectly preserved by the acidity of the peat, pickled so to speak. Who is it? Why did he die? And who killed him? So, the first hurdle for the author Peter May might have been this: "Cold cases aren't normally very interesting. So, how do I make this story relevant to a current day Fin MacLeod?" And, he might have thought: "How do I tell this story in such a way that my readers become invested in the actors living 50 years ago?" Not only that, but May further decides to add another complication by making one of the main characters as a person suffering from dementia. And so he might have mused, “How to tell this story if one of my main characters can’t remember anything?” Through his brilliant use of First person vs. Third person, not only does the author create the effortless move between yesterday and today, but he also resolves the issue of a character’s dementia.
Today, I started The Chessmen, third in the Lewis Trilogy. I’ll report back on that one when I’m done with it. I highly recommend this trilogy for any fan of Tartan crime.
About the author
[image] Peter May
Peter May has a prolific career in writing, starting out at the age of 21 when he won the Scottish Journalist of the Year Award. But, Peter's childhood dream was to be a novelist and that dream was accomplished at the young age of 26. That novel was to become a major BBC television drama series and that temporarily changed the direction of his writing career as he became one of Scotland's most prolific and popular TV dramatists.
With the approach of the new millennium May quit television and returned to his first love: novels. What is particularly interesting is the meticulous research May implements for his novels. For example, Peter spent 5 years on The Isle of Lewis, befriending its inhabitants and photographing the island and inhabitants as research for his novel The Blackhouse.He embarked on a series of thrillers which took him half-way across the world, to the land of China. There he made contacts and gained unprecedented access to the forensic science set ions of Beijing and Shanghai police forces and studied the work of Chinese detectives and pathologists. His efforts won him Elle Magazine's Best Crime Novel in 2005 and the Prix Polar International in 2008. His China thrillers feature Beijing detective Li Yan and a Forensic pathologist from Chicago, Margaret Campbell. China even made him an honorary member of their Chinese Crime Writer's Association.
There's another MacLeod hero featured in his books. Enter Enzo MacLeod, a cold cases crime series set in France where the author lives.
As a visitor myself to Second Life, I find it especially interesting that in researching his setting for the 2010 thriller Virtually Dead Peter May setup a virtual detective agency in Second Life, created his own avatar, Fick Faulds, and explored the metaverse: handling real Second Life investigations from paying clients (Second Life has its own denomination and yeah, it takes a credit card to convert dollars into their currency).
Next came the Lewis trilogy. Interestingly enough, the British Isles were not impressed and all the major publishing houses (to their current dismay) rejected to publish his first in the series: The Blackhouse. It was France that hailed it as a masterpiece and it was in France that it was fist published which led to the Prix des Lecteurs and the world's biggest adjudicated readers' prizes, the Prix Cezam. Finally, an upstart publishing house in the UK (Quercus) published The Blackbook and the rest is history. The Lewis Series became an instant best-seller in the UK, France if not worldwide and finally landed on US shores to win the Barry Award for Best Mystery Novel in 2013....more
Most of my GR friends know that I review crime novels and within those reviews there are a lot of Scandi crimes. It isn't that I don't reaBook Review
Most of my GR friends know that I review crime novels and within those reviews there are a lot of Scandi crimes. It isn't that I don't read other genres, non-fiction, or other books. I do. I like to stay informed and inform my own opinion from what is opined elsewhere: whether that be prose or poetry, journalism or literature, film or television, fact or fiction, as well as the scholarly and the unscholarly. But when it comes to reviewing fiction here on GR? I do crime. Particularly Scandi crime because in general these authors like to use the vehicle to inform on psychological, social and political issues. What would the book The The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo be without Lisbeth Salander! And how powerful is that character were it not for Larsson's focus on the Swedish foster care system and sexual abuse? Where would Anne Holt’s novels be without the psychological emphasis on characterization, human sexuality and the failures of the Norwegian legal system?
A while ago, a GR friend of mine wrote me and recommended a book to me. She is aware of my penchant for Nordic crime, knew this wasn't a book I would normally review - A Man Called Ove is not a crime story - but insisted I should read this, quite passionately, I might add. Here is where to go if you are interested in her in-depth and lovely review.
It took me a while to get to reading this book. It sat on my Kindle and I kept skipping it for crime novels, some good, some not ( did I mention I'm hopelessly behind in my reviews?) or reading political blogs. And then finally I exhausted everything else on my Kindle. And there it was: A Man Called Ove; my friend's recommendation; stubborn and alone; the only one left on my list. I opened it on my Kindle with a healthy dose of curiosity and a certain measure of guilt for not getting to this sooner.
