The Helicopter Heist by Jonas Bonnier, translated by Alice Menzies

Paperback, 404 pgs, Pub May 28, 2019, Other Press Paperback Original. (first published April 2017), Original Title: Helikopterrånet translated by Alice Menzies, ISBN: 978-159051-950-9.

Have I got a summer read for you! This fictional Scandinavian thriller is based on true events, which makes it even more ravishing. I can’t wait for you to read it.

All you who love the TV series, movies, mysteries and thrillers to come out of Scandinavia, to say nothing of Karl Ove Knausgård’s bestselling fictional autobiography, are going to be reminded why you love those stories so much. This book has the daily life detail of Sweden that makes the journey so different from ordinary American novels.

To make it even more interesting, we are privy to the intimate thoughts and intentions of recent and not-so-recent migrants to Sweden, three of the main characters originally hailed from Lebanon, Iran, and Yugoslavia, though all are Swedish citizens now. Already we are interested. Add to that these folks struggled in their first years and turned to what appeared to be easier: theft and sometimes intricately designed robberies. Several of the characters met in jail.

Throw in some gorgeous Swedish blondes, female, at least one on the side of the law, the other working for the largest cash depot in Västberga, not too far from Stockholm, except there is water in between.

The beautiful blonde probably should have been harder to get, but one of the unattached, recently released, always-looking-for-an-angle young men is pointed towards her by a legendary thief, a thief who is in ‘retirement’ in a remote cottage filled with eight big labradors, and a stash of cash moldering in a root cellar.

The young man discovers the blonde is a talker, and she likes to talk about work, and that is the cash depot.

The absurdity of the plan to rob the depot is so far out that we can’t imagine these guys, who have already been to jail once and are so obviously outsiders in every way, can manage to pull it off without serious damage to their lives, if not their reputations. But still they persist. So many things go wrong: they lose key personnel regularly and must replace them with someone less knowledgeable or less skilled. The plan is wildly oversized in every way.

Then the police find out. They know what will happen, where and when. They prepare for weeks in advance. They contact the National Guard and SWAT. They have the judiciary involved and have bugged a key member of the team ten different ways.

The robbers are screwed.

That’s all I’m telling you, but believe me, this is about as stressful a situation as I can imagine. Each member of the team doesn’t know the other members well. It’s a total crapshoot. Wait until you see what happens. What struck me as most bizarre and yet so ridiculously true, is the media reaction. When the absurd robbery was underway, the entire world became riveted at this audacious plan.

This is a translated novel. There are some moments when one is completely aware one is not reading an ordinary American thriller of the more usual kind. This, my friends, is something completely different. If you did not get that Scandinavian vacation this year, never fear. You will be in Sweden for the two or three days it takes you to read this one.

And you will spend a lot less money.

This terrific novel has been optioned to be made into a Netflix film original starring and produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. Do not wait! Read the book first, if you have time in your book-reading schedule. I will make an admission: for almost a year now it has been very difficult for me to read fiction when our daily nonfictional lives are so eventful. Somehow this fiction of nonfiction is the perfect fit.

Enjoy!



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Beyond All Reasonable Doubt (Sophia Weber #2) by Malin Persson Giolito, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles

Paperback, 480 pga, Pub June 4th 2019 by Other Press (NY) (first published January 1st 2012), Orig Title: Bortom varje rimligt tvivel, ISBN13: 9781590519196, Series: Sophia Weber #2

This legal thriller bursts out of the gate from the first pages, easily capturing the attention of anyone who has ever been, or known, a teenaged girl. At the same time it underlines and validates the well-deserved success of Swedish novelist Malin Persson Giolito, who won Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year for her English-language debut Quicksand.

Persson Giolito has not so much captured the crime thriller genre as reinvented it for a sophisticated and cosmopolitan audience. We may never have set foot in Scandinavia but we certainly know their crime writers. Quicksand was optioned and produced as a Netflix Original Series, and debuted worldwide in April 2019.

This story is presented as a case of possible wrongful imprisonment; as each new fact is uncovered, our vision blurs and we are not sure if we have corrupt law enforcement, a scam trial, evil parents, or #MeToo run amok. The victim is fifteen and a model student. A doctor is in jail for her murder. A female lawyer in mid-career is asked to look into the case by her old professor, as a favor. Reluctantly, this lawyer begins to investigate the old case, now fifteen years past, and sees the possibility of retrial or release.

The story has resonance, the subject is personally interesting to everyone, and Persson Giolito’s writing is sharp and insightful. She adds short propulsive chapters of character development to bind us to the characters. We see marriage with the boredom left in, and then later, the exquisite and intimate tenderness. We enjoy the sight of a woman exhausted by the mental and emotional toil of lawyering take a 3-ton sailboat out on a northern ocean by herself in March for a week. We recognize the misplaced pride of the old professor who may have sabotaged his protégé’s case because he wanted the recognition due her.

This novel is just being published in time for summer reading this year and I urge you not to pass this one by when you are developing your summer reading list. It is definitely an immersive rain day read at the beach, but will keep anyone occupied for what it tells us about the psyche of young girls, the legal system in Sweden, and the state of criminal forensics in Europe. Apparently everyone looks to England for “the latest equipment” and to America for discoveries in the field: the TV show CSI makes the actors look authoritative beyond all reason.

The final third of this novel is reason to read through to the end. It is utterly without formula and gripping for that. I don’t think anyone will predict how this legal case might turn out. Americans may have a view of Sweden as famously liberal sexually, but what struck me beyond the fact that fifteen is considered the “age of consent,” is how similar our wealthy classes appear to be in terms of social development. In other words, a teenager is a teenager is a teenager, with all the teenaged angst fairly shared around the world.

Women will feel a bond with Persson Giolito after reading this novel. She is, after all, a professional woman making her way in what used to be called “a man’s world.” Male supremacy has not ended yet, but there are chinks in the wall. Persson Giolito has her main character make casual comment about the backlash that plagues a professional woman making any kind of public statement that could conceivably be the subject of controversy; she describes the now all-too-familiar online and media trolling that is difficult to survive, emotionally, personally, professionally.

The backlash often comes in the form of sexual attack. When I examine my own thinking, I have to admit the most outrageous swear word still taboo is the C word, only recently publicly breached and used in mixed company, but still not normalized. When we get mad, we get sexual. Persson Giolito also makes reference to the court of public opinion: how bad information about a person may be introduced into the public sphere through social media and is almost impossible to combat. This is partly why this book feels so contemporary, and cosmopolitan. Women and men must deal with this new world now.

Persson Giolito is now a full-time writer based in Brussels. In an earlier incarnation she worked as a lawyer for the biggest law firm in Scandinavia and as an official for the European Commission. She is a writer of enormous gifts, and her invention looks like the real deal. Her perceptions are invariably enlightening. Her description of winter sailing made me want to pound my chest Tarzan-style. Women are just getting better and braver and that is a good thing.



