. . . and another critic on Stieg Larsson

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio, also thinks highly of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

. . . one of the most intriguing aspects of hard-boiled history is how the form has been enthusiastically embraced by writers outside of the United States as a literary tool to explore the skeletons buried deep in their own particular patches of the world. In fact, for the past decade or so, Sweden has been a popular pick for crime capital of the literary world, thanks to Henning Mankell and his fellow practitioners of noir on ice.

The newest name in mystery to emerge out of the frozen north is that of the late Stieg Larsson. His debut novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was a blockbuster when it was published in Europe, selling an estimated 2 million copies. Now, an English language version, translated by Reg Keeland, has just been published here.

A veteran mystery reader could spot the clues to this novel’s runaway popularity as easily as Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, spotted that purloined letter. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a super-smart amalgam of the corporate corruption tale, legal thriller and dysfunctional-family psychological suspense story. It’s witty, wrenchingly violent in a few isolated passages and unflinching in its commonsense feminist social commentary.

The social vulnerability of women is the underlying Mystery with a capital “M” here; specifically the abuse — psychological and sexual — that’s perpetrated against young and dependent women.

She also notes that it’s not all noir – there’s a classic “locked room” feel to the mystery that kicks it all off. But she predicts it’s Lisabeth Salander who will really grab the reader’s imagination.

Corrigan, incidentally, is the author of a memoir in books – Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. A title that many of us can relate to.  Thanks to my 4MA friend Lourdes for catching this radio review.

from the Book Bench

A number of New Yorker writers warm the Book Bench, an online column about books and the book business. Several of them recently discussed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Reading it is a little like listening in on a book group disucssion, minus the cookies or wine and cheese. But do beware – here there be spoilers.

Thanks to Sarah Weinman for the tip.

the saga continues

Doug Johnstone of the Times interviews Arnaldur Indridason as Arctic Chill hits the stores and as the Icelandic film version of Jar City is released in the UK. Interestingly, Arndaldur says there was no crime fiction tradition in Iceland until his massively popular series was published, and that the genre was considered trashy. And yet he feels his writing is part of Iceland’s most celebrated literary tradition.

The Erlendur novels are certainly cinematic, but there is also a sparseness and a deadly dry sense of humour that make them distinctly Icelandic, both traits found in the most famous Icelandic literature of all. “I am heavily influenced by the Icelandic sagas,” he admits. “The sagas are huge stories of families and events, murder and mayhem, and they were written on rare cowskin so they had to be very concise. They don’t use two words when one will do, and I take my cue from that.”

something to look forward to

That amazing perpetuum mobile of European crime fiction, Karen Meek, has added three titles to her list of forthcoming Scandinavian crime fiction in English translation. What a lot to look forward to – More from Alvtegen, Nesbo, Nesser, and Stieg Larsson, among others.

The greatest surprise for me is the introduction of a work of psychological suspense by Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver, being released for the first time in English by a small UK publisher – Sort of Books. They have published a number of Jansson’s books – short stories, a new translation of a Moomin children’s book, and a novel.

I’m not surprised that Jansson could write psychological suspense. Moomin Valley was a part of my childhood, and the mix of whimsical and psychologically complex characters living there was an early introduction to Scandinavian culture, along with Pippi Longstocking. Though they are mostly lighthearted, there was a definite undercurrent of emotional complexity among those trolls, particularly in the darnkness of winter. Tove Jansson, a Finnish writer and illustrator, began writing her Moomin books during World War II. I think I still have copies of Finn Family Moomintroll and Moominland Midwinter somewhere on my bookshelves.

If you are ever in Tampere, you can visit the Moomin museum in the basement of the public library. Even if you aren’t interested in Moomins, be sure to visit the library – it’s an amazing work of architecture, and (when I visited it many years ago) the only library I’d ever been in that served ice cream.

defining genres

Michael Grove writes in the Times that used bookshops can reveal what is really going on in a country. And for Scandinavia and the UK, it’s in the blood. Viking blood, to be precise.

The ability of second-hand bookshops to open a window on to a place’s soul isn’t restricted to England. In Stockholm last week I stumbled into a couple (my wife is convinced that I could find second-hand bookshops in Amazonia or Antarctica) and was surprised by what they revealed. The largest amount of space devoted to a single author – and it was huge in both shops – wasn’t there for Strindberg or some other Scandinavian national hero.

No, the author who seemed to have the greatest purchase on the Swedish soul was Agatha Christie. There were yards of Olde English whodunnitry stretching far further into the recesses of the shop than any collection of bleak Nordic dramaturgy.

Indeed, the deeper I delved, the more Swedish and English literary tastes seemed to intertwine. For both countries the detective novel is the defining national genre. The Swedish authors who succeed abroad, and are devoured most energetically at home, are the crimewriter Henning Mankell and the husband-and-wife detective novelists Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and Sjowall/Walloo’s Martin Beck, like P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, or Miss Marple, Campion, Wimsey or Rebus, are the fictional creations who define a nation.

I must say, my head hurts trying to figure out how Miss Marple currently defines the UK, or how Viking blood might have entered into it, but I digress . . . He goes on to characterize other country’s national genres, sadly missing out on explaining what Fred Vargas tells us about France, only being defeated in his quest when he comes to the US, with a literary output “so rich, so plural, so prodigious that there is no way that even a determined pigeon-holer like me can shrinkwrap it into one package.”

The rest is a scathing critique of a panel of American writers coming to London who are not tough enough on terrorism and too tough of George Bush. Well, he is a conservative MP.

I do think the current flowering of crime fiction in Scandinavia is an intriguing commentary on a particular place and time – just not too comfortable with it being somehow in the genes.