Before I started reading, I took a quick look at the GR stats for this one. It’s not often that a book on GR gets a 4.31 star rating (out of 10,411 readers). I read a few of the reviews and quickly saw that essentially people liked the book for similar reasons: they could laugh at, they could feel sad for, they could hate, and they could love a man called Ove, a crusty, ill-tempered old man (Note: I did not use the word “curmudgeon”!) :-)
And so I began reading. By the way, this book’s an easy read, you can put it down often and jump right back into it. The structure is one of short chapters that take you to the present and back in time without missing a beat. Being of similar age to Ove I was transfixed from the start by Ove’s observations on Swedish society (not so dissimilar from our own) as seen through the lens of a man entering old age. I found it delightful to read a Scandi book with obvious comical insights that you don’t often see in Scandi crime novels which tend to be more cold and dispiriting. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think this is the reason my friend wanted me to read this book.
It did not escape me that this book contains a wealth of commentary on what we have gained and subsequently lost in today’s society. Beneath the hilarity of Ove’s adventures lies a deep sadness that captures the imagination of the reader as they too feel a measure of loss. If you are a young reader, you are confronted with Ove’s world with which you are unfamiliar, a world in which values and principles are indisputable and ingrained in concrete: a world that is black and white. Clearly, for this young reader this is the comic antithesis of the world in which he or she lives in today: a world of relativity, subjectivism, and where facts are made malleable enough to support one’s view of it. If you are an older reader, as I am, you are confronted by a time that you too have been fortunate enough to witness, a time long gone. For this reader, the comic and tragic mesh together within Ove’s escapades and evoke a certain sense of sadness brilliantly captured by the author’s prose.
Throughout the course of the novel what every reader eventually experiences is a metamorphosis where in the beginning one thoroughly dislikes Ove - his crustiness, his seeming rude manner, his apparent disdain for mankind - only to eventually come to feel a deep compassion and love for this man.
Parvaneh, who has moved into Ove’s neighborhood and who is an Iranian woman married to an IT professional has set her sights on the thoroughly ill-tempered Ove as being a worthy cause. Like Ove’s deceased wife whom friends thought it unwise of her to marry the dogged Ove, Parvaneh sees something in Ove that is priceless. Ove becomes Parvaneh’s mission in life, as is exemplified in the following passage where she accompanies Ove to the doctor, who says:
”Ove has a heart problem…” he begins in an anodyne voice, following this up with a series of terms that no human being with less than ten years of medical training or an entirely unhealthy addiction to certain television series could ever be expected to understand.
When Parvaneh gives him a look studded with a long line of question marks and exclamation marks, the doctor sighs again in that way young doctors with glasses and plastic slippers and a stick up their ass often do when confronted by people who do not even have the common decency to attend medical school before they come to the hospital.
“His heart is too big,” the doctor states crassly.
Parvaneh stares blankly at him for a very long time. And then she looks at Ove in the bed, in a very searching way. And then she looks at the doctor again as if she’s waiting for him to throw out his arms and start making jazzy movements with his fingers and crying out: “Only joking!”
And when he doesn’t do this she starts to laugh. First it’s more like a cough, then as if she’s holding back a sneeze, and before long it’s a long, sustained, raucous bout of giggling. She holds on to the side of the bed, waves her hand in front of her face as if to fan herself into stopping, but it doesn’t help. And then at last it turns into one loud, long-drawn belly laugh that bursts out of the room and makes the nurses in the corridor stick their heads through the door and ask in wonder, “What’s going on here?”
“You see what I have to put up with?” Ove hisses wearily at the doctor, rolling his eyes while Parvaneh, overwhelmed by hysterics, buries her face in one of the pillows.
Parvaneh, of course, is embracing the juxtaposition presented throughout the book. In spite of the news that Ove suffers from a serious heart condition, it does not escape her that the prognosis is also exactly what she loves about Ove: that he has a huge heart, a heart of gold.
Read this book. Embrace that comedy and tragedy can indeed be intertwined in a thoroughly heartfelt way. Read A Man Called Ove and relish what this book provides: tears and peals of laughter all at once....more
We all form connections and we break them. We build friendships. Some of us are on teams at work only to get displaced and join a differenBook Review:
We all form connections and we break them. We build friendships. Some of us are on teams at work only to get displaced and join a different team. We travel to distant lands and leave such lands and the people in it. We have families and children, this sacred space we rarely leave until death. We marry and sometimes we divorce a beloved. We become fans of successful artists, perhaps a musician, a singer/songwriter or a Maxfield Parrish, or a Goya, only to feel our inner landscape has changed as do our tastes. We form connections with strangers using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram where the sheer volume of activity makes the absence of one such connection virtually unnoticeable. And then we form connections with characters on the television and in books because they reflect an essence that already exists in our own being. We are anxious to not have them end as they all must. Truth is we do not want to be left without our connections because they, more than anything else, form the fabric of our lives. It is through connections that we have a semblance of immortality.
And still, we face the end of our existence alone no matter what connections were made or remain. I am reminded of Lee Child’s fictional character Jack Reacher where in the series review I mention:
”Jack seems to implicitly understand that he is a unique animal/human running around on this planet and that in spite of social conventions, cultural trappings, and whatever conventions and abstractions we allow into our mind in order to alleviate this core fact of our singularity (and solitude)...the truth of it is not something Mr. Reacher denies. Secretly, we only wish we could face life alone as Reacher does.”