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Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles

Hardcover, 512 pgs, Pub Mar 7th 2017 by Other Press (first published 2016) Orig Title: Störst av allt ISBN 1590518578 (ISBN13: 9781590518571) Awards: Glass Key Award (2017), Best Swedish Crime Novel

There is a reason this Swedish novel rocketed to the top of Europe’s bestseller lists. It has everything—enormous wealth, inequality, immigration, teenage angst, drugs, sex, and death—but it also has whip-smart writing, the constraints of law, the quiet and unbreakable bonds of family. Entirely suitable for teens, this is a YA title worthy of the designation.

Told from the point of view of a young woman just out of high school, this story recounts how Maja awaited her trial on school shooting and multiple murder charges. Maja herself is silent. We only hear the voice inside her head. It is a legal thriller easily as good as America’s Scott Turow, John Grisham, Marcia Clark at the height of their powers.

Headlines scream

MASSACRE AT DJURSHOLM UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL - GIRL IN CUSTODY

and

CLAES FAGERMAN MURDERED - SON’S GIRLFRIEND DEMAND: “HE MUST DIE!”

We are inside the jail, inside Maja’s confused thoughts as she contemplates her imprisonment, and remembers moments in her past which illuminate her present. Readers are skeptical of any reason which seeks absolution for such a heinous crime. Maja’s lawyer is one of the most famous in Sweden, taking unpopular, unwinnable cases. Our emotions seesaw between a kind of sympathy for an ordinary teen and the extraordinary circumstances of her imprisonment.

We wrestle with big issues like the statement that “the truth is whatever we choose to believe,” and “innocence until proven guilty.” And the voice of Maja is piquant and high-school observant:

“…not a single person has ever believed that Mom is the person she pretends to be. But she keeps pretending anyway. And for the most part, people are polite about it and leave her alone…Dad’s money is hardly even fifteen minutes old. And he doesn’t have enough of it to compensate…he thinks boarding school taught him what it takes to fit in, what he has to do for high-class people to think he's one of them. He’s wrong, of course.”

We are talking about the rich and the ultra rich. That in itself is an interesting perspective on high school life in Sweden: yacht trips in the Mediterranean, weekend jaunts to southern islands, parties that bring in musicians and YouTube specialists from America, multiple homes, corporate planes…you get the picture. But there is also an immigrant community in the town and the wealth discrepancy is radical. We have so many dichotomies examined in this novel between parents & youth, wealth & the lack of it, light & dark skins to name a few.

But what is best about this drama are the legal arguments. First we hear the prosecutor do her best to lay out the case against the defendant. That, and the newspapers give the court of public opinion plenty to work with until the defense can present a few counter-arguments in the weeks that follow. In the defense, we get a careful step-by-step unpicking of the prosecutor’s almost airtight case for murder. It is masterful.

Maja is uniquely well-off and privileged, but is she uniquely evil? Statistically, one could argue it is unlikely. But so much more is uncovered in the course of the trial that we cannot break away. What would cause a well-educated woman of privilege to behave in this way?

Giolito places an articulate corporate American PhD and editor-in-chief of a prestigious business publication in the position of giving a talk before the high school Maja attends, and she explicates the argument America is undergoing right now, played out by our political parties wrangling over tax policy.

“We must be cautious about the social contract. Both parties must uphold their side of the agreement. We must have comprehensible equity. It is not fair if the welfare system is bankrolled by low- and middle-income earners. If large corporations pay less in taxes than their small- and medium-size colleagues, that is not what the social contract looks like…”

I don’t want to take the fun out of this spectacular book for you. Academics, teachers, high school students, lawyers, ordinary citizens will all find this beautifully-written and -translated novel a page-turner.

This is Malin Persson Giolito’s English language debut. Let’s show her American gratitude and support so we can get all her novels published here. Giolito has worked as a lawyer and for the European Commission in Brussels, where she lives with her husband and three daughters. She has entered the ranks of the best legal thriller writers working today. The translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles is exceptional. Published by Other Press.

An excellent bookreporter.com interview explains the backstory behind this book.



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Leona - The Die is Cast by Jenny Rogneby

Paperback, 464 pages, Pub August 1st 2017 by Other Press (NY) (first published January 1st 2014) Orig Title: Leona Tärningen är kastad ISBN13: 9781590518823

This debut fiction has so many divergences from a standard police procedural that we are held in thrall to the last page, not believing our eyes. During the process of investigating a series of bank robberies, Investigator Leona Lindberg reveals certain unsavory truths about her police department and the people in it. Someone abused as a child apparently turned around as an adult and inflicted the same kind of suffering on another child. For money.

In fact, there is so much going on that is different in this novel that it begs to be discussed in a book group. One of the first things that captured my attention is that the author is a woman of color, born in Ethiopia, adopted and schooled in Sweden. She became a criminal investigator in Stockholm after graduation from Stockholm University, gleaning enough information to create the character Leona Lindberg and the circumstances under which Leona does her job.

It is not clear that Leona is a woman of color. It is never mentioned in this first novel. Leona is desirable—several men on the workforce make plays for her attention at different points—and her hair is described as “brown, curly and fluffy.” When I realized that Rogneby wrote this novel without pointing to race, I realized how unusual that would be in America.

The writer Chris Abani, born in Nigeria and now an American citizen, says America has a unique relationship with race: “Slavery in America is not really over.” Blacks from countries with black majorities naturally think of themselves differently than do black Americans. Jenny Rogneby, though growing up in a white majority country like Sweden, is also different than American blacks, who probably wouldn’t consider writing a book where race is not mentioned simply because it is so much a part of their daily calculations. Even now I am here having a big discussion about race when it is not even mentioned in this book. What does this say about us? What does it say about Jenny Rogneby?

Of course, Leona has more important things to worry about than skin color. She registers on the autism spectrum, and has a son with Crohn’s disease who requires expensive repeat surgeries to fix a long-term life-or-death ailment. Her daughter is of an age to require parental oversight, and her husband gets insufficient attention. Leona herself stays up many nights to gamble online. Meanwhile, she is heading up one of the most perplexing series of robberies in modern Swedish crime history. It’s a lot to juggle.

The novel itself at several points strains credulity. But Rogneby manages to pull us back from the brink, partly because she is coming at this from such a strange angle that we are dying to see how she is going to manage it. Knowing what we do about large bureaucracies where everyone is very busy, we sometimes can buy her explanations for how things are overlooked. If we remember we have information that the police department in general does not, in contrast to most novels of this sort, we could be convinced.

It is worth hanging on to the end because Rogneby manages to pull off something so devilishly clever and so disturbingly depraved that we really feel as though the term “crime novel” has just been invented.

The multi-talented Jenny Rogneby worked as a pop singer in Sweden before going to university for criminology and working for some years with Stockholm City Police Department. In that authors reveal a great deal about themselves in what they write, I will admit I looked for clues to Rogneby’s experiences in her work. According to her website, Rogneby

“took a year's leave from work, sold her apartment and all her furniture in Stockholm, moved abroad and wrote LEONA - The Die is Cast. She submitted her manuscript to Swedish publishers and 10 publishing houses were interested in publishing her debut. Now the book series is sold to 13 countries and the film rights are sold to Hollywood.”

You must admit, her life as been interesting so far. Might as well see where it goes from here.

A short interview is attached below:




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My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston

Hardcover, 272 pages Pub April 18th 2017 by Pantheon Books (first published 2014) Orig Title Kissani Jugoslavia ISBN13: 9781101871829 Literary AwardsHelsingin Sanomien kirjallisuuspalkinto (2014)

Years ago I remember wishing I could experience a bit of what immigrants experience, or that some could communicate their experiences in ways I could understand. They’d started out somewhere I’d never been, and they’d arrived somewhere they’d never imagined. Like Finland. Cold, white, communal, with few racial or religious tensions. I was eager to hear it all, but such stories, if they existed, were rarely published in the U.S. All that has changed now and I couldn't be happier.

This remarkable debut by the 27-year-old Statovci gives us that strangeness, familiarity, differentness, and similarity in a wild ride from Kosovo to Finland, from traditional society to an open society, from cultural acceptance to social ostracism. See how the arrows in that sentence seem to point in opposite directions? Therein lies the tension.

Two seemingly unrelated stories, one featuring a talking cat, twine and twist through the first part of the novel, both stories engrossing: a woman describes the lead-up to her traditional marriage…the clothes, the gold, the mother-to-daughter secrets, the preparations. The other thread features the cat and a snake, neither of which we want to take out eyes off for very long. They are both dangerous.

As readers we don’t object to the fact of the cat, though by rights we should. He is thoroughly obnoxious, insulting his host and then being falsely obsequious. He comes for a tryst and stays for meal, which he then refuses on the grounds such food would never cross his lips. He insists on eating meat in a vegetarian’s house, and he takes long, splashy showers…he is your worst nightmare, the height of self-regard.

The snake—I’d like to hear your take on the snake. A boa constrictor. He’s a wily one, seems to have formed a kind of attachment to his owner, in that he doesn’t threaten him, but he does threaten a guest…Throw a dangerous animal into a story and see if your attention flags. It’s a old trick that works every time. We don’t take our eyes from him whenever he appears from behind the couch.

But it is the story of the wedding that grabs us by the balls, as the expression goes. We are shocked, distressed, angry. We try to imagine how we would handle what comes up, both as a young person, and as an adult. We think over decisions we make so quickly, painlessly in adulthood that are so tortuous and fraught in youth.

All this is overlaid with the portrait of a family of seven living in one room provided by the Finnish government to refugees. The bunk-beds squeak so cannot be used. Mattresses cover the floor. Four or more families share a kitchen, a bathroom. It is nearly intolerable until they remember what they left, native Albanians in a Kosovo run amok. The Bosnian War was brutal beyond all imagining. There is that.

The stories twist and twine through one another like the loops of a snake, another of which, a poisonous viper, makes an appearance later in the book. The viper is only a meter long, and is captured in a plastic bag. It doesn’t provoke as much anxiety as it should. When a plastic bag reappears later in the story, holding not a snake but a book, The White King by György Dragomán, we wonder…can the snake represent his father, the bully whose influence stays around, silently inhabiting the places we live? Deadly, but sometimes ineffective, who might be deflected or exorcised with understanding and effort.

And the cat? There is more than one cat. The first cat talks. The second cat was abandoned, uncared for, unloved in the native country until rescued and restored to health. And finally, there is the black cat in a litter, “just normal, mongrel kittens,” in the author’s words, to distinguish them from the black and white cat who speaks, and the orange cat who doesn’t. The talking cat so full of himself could be the author himself, and the follow-on cats could be those who’d suffered during the war, coming finally to the children, those ‘normal’ integrated ‘mongrels’ who’d adjusted to their new environment in their adopted country and married with locals.

The disturbing shifting sexuality throughout this novel, in a person from a traditional culture with unresolved parent issues, has a touch of intimidation and coercion about it, in the beginning at least. By the end I am much more comfortable that our narrator’s sexual choices are healthy ones, and begin to wonder…is this one of the things that caused the rift between his father and himself?

Statovci succeeds in capturing our attention with this debut, recounting an agonizing childhood and an adulthood filled with sudden emotional traps. His use of a female point of view is extraordinarily effective in making us inhabit her choices. He shows us the distance an émigré may feel from his host country, no matter how conflicted these feelings are with gratefulness and surprise and ordinary, daily joy at being alive. He shows us the pointed, hateful bullying in town—a step up from ordinary schoolyard bullying—that may provoke withdrawal rather than a healthy resistance and reliance on home-grown values.

This is a thrilling debut. Bravo!

Below is a clip from the Penguin Random House audio production:





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Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

This novel has the spine-tingling atmosphere of an episode of Netflix’s original series Sense8. Chance, coincidence, gambles, even miracles figure into the actions of a young woman seeking to make sense of her life and her mother’s death. The distinct sense of foreboding that pervades the pages comes partly from us: we are involved, judging the character’s choices against our own. The main character cannot be sure how this will play out, either. "I feel new. I’m a blank slate. A gamble…" This is a teenaged alienation story that does not run to drugs, alcohol, nor sexual perversion.

Katherine (Kit) Carlyle was an IVF baby who had been kept as a frozen embryo for eight years before she was implanted in her mother’s uterus with two other embryos. She was the one who survived, and from her years waiting in limbo, we know her conception and birth was a kind of gamble. Kit is nineteen and living in Rome when we meet her. Somehow Kit claims a kind of DNA memory of that pre-time of frozen suspension, and finds herself going in search of those origins when she feels abandoned by her parents--her mother to death, and her father to a peripatetic career.

Kit is a woman who doesn’t always have the motivations we associate with a woman of her wealth, beauty, and intellect. She is young but her naïveté is paired with a world consciousness that few people over thirty can claim. She also has waist-length hair. When I pointed out to friends that this seemed a male fantasy, one man said “not so fast: women with very long hair tend to obsess over it.” It turns out that hair is like a talisman in this novel, a touchstone upon which feelings, actions, and behaviors turn.

Author Rupert Thomson has published nine other novels, one described by critic Jonathan Miles writing for Salon.com as "disquieting" for the horrific scenes of sexual abuse depicted. Thomson, now sixty years old, has been praised for his sentence craft and is often in the running for major literary prizes. One suspects it is his unusual sense of story rather than his writing talent that advances other authors over him to win prizes. In this novel, for instance, the palpable sense of doom and danger does not often play out: we readers are bloodied but whole. There is a rape scene late in the novel, but it is not graphic and is only implied.

More disturbing are the dreams and fantasies of the young woman, who likes to imagine her father searching for her, trying to find her. She writes letters to him, and despite accusing him of not loving her enough, she dreams that he will feel anxious moments trying to locate her with the few clues she has left behind. The author adds to our sense of unease by italicizing a sentence that could only be said by an older person to a younger one: "Even negative experiences contribute to the sum of who you are." There is a sense of inevitability about pain and exposure, though Thomson does not do his worst, to Kit nor to us, in this novel.

Thomson’s work may simply be too uncomfortable to win the prizes, but this novel stands as an entry in the new literature being written that gives us a sense of being untethered in time and space. Thomson’s characters appear to acknowledge and accept the many mysteries that come with interactions with new people. It remains an open question whether his reading public wants that, too.

**Rupert will be participating in a series of events in the US this fall. Please see below for a list of readings and interviews for the novel KATHERINE CARLYLE.**

EVENTS

ST PAUL, MN
Twin Cities Literary Festival – 10/17

NEW YORK, NY
Bookcourt – Talk, Q&A, Signing – 10/19/15
Greenlight Bookstore in conversation with Rebecca Mead – Talk, Q&A, Signing – 10/20/15
Center for Fiction in conversation with w/ Rebecca Carol – Talk, Q&A, Signing –10/22/15

BOSTON, MA
Boston Book Festival – 10/24/15

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Min Kamp #4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Don Bartlett

In this installment of his six-volume fiction, Knausgaard is eighteen years old. He relates his first year teaching lower secondary school in Håfjord, a small town by the sea in far north Norway. This is his first full-time paid employment outside of a month’s summertime stint at a nursing home. The excitement of being on his own to earn money, to write, to be all he can be is palpable in the beginning. Only a few short months into the teaching gig he calls his mother: he wants to quit. Ah, callow youth!

It turns out what he really wants to do, what absorbs his attention, is shag girls. "I would have given anything to sleep with a girl. Any girl actually…But it wasn’t something you were given, it was something you took. Exactly how, I didn’t know…" A great deal of the time and energy of his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth years revolved around this quest. The wider world was there: the colleague he lived with continually asked him to go on tramps in the countryside but he refused: "not my thing." When at Christmas that year he returns to Lavik in southern Norway he notices trees: "I’d had no idea that I had missed trees until I was sitting there and saw them."

Outside of shagging girls what Karl Ove wanted to do is write. And not just write: “I will be the bloody greatest ever…I had to be big. I had to.” Actually, it is this certainty in his own talents that makes Karl Ove interesting to listen to for five hundred-odd pages in this installment. It has been said that a novel is just words on paper until it is read; that is, the reader brings imagination, understanding, and empathy to a novel to make it cohere or not. This installment of Knausgaard’s six-part novel, subtitled Dancing in the Dark, is a particularly good example of the need for reader insight. Karl Ove is a special kind of boy, but he can fail. That we don’t want him to fail is only partly his doing.

This section of the linked novels is also more claustrophobic than earlier installments of Knausgaard’s story. We have less of the older authorial voice, and any distance history might provide. All thought and action takes place entirely within Karl Ove’s own head, and outside of a section in which he moves back to his final year in high school and occasional comments by the then 40-year-old author, we have only the binocular vision of his two eyes and his underdeveloped prefrontal cortex to guide us through six months living in the perpetual dark of the an Arctic winter.

The dark plays a large role in developing this teenager into a man. He has to fight against the dark within and without, and doesn’t always manage it. We readers give him ample room for mistakes in this environment, seeing as how we can hardly imagine ourselves pulling it off. The endless cycles of weekend drinking are both horrible and understandable; we just wish our bright young narrator were not so susceptible to alcohol’s siren song.

Knausgaard finishes Min Kamp Volume #4 on a high note and with a flourish worthy of his hormonal anguish. He has us laughing that he finally scaled the hills and valleys of his testosterone-soaked internal landscape. While the story of his eighteenth year has insufficient perspective in itself to have much meaning, the rest of the volumes and readers themselves provide context and meaning. We learn fractionally more about the elusive Yngve, who has small speaking parts in this novel, and marginally more about his father’s decline. We feel Karl Ove’s desperation and confusion when he realizes the place his mother rented is only home when his mother and brother are there: "...home is no longer a place. It was mum and Yngve. They were my home."

This novel is the written equivalent of Karl Ove staring into the bathroom mirror while washing his hands, looking and being looked at, inside and outside at the same time, purely and unambiguously expressing his inner state. It is forgotten the instant the pen is put down or the book closed until someone else opens the book, picks up the soap, stares at their reflection, and examines their soul.

My Struggle Volume 1
My Struggle Volume 2
My Struggle Volume 3


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One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad translated by Sarah Death

Åsne Seierstad is a nonfiction writer and foreign affairs journalist who had never written about her native Norway before she was asked to cover the case of Anders Breivik, on trial for mass murder in the city of Oslo and on the island of Utøya. She found herself uncertain how to explain the Breivik phenomenon after listening to ten weeks of trial testimony and decided to go deeper.

To Breivik’s story she adds those of three Breivik killed (Simon Sæbø, Bano Rashid, Anders Kristiansen) and one he did not kill (Viljar Hanssen). The only thing missing from this history are photographs, which I try to supply here.

Anders Kristiansen & Simon Saebo

Seierstad goes into great detail about Breivik’s personal upbringing which may be of use to some who think they can find a key to his behaviors as a 32-year old man. I am no expert on these things, but it didn’t help me to understand: what I did conclude is that family or community might be a more of a curb to deviance if they just spoke to the individual about their observations or concerns about their more anti-social behaviors. But this path may suppose those family or community members to have a well-developed sense of self, and of right and wrong.

Bano Rashid

Breivik spent a great deal of time and money organizing and preparing for his big moment. He rented a farm, had tonnes of fertilizer delivered, and purchased many items online. It took months. He wasn’t stupid, exactly—he just didn’t listen to opposing views. The novelist Karl Ove Knausgård points out in a recent New Yorker article that the bonds, constraints, differences and fellowship of ordinary community around the world are breaking down and allowing folks to feel themselves distanced from neighbors, countrymen, fellow humans.

Viljar Hanssen

Knausgård argues that Breivik was not exceptional in any way: “Breivik’s history up until the horrific deed can more or less be found in every life story…he was and is one of us.” Seirestad says that this is a story of community: “this is also about looking for a way to belong and not finding it.” Breivik found groups he liked and who liked him throughout his development but gradually he was dropped from their ranks. So he made up his own international “Knights Templar Europe” of which he was Commander. All alone by himself.

Island of Utøya


Having just finished a remarkable novel by Christie Watson, Where Women Are Kings , about severe child abuse and the damage it wreaks, I am inclined to think parenting may be the most important thing we should do well if we are going to participate in the world. It is not enough to have one’s own career and provide food and shelter. Even the indigent and refugee communities can do that now with government help. It takes more, much more, to create a home, or to run a school.

One of the more horrible (and horribly funny) portions of Seirestad’s account was how the police reacted to news of what they thought was the first major terrorist attack on Norwegian soil. A reader is simply undone by the Keystone Cops manner of their response. The police, living as they had in a civil society unused to such horrors, were extremely polite with one another and inefficient in the extreme. Every moment they delayed, another child was being shot. We are left with a vision of ten heavily armed police in a dangerously overloaded red rubber dinghy attempting to motor three kilometers to Utøya but getting stuck after a couple hundred meters offshore because the motor gave out when the craft was swamped. Rescued by a local holidaymaker, the dressed-to-kill warriors then overloaded the rescue craft.

We must realize, once again, that our protection must rely on us, the body politic. And I don’t mean we should arm ourselves. What I mean is that we are responsible for teaching the children about the meaning of community.


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My Struggle Volume 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The third book in the Knausgaard saga explores Karl Ove’s boyhood. The family moves to the largest island in southern Norway, Tromøy, where Karl Ove's father teaches Norwegian in high school and his mother works with families experiencing trauma. Finally we learn why Karl Ove was so terrified of his father. The older brother Yngve now becomes the shadowy enigma we only glimpse but cannot see. Yngve is the essence of the older brother—a little dismissive of his younger sibling, but generally supportive and friendly enough. I yearn to see more of him, but suspect Karl Ove’s penchant for self-revelation did not extend to his brother.

This is a remarkable piece of work. The more I read the more I want to read. Fiction or nonfiction? Of course it is both. In a series this long and detailed one could only have used elements of both. In order to ring true it must have recognizable motivations and actions, yet the detail feels new rather than remembered. I found myself mesmerized by the thirteen-year-old Karl Ove. The scene in which he takes “the prettiest girl” he’s met to the forest by bicycle to kiss is positively painful—and classic.

The difference between the personalities of Karl Ove’s parents is spelled out in a paragraph about driving styles:

”Speed and anger went hand in hand. Mom drove carefully, was considerate, never minded if the car in front was slow, she was patient and followed. That was how she was at home as well. She never got angry, always had time to help, didn’t mind if things got broken, accidents happened, she liked to chat with us, she was interested in what we said, she often served food that was not absolutely necessary, such as waffles, buns, cocoa, and bread fresh out of the oven, while Dad on the other hand tried to purge our lives of anything that had no direct relevance to the situation in which we found ourselves: we ate food because it was a necessity, and the time we spent eating had no value in itself; when we watched TV we watched TV and were not allowed to talk or do anything else; when we were in the garden we had to stay on the flagstones, they had been laid for precisely that purpose, while the lawn, big and inviting though it was, was not for walking, running, or lying on...Dad always drove too fast.”

This revealing paragraph shows us two critical portraitures and Knausgaard’s run-on style which impels the reader forward. We know immediately the difference in the two personalities, and Karl Ove’s as well. On the day Karl Ove was reprimanded for embarrassing another boy, Edmund, for not being able to read, Karl Ove tells us “I both understood and I didn’t” why his family was mean to him and kind to Edmund, whom they hardly knew. He was learning two sets of behaviors and being confused by which to adopt. By including this incident in his record we know that it became clearer to him at some later point.

There is no mention of Knausgaard’s overall direction with this third of the six books, though in the very last pages Karl Ove comes across a photograph in a history book of a naked woman starving to death. The next page of the history book contains images of a mass grave with many strewn, emaciated corpses. Immediately readers' minds go to the Holocaust with no further prompting. The juxtaposition of the sunny warmth of impending summer and the stark brutality of the images jerks us from our reverie and places Karl Ove's boyhood in a larger context. The years are passing but there are a few holes in the picture of a forty-year old life. We’ve now had the beginning and the end, but early adulthood and a first marriage are still missing.

Is it literature? I think so. We have already “gone somewhere” though each volume leads only to another at this point. A person with contradiction and depth is given life in these pages. The detail is lush and ample and oh-so-readable, the story instructs us, and the context haunts us. I look forward to seeing what Knausgaard wants us to understand with his linked volumes, but he has already given us something very special indeed.

My Struggle Volume 1
My Struggle Volume 2
My Struggle Volume 4


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My Struggle Volume II by Karl Ove Knausgaard

We are almost finished with Volume Two of Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir before we learn what Knausgaard is about with this huge, unwieldy thing he calls a novel.

"Over recent year I had increasingly lost faith in literature…Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?"

Does that not mean that art is subjective, and in the eyes of the beholder only? Knausgaard is still asking questions rather than answering them in this staggeringly discursive but surprisingly readable set of books about his life: "I wanted to get as close to life as possible." We sit like Geir, his best friend and sounding board, hearing his explanations, and bringing our own understanding to his novel/memoir/quest. The writer Karl Ove places some observations about Karl Ove the narrator in the mouth of Geir:

"You’re an arch-protestant…If you have some success, generally something others would have died for, you just cross it off in the ledger. You’re not happy about anything. When you’re at one with yourself, which you are almost all of the time, you’re much more disciplined than me…Your ideal is the innocent, innocence…what you lust for is innocence and this is an impossible equation. Lust and innocence can never be compatible."

Since reading Min Kamp Volume One, I watched a number of interviews of Knausgaard. Knausgaard tells us in Volume Two he cannot stop himself from accepting invitations to speak about himself and his book, despite his terror and despite the oftentimes mediocre write-ups. His sense of worthlessness and feelings of intimidation (he says these feelings are rooted in Norwegian culture and his own upbringing) are clear from what he says, writes, and does because, he says, he has revealed the darkest, most shameful things about himself and his family and friends. One might understand, therefore, his reluctance to be in public answering questions about his motivations were it not for the vast number of critics coming down on the side of celebration and awe upon the publication of the linked books. This praise he “crosses off” the income side of the ledger, leaving him desperate and despondent, feeling "like a whore." Well, okay, if that’s how you want to play it. I can heap criticism on his head, too. A little bit of whip-play, eh?

We must ask ourselves why we care. How much of this is fiction and does it matter? Are we as close to life as possible—a little reality show for the bookish set, the novel-minded?

The author Karl Ove tells us this book is about love, and readers might agree. Love in its imperfections, in the imperfections of the lovers, in the circumstances, in the choices one makes, and in the choices one doesn’t. Love between parents and children and children and parents and between the parents and between friends; Love that is not blind, but alternately tender and vengeful, accepting and unyielding. There is a love of writing here, too, of the lost-in-the-dream flow of writing, of the can’t-wait-to-get-back-to-it addictiveness of creating something unique. Which is how we know it probably is fiction. Karl Ove is creating, not just recording. He "finally gets to tell the story" and it is his story. Not objective, but subjective. Fictive, at least in part. We learn the tiniest detail of his child’s outdoor clothing and how to cook a meal of potatoes, steak and broccoli, but we will never hear the voice of his father except through Karl Ove the narrator. What difference does it make? None. Memoirs and fiction often trade places.

Regarding the larger question of whether or not it is literature, I sidestep: that will answer itself over time. The books have their amusements and instruction, for we read so deeply about others’ decisions, successes and downfalls, hidden secrets and cracks in the façade, as well as about Scandinavia, lest anyone think I forgot the cultural context. But were I pressed, I would guess I am reading something resembling an old-fashioned "confession" perhaps like St Augustine’s Confessions written when he was in his early 40s, considered by some to be the first autobiography in the western world, and in which Augustine regrets his sinful life. Confessions ran to thirteen volumes and was meant to be read aloud. In at least one interview, Karl Ove tells us he read his book aloud to an unnamed friend.

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Karl Ove references, had a long standing disagreement about how best to understand the divine. Confused, sinful, ascetic (rejecting the world) Karl Ove (Augustine?) talks repeatedly and deeply with organized, controlled, disciplined Geir (Aquinas?) who embraces the world, even to the point of travelling to witness the war in Iraq. We listen; we wonder.

All this is to say nothing of Hitler, who is mentioned twice I think in this book, and once in Volume One. Perhaps in Volume Three we will have three references? Of that, stay tuned.

Review of Volume 1
Review of Volume 3
Review of Volume 4


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My Struggle, Volume I by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I hadn’t really thought to read this despite it being “the” book of 2012, but I read the article he wrote for the March 1, 2015 NYT Sunday magazine, Part I(!) It was the funniest thing I’d ever read. Here is an author whose linked novel/memoirs has taken the literary world by storm and he is showing his utter unpreparedness for that world and the interactions it requires. I wanted to see if that tongue-in-cheek droll self-awareness was his constant subject.

As it turns out, Volume One of his six-volume memoir cum fiction is much more than that. It has a vibrancy, truth-telling honesty, and relevance far beyond anything I expected. And the writing…well, the writing was involving and exacting…and addictive. For a man who doesn’t like to talk to strangers, he does an awful lot of talking to strangers.

My Struggle Volume I begins with a discussion about death and how the dead have been removed from our purview, we lucky ones in the Western world who do not experience street conflict. This is precisely the thing I have been mulling over lately, so he drew me in with his talk of death rather than put me off. Without even a pause or a section break from our dip into death’s icy waters in the first pages, Knausgaard relates a news event in his childhood he watched on television, in which some newscasters showed the waters of a fjord, explaining that some Nordic fishermen were lost on a ship that sunk without a trace. His parents had laughed at his eight-years-old imagination that he had seen a face in the waves on the newscaster’s film shot. He returns to that humiliation again and again as he grows older, for the sense of having seen something and the shame of having been laughed at never leave him.

There is a circular momentum to his narrative (a circling-the-drain quality, all facetiousness aside), for he returns to the death of his father in the second half of Volume One. But first we learn his age (39 years), and learn of his marriage, his children, his attempt to create something important, circling back to begin at the beginning, his birth and childhood. Knausgaard as a teen is not to be missed. The second half of the book is consumed with his father’s death, which occurred just before he turned thirty. When viewing his father's corpse he writes: "The idea that I could scrutinize this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable." Unhindered? What a remarkable thing to say. But, he goes on to say, "I was no longer looking at a person but something that resembled a person." His father, with all his personality, strengths and failures, was gone.

The very ordinariness of his days, and of his detail about those days makes the novel/memoir something extraordinary. Knausgaard says in a Paris Review interview that he was trying to get the detail "as close to life as possible," so we shouldn’t feel surprised to experience a palpable peristalsis of boredom followed by intense interest and inescapable need. The interminable house cleaning and grass mowing…we feel those details in our exhaustion, repugnance, and need to escape. The accretion of detail, the structure, the language…all of it add up to something impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

"But as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing—maybe art in general—will know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value."--Paris Review interview

Karl Ove, the narrator, shows us how he is his father’s son. He claimed to hate his father, but he loved him, too, and was more like him in his reserve than he dares mention. But we see it. We never get a clear or complete picture of his father--his father as son, his father as husband, as teacher, as neighbor--but the moments of his tenderness and of his decline flash from the book like beacons.

"But still, there is much more to a relationship than what you can say. You just take one more step back into yourself. I’ve never understood psychoanalysis. Mentioning things doesn’t change anything, doesn’t help anything, it’s just words. There is something much more deep and profound to a relationship than that. Revealing stories and quarrels—that’s just words. Love, that’s something else."--Paris Review interview

Observing Knausgaard’s intense reluctance to self-reveal in ordinary day-to-day interactions and conversation, one has to ask why Knausgaard wrote a book like this. The answer comes in a thousand ways, but it revolves around the breaking of accepted patterns, of standing outside so as to observe and understand more deeply, of the spaces between things, like language…what it doesn’t describe, what it can’t catch. "Writing is more about destroying than creating." He seeks to make an experience, rather than just describe one. Well, he’s done something provocative here, and it is absolutely an experience reading this book.

Review of Volume 2
Review of Volume 3
Review of Volume 4

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Invisible Murder by Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis

This Danish mystery series featuring Red Cross nurse Nina Borg in modern-day Copenhagen follows a long line of deliciously cosmopolitan and yet delightfully local novels translated and published by Soho Crime. Reading a few of the mysteries by these illustrious authors will give the reader an indication of the quality associated with Soho Crime: James Benn, Cara Black, Jassy Mackenzie, Leighton Gage, Timothy Hallinan, Martin Limon, Peter Lovesay, Qiu Xiaolong, Helene Tursten, Akimitsu Takagi, Matt Benyon Rees. Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis are in good company. Crime and intrigue is all the more complicated in a Danish society famously known for its liberality.

Invisible Murder is the story of a young gypsy Hungarian boy seeking to gain some control over the fates of his family by looting an old hospital left to rot by departing Russian occupiers. He intends to sell leftover X-ray equipment to the highest bidders in Europe, leaving himself and his family exposed to the most rabid and calculating bottom-dwellers in the criminal syndicate.

We meet Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse volunteering outside work with illegal immigrants to Denmark, and members of the Danish Counterterrorism Units who are chasing whomever accessed known terrorist sites on the internet while in their jurisdiction. We get a fascinating peek at the concerns of Danish society today, and the impetus for crime from the most underserved and exploited communities in the EU.

This novel is the second in a series, and as such the authors may have missed an opportunity to present Nina Borg in the depth first-time readers need to accept her leading role. The book was long and complicated—perhaps more complicated than it needed to be. Some judicious editing or more time spend reducing the work to its essentials would have aided our understanding and interest starting out, but the action picked up in the last third and it stands as a solid entry in this crime series.

BTW, I just noticed that amazon is running a special e-Book price for The Boy in the Suitcase (Nina Borg #1) at $1.99 for a limited time if you think you want to read this series from the beginning. (8/13/14)

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Lazy Days by Erlend Loe

I need a new shelf called "Silly." Loe is talented, no doubt about it. A few times laughs escaped me in a surprise assault. But he indulges himself this time. I suspect he didn't have a subject but needed to publish, so he just picked something--anything--so he could make a few bucks. Such is his reputation in Europe and Norway that he could pull that off.

A playwright and his family vacation in Germany. The playwright, obsessed with Nigella Lawson since his wife gave him one of her cookbooks for Christmas, does not like Germany and pretends to be working while his family tours. In fact, he daydreams about Nigella in her "thin blue sweater" making him taste her concoctions. He's got the whole ridiculous obsession thing down, humiliatingly familiar to us all as it is. He makes it funny, because his wife seems to divine what he's up to and doesn't seem to mind awfully much. We can hear her sigh. She's just as happy to have him out of her hair, what with his comments about Germany getting very annoying and sometimes embarrassing.

For those brain-dead from a fast-paced working life who none-the-less feel guilty on vacation without having a book on their chaise as they sit in the sun, this nothing-really-happens ridiculous train-of-thought by a Norwegian nutcase is a good companion. It's funny enough to pick up and put down for a week without ever being really challenged.

Loe's Doppler was a runaway bestseller in Norway and Europe. It established his reputation and is also small, funny, and great vacation material. It might be a classic of existential angst in our time of plenty-for-some. It is perfect for that overworked executive beginning to wonder if life in the fast lane is worth the effort.

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Phantom by Jo Nesbø

Hardcover, 378 pages, Pub October 2nd 2012 by Knopf (first published June 9th 2011) Original Title: Gjenferd, (ISBN13: 9780307960474)Series: Harry Hole #9, The Oslo Sequence #7, Characters: Harry Hole, Rakel, Oleg, Lit Awards: CWA International Dagger Nominee (2012), Bokhandlerprisen Nominee (2011), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Mystery & Thriller (2012)

Harry Hole has interrupted his his three-year sojourn in Hong Kong (where he says he resided at Chungking Mansions) to return to Oslo's Hotel Leon. Sporting a facial scar and a titanium finger, Harry is sober and has renewed contacts with Oslo's police force. Oslo has changed and not: there is a beautiful new Opera House but street drugs are still ubiquitous. This has to be one of the best of the series so far—Harry manages to save himself from drug lords using his titanium finger in one instance, and an empty bottle of Kentucky Bourbon in another.

Harry fills out his photo album with pictures of his estranged family that we became familiar with in The Snowman: step-son Oleg now has grown up, but has fallen into drug addiction. Rakel is the same but may be moving on in his absence. His old nemesis at Crepos is making hay without Harry to keep him honest. Everyone is older, wiser, scarred.

It is to get Oleg out of the clink that Harry begins to investigate the death of a young street pusher, and what he finds nearly kills him. Nesbø does a great job with characterization and motivation with this #9 in the series, and leaves this reader wondering if the next fight Harry picks will be his last.



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Doppler by Erlend Loe

Some books just hit a nerve, as this did in Scandinavia where it became a bestseller when it was first published in 2004. Just republished in English by Canada's The House of Anansi, this hilarious comic novel about a worthy man's mid-life crisis is destined to be a huge hit in North America. Just about everyone I know needs a copy of this--for its humor, insight, and recognition of our commonalities across national boundaries.

Our narrator is Doppler, a man confused and unmoored by his success. He rails against the Americans for having the temerity to begin a controversial invasion of Iraq while he, busy executive that he is and all, is having his bathroom redone. How on earth is he supposed to concentrate on tile choices? Trust someone to do something truly disturbing just as he is wishing to enjoy the spoils of his wealth.

Mad for cycling (“as a cyclist you’re forced to be an outlaw”), he falls off his bicycle in the woods one day and hits his head. He decides he doesn’t (and perhaps never had) like people. And he is much too nice. “Even when I’m alone and I’ve decided not to be nice, I’m nice. It’s a sickness.” He decides to straighten out his priorities and heads for the woods.

It is difficult to choose just one thing about Doppler that is so very intoxicating, for his adventures and his inherited attributes (“Chopper Doppler”) rival his philosophies for attention. We see the world from the cramped tent of a curmudgeon and we want to see more of him…as does everyone else he runs into. Having decided to be on his own, Doppler finds he has acolytes who follow him everywhere, starting with the moose…

I loved this short novel from its opening pages, mostly because Doppler is so very nice, and civilized. It laughs at the human condition while demonstrating that indeed we can’t really escape ourselves or each other. Perhaps this novel could only have been written by someone who’d experienced the angst and ennui of affluent society, and may only appeal to the same. I found it utterly refreshing and reassuring to find such high-minded humor in such a small package.

A word about the publisher: The House of Anansi Press is fast becoming my favorite press-to-watch for really fine, accessible selections of recent foreign-language literature translated into English.

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Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin

This novel has the best sense of place I’ve read in a long time. Theorin paints with a few words scattered through his dialog: sparse yellow-brown grass in a small meadow, low, gnarled juniper and moss-covered stones, wind, cold, limestone beaches, pointy firs. He writes of Öland Island, off the southeastern coast of Sweden. I waited until I finished the book to look up photographs, but you may want to have a look now. It is a large, scrubby island landscape with the ruins of a most intriguing castle.

The island is an inspired choice for a mystery setting because it has small year-round communities isolated in winter. Residents tend to be hardy and self-sufficient, relying on the ocean and the island to eke out a living. Theorin’s characters have closed personalities, with lots hidden, even from family. When a psychopath, Nils, is born into the midst of a small community, the group bears its troubles silently until Nils has to be corralled.

Theorin has made a series out of his mysteries set on Öland. It is the island that is reprised, not the characters. On his website, Theorin tells us that he wants to write a quartet of novels, one for each season of the year. Echoes of the Dead is the autumn novel. His second novel, The Darkest Room is set in the winter, and was published in 2008 to wild acclaim. Theorin’s third novel in the quartet, The Quarry, has been translated and was published last year in the UK. It should be available shortly in the U.S. An insightful reviewer has commented that Theorin is the least conventional of Swedish crime writers, and that this can be a disappointment to some, but that the “dailiness” of his novels gives readers an understanding of ordinary people’s lives. This may be the my favorite thing about these titles.


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The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Jansson captures not only a season but life itself with this short novel of a grandmother and her granddaughter summering on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The freshness of spring turns to the muggy veil of summer, and when August comes, our feelings of ending and loss are those we experience every year in this month.

Grandmother remains unnamed, perhaps to preserve that essential privacy that she explains to her friend Verner must always be reserved. But her granddaughter Sophia is six years old. Sophia’s mother has recently died, and her loss is little mentioned but much felt in a handful of remarks made by each throughout the time they spend together. How can an aging grandmother who is often aware of her diminished physical and mental capabilities relate to a six-year-old? About as well as a six-year-old can relate to a sixty-year-old…with difficulty, but with synergistic results. Life is a struggle no matter what creature we are, and we can’t always control the things that will affect us. But we can do the best we can and allow God to handle the rest. “The thing about God, she thought, is that He usually does help, but not until you’ve made an effort on your own.”

I have not read Jansson’s series of books for children yet, called the Moomin books, but they are described in NYRB’s introduction by Kathryn Davis thus: “the Moomin books—pictures in which creatures of cartoonlike simplicity comport themselves in a painstakingly detailed natural world…” Jansson describes the island habitat of The Summer Book with Zen-like clarity:

She saw the conical depression in the sand at the foot of the blade of grass and the wisp of seaweed that had twined around the stem. Right next to it lay a piece of bark. If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools. The scrap of bark was beautiful and dramatic. It rested above its shadow on a single point of contact, and the grains of sand were coarse, clean, almost gray in the morning light, and the sky was completely clear, as was the sea.”

The characters in this book for adults, however, are not “cartoonlike in their simplicity.” They are rich with feelings of anger, spitefulness, tiredness, boredom, as well as joy, happiness, pleasure, and love. The grandmother can be crotchety to the point of sharpness, and little Sophia surprises us with adult words and emotions newly learned. But the two feed each other’s imaginations: they create a sea-side Venice, furnish a magic forest, and set off in journeys of discovery. Together they create a world neither would give away for any other.

A friend has shared a website on Tove Jansson with essential facts and pictures. She was Finnish, born in 1914 and died in 2001. She was born into a warm, open-hearted home in which both parents were artists and storytelling was prized. She became a painter and writer. In another blogpost, we get pictures of Tove Jansson’s mother with Tove’s niece, Sophia, and the picture makes the entire book come clear. This is a wonderfully atmospheric story that will allow you to experience summer at any time of the year.




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The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

Paperback, 438 pgs, Pub 2009 by Aschehoug (first published January 1st 2007) Orig Title: Snømannen ISBN13: 9788203194788 Edition Language: Bokmål, Norwegian; Norwegian Bokmål, Series: Harry Hole #7, The Oslo Sequence #5, Characters: Harry Hole, Rakel, Katrine Bratt, Oleg setting: Oslo (Norway) Bergen (Norway) Literary Awards: Bokhandlerprisen (2007)

One has to ask oneself why Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø would create a mystery series with a protagonist named Harry Hole. Even allowing for the idiosyncracies of translation, this is a character with something to prove. He is teetering on the edge of a hole, which is growing larger the longer he works for the Norwegian Police Force on serial killings. He struggles with alcohol addiction, is separated from his wife and her child, and is accused by his colleagues of seeing serial killers in every new murder. But he also has a celebrity of a sort: he is the only member of the Norwegian police force to have trained with the FBI in Quantico, VA; he has worked briefly on serial killings in Australia; and he is a sought-after TV panelist and personality. He is therefore a large target, both for the resentments of his lesser-known colleagues, but also for excitement-seeking women and…serial killers looking for a challenge.

The Snowman is the first of the Nesbø oeuvre I’ve read, although it is also his most recent novel to be translated into English. I should also say I’m a real fan of dark Scandinavian mystery series like those of Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indriðason, Helene Turston, Karin Fossum, among others. These series tend to feature grisly sex crimes along with buckets of blood, and more than one corpse. In this particular offering, Nesbø creates an intricate and complicated decades-long mystery in which a dozen people are murdered before the police understand what they are dealing with. By this time, Hole has become the man everyone (including the killer) is hoping will be chief investigator.

Young, married women with children disappear and a snowman made from a season’s first snow has been found in the vicinity of their disappearances. The women are found sometime later, dismembered usually. What links them is what Detective Inspector Harry Hole must find out.

The audio version of this title is a fine way to enjoy the mystery. It is narrated by Robin Sachs in 15.5 hours. If that sounds long, remember that this is a complicated tale, but Nesbø keeps it taut and moving along. If I had one complaint, it was that the author seemed reluctant to allow the story to end, and wanted to explain perhaps more than was needed. But for those who crave a dark tale of woe for long winter nights and appreciate the peculiarly Scandinavian sense of dread, this will be a very good introduction to the work of Jo Nesbø.




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Summer Reads from Three Bloggers

Porter Square Books

-- a BOTNS Boston event --

When: June 3, 2011
Where: Cambridge, MA
Porter Square Books

[Courtesy of http://portersquarebooks.com/]

Three bloggers shared their best recommendations for summer reads with us:

• Melanie Yarbrough of The Things They Read
• Marie Cloutier of BostonBibliophile
• Ann Kingman of Books on the Nightstand

Melanie writes, but also blogs. Though she usually reads and writes fiction, Melanie recommended two nonfiction memoirs for summer reads:

1. A Widow's Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates
   
   
   
   
   
2. 
   Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason by Anne Roiphe

Marie buys books at bookstores like rest of us, scanning shelves and tables for something to catch her eye. Summer Reads for her are big, enveloping books that bring you somewhere new. Melanie recommended three books and you can see what she says about her choices here:

1. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Heliopolis by James Scudamore

Ann Kingman has found her calling as a podcaster. When she starts telling of her summer reads, her voice becomes slow and honeyed. One settles back for storytime, and when she says, "I just couldn't put it down," we know we must see these books:

1. Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. The Snowman by Jo Nesbø
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
   
   
   
   
   

Finally, some listeners at the gathering wanted to make their recommendations for summer reads:

• Anything by Bill Bryson on audio;
• Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
• Three Seconds by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström, translated by Kari Dickson. I reviewed this book last month.
• Tibet Underground 1939(?) by Jinzo Nomoto, or maybe it was Japanese Agent in Tibet by Hisao Kimura. He wasn't sure, but it sounded great!
• My recommendation is a brand-new (comes out August 1, 2011) genre-smashing, wildly good stand-alone Reginald Hill called The Woodcutter. Put it on your lists so you don't forget--you'll love it!

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Simply Great Breads by Daniel Leader with Lauren Chattman

I wrote a review in a post before I tried the Yeasted Pancakes. Now I'm just going to rave about these: I have NEVER have I tasted anything to rival the creamy lightness of these pancakes. In fact, it is laughable that they are even called pancakes. They should have another name--like crepes have a different name because they have a different texture, these are a different class altogether. Maybe something like a pan-fried doughnut, but far more elegant and without the greasy overtones 'doughnut' implies. It has a melt-in-your-mouth not-too-sweet airy perfection that will take any added fruit, fruit sauce, or drizzle of maple syrup and make your family/guests swoon with pleasure. Best of all, you make the batter the night before and have a coffee before you do anything more strenuous than take the batter out of the frig.


At first I thought this a collection for entertaining. It has a marvelous set of breakfast breads, rolls, and specialties that one would probably not make every week for oneself, especially if one had a busy schedule, but may want to do as a special treat for family or if a guest were coming. Or perhaps if one had a tea shop, one could offer specials each day. The yeasted tarts and schiacciata, or flatbreads something like focaccia, make me think of brunches, afternoon teas, cool and sweetly delicious white wines, and casually elegant lunches for delighted and delightful friends. But you know what? I really like this collection so much I would probably use it to fill in all week when I run out of something--and to treat myself.


The array of flatbreads must be tried: Mana’eesh is a Middle Eastern olive oil-rich bread topped with dried thyme, sesame, and sumac. This was screamingly good in taste and texture. (Use some lemon peel if you have no sumac on hand.) But not only are secrets of the bread revealed (e.g., how to make the bread rise--or not--since it is intended to be flat), but the secret of the spice mixture, and the cooking of chicken topping that