Nesbo speaks

I’ve signed up for a mysterious little Internets-thingy called FriendFeed that makes RSS feed aggregators social and am now receiving updates on crime fiction from multiple sources. (Thanks, Maxine!) One of the links that I discovered is a short interview with Jo Nebso posted at This Writing Life. One interesting tidbit – when asked how he got started writing, he responded that he read a lot first. “I basically postponed writing as long as I could, that was until I was 37. Then I started writing like a madman.”

No kidding – he has quite a long list in the Harry Hole series already, and each volume is quite long, generally 500 pages or more. But they fly by all too quickly.

Meanwhile, over at International Noir, Glenn Harper ponders Asa Larsson’s The Black Path, which he reckons is her best book yet. He makes some fascinating points about the book, including some great insights about one of the characters living in the future, and concludes “blogging and conversing in the crime-fiction blogosphere is proving to be a great way to think about what crime writers are doing and what crime fiction does and can accomplish in terms of both fiction writing and the relationship of the genre to contemporary life.” Very true – especially at his blog.

irresistible

Journalist and critic Michael Carlson locks onto a number of “irresistible targets” in his blog of that name. Recently he reviewed Arnaldur Indridason’s Arctic Chill, the latest of the Erlender series to be translated into English. He noticed an interesting parallel to Jar City – both books are about the isolation of Iceland and its homogenous genetic pool, and even more about the isolation between individuals, even close family members. In this book, the murder victim is a mixed-race child whose mother is a Thai woman brought to Iceland by a man who needs a wife. (Hmm…. that reminds me of Karin Fossum’s The Indian Bride, another book on my enormously long to-be-read list.)

Carlson also recently reviewed John Theorin’s Echoes of the Dead at Crime Time and at his blog recounts his visit to its setting with his small son – he has family living on the island where the book is set. Evidently, the book does justice to the landscape.

I hadn’t often been there before in summer, when it is lovely, but usually in winter or thereabouts, when the ‘alvar’, the inland steppe or plain, is bleak and deserted, the way Theorin uses it to create an atmospheric setting for his slow-building suspense, a story of history and loss.

The theme is the search for a long-missing child, and just thinking about that summer made the book all that much more real to me…the Oland I know may never seem quite the same. But I recommend the book, and Oland, highly.

I owe thanks to Michael for pointing out a Danish author who was missing from my website, Anders Bodelsen -  Mange tak!

gloomy Swedes? or pure escape?

The New York Times this Sunday reviews Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, just released in the US – and reviewer Alex Berenson finds that it may just cement Sweden’s reputation for dourness and gloom.

The novel offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women. In Larsson’s world, sadism, murder and suicide are commonplace — as is lots of casual sex. (Sweden isn’t all bad.) . . . .

The book’s original Swedish title was “Men Who Hate Women,” a label that just about captures the subtlety of the novel’s sexual politics. Except for Blomkvist, nearly every man in the book under age 70 is a violent misogynist.

Nor will “Girl” win any awards for characterization. While Blomkvist comes to life as he’s investigating the murder, his relationships with his daughter and with Erika Berger, a co-worker who is his occasional lover, seem half-formed and weak. Even after 460 pages, it’s not clear whether Blomkvist cares, whether he’s troubled by his lack of intimacy or simply resigned to it. Is he stoic or merely Swedish? Either way, he seems more a stock character than a real person.

On the whole, Berenson is not impressed. Though the middle section of the book is “a treat,” he thinks the conclusion drags.

Not so, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune book critic, Susan Larson, who enjoyed visiting cool climes on her summer vacation.

Maybe it’s these hot summer days, but I find myself drawn to Scandinavian writers. I loved Per Petterson’s “Out Stealing Horses,” a tale of 67-year-old Trond Sander, who has retreated to the countryside, but sees his whole life come rushing back at a moment. “This is what I want,” he thinks, “and I know I can do it, that I have it in me, the ability to be alone, and there is nothing to be afraid of.”

Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer mystery series — “The Indian Bride” is the most recent — appeals to me for the obvious reasons: like me, Konrad Sejer has lost a spouse and is devoted to his dog, and it’s easy to slip into his wintry frame of mind.

Hands down, the best book I read this summer — which will be published in September– is “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” a novel by the late Swedish writer, Stieg Larsson, the first in a trilogy, a kind of locked-room mystery set on a Swedish island. The title character, Lisbeth Salander, is a computer hacker, one of those isolated but determined women like Smilla of “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” capable of getting through the hardest moments. Pure escape. I’d love to be so tough.

more reviews . . .

Dick Adler of the Trib is impressed by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, now that it’s finally reached the US market. In the UK, lucky Brits get to read Arnaldur Indridason’s latest Erlenedur novel, Arctic Chill, and The Telegraph recommends that they do.

Margaret Cannon of The Globe and Mail thinks Asa Larsson’s The Black Path is well worth following, but Richard Lipez of the Washington Post thinks it meanders too much.

And finally – OffMyTrolley thinks Karin Fossum’s Black Seconds is first rate.

time out, Scandinavia

Elisabeth Vincentelli, determined dilletante and arts editor for Time Out New York, decided to cure a run of unusually pleasant weather in New York City by reading some noir Scandinavian fiction.

Thumbs up for Steig Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and for Per Persson, whose To Siberia is a spare masterpiece.  On the other hand, Henning Mankell’s standalone The Depths scores high both in both bleakness and cliches. As for Kjell Eriksson’s procedurals, The Demon from Dakar and The Cruel Stars of Night . . . in a word, m’eh.

I’m not sure how you say m’eh in French, but I’m amazed that Elisabeth, who is originally from France, has been able to restrain herself from reading the second in the Millennium trilogy, which has been out in French translation for some time as one of our French professors has told me, gloatingly.

Thanks to the Determined Dilettante for the props!