Humanity has devoted many religious institutions, dogma, if not philosophical thought to this problem of human existence and the end of it, more as a means to assuage our fear of it as opposed to providing an actual answer. And to have this fear extinguished, or not, the one consistent rope to which we cling to is our identity, our individual accomplishments. We are someone as opposed to someone else. Our character, our personality, our ID cannot be erased and is the only connection that remains. On our death bed, at least we are in the company of ourselves.
Or is this not true? Can even this last connection be taken away from us?
Henning Mankel, in this the last of the Kurt Wallander novels, gives us the unpleasant answer. And in a sense, perhaps The Troubled Man is the most terrifying of all the Kurt Wallander novels, especially if you’ve established a clear connection to this brooding, emphatic man. It is a sad and intriguing story in which the reader will experience a profound sense of rejection of what is proposed by the author. That to end this series, Kurt is not killed as a policeman. He is not shelved to a retired policeman’s life, as a father and grandfather with a family that surrounds him. No. Mankell has something far more devious in mind for Kurt’s retirement.
Mankell kills Wallander and lets him live.
I will miss him.
----------------------------------------------- Series Review Henning Mankell is an internationally known Swedish crime writer known mostly for this fictional character Kurt Wallander. He is married to Eva Bergman.
[image] Henning Mankell - Author
It might be said that the fall of communism and the consequent increase in Swedish immigration and asylum seekers has been the engine that drives much of Swedish crime fiction. Mankell's social conscience, his cool attitude towards nationalism and intolerance is largely a result of the writer's commitment to helping the disadvantaged (see his theater work in Africa). In this vein, readers might be interested in his stand-alone novel Kennedy's Brain a thriller set in Africa and inspired by the AIDS epidemic (Mankell often traveled to Africa to help third world populations); or read his The Eye of the Leopard, a haunting novel juxtaposing a man's coming of age in Sweden and his life in Zambia.
Mankell's love of Africa, his theater work on that continent, and his exploits in helping the disadvantaged is not generally known by his American readers. In fact, an international news story that has largely gone unnoticed is that while the world watched as Israeli soldiers captured ships attempting to break the Gaza blockade, few people are aware that among the prisoners of the Israelis was one of the world's most successful and acclaimed writers: Henning Mankell.
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It is no exaggeration when I say that Henning Mankell is by far one of the most successful writers in Scandinavia, especially in his own country of Sweden. The Nordic weather, cold to the bones, drives its populace indoors for much of the year where cuddling up to read the latest in crime fiction is a national pastime.
For many GR readers who have been introduced to Kurt Wallander it is interesting to note that ultimately the success of bringing Mankell to English speaking audiences only came after bringing in the same production company responsible for Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy for the wildly popular BBC version starring Kenneth Branagh. Viewers had no problem with an anglicized version of Mankell's work, an English speaking cast set down in a genuine Swedish countryside. Of course, to those fans thoroughly familiar with Mankell's work, it is the Swedish televised version that is found to be a more accurately portrayal of Mankell's novels...not the British, sensationalized version. And there's a reason for that.
Henning's prose is straightforward, organized, written mostly in linear fashion, a straightforward contract with the reader. It is largely quantified as police procedural work. The work of men who are dogged and patient to a fault. Kurt Wallander, the hero in Mankell's novels, is the alter ego of his creator: a lonely man, a dogged policeman, a flawed hero, out of shape, suffering from headaches and diabetes, and possessing a scarred soul. Understandably so and if some of the GR reviews are an indication; like his famous father-in-law Ingmar Bergman, Mankell is from a country noted for its Nordic gloom. But before you make the assumption that this is yet another addition to the somberness and darkness that characterizes Nordic writing Mankell often confounds this cliche with guarded optimism and passages crammed with humanity (for Mankell, this is true both personally and professionally as a writer).
As Americans we often think of Sweden as possessing an very open attitude towards sex and that this is in marked contrast (or perhaps reprieve) to the somber attitudes of its populace. But this is a view that often confounds Swedish people. The idea of Nordic carnality is notably absent in Mankell's work, as much a statement of its erroneous perception (Swedes do not see themselves as part of any sexual revolution at all) and in the case of Mankell ironic because the film director most responsible for advancing these explicit sexual parameters (for his time) was his own father-in-law the great Ingmar Bergman. In a world where Bergman moves in a universe where characters are dark, violent, extreme and aggressive - take note that the ultimate root of this bloody death and ennui lies in the Norse and Icelandic Viking sagas of Scandinavian history - that dark, somber view ascribed to both Mankell and Bergman's work was often a topic of intense jovial interest between these two artists.
For any reader of Nordic crime fiction, Henning Mankell is an immensely popular and staple read.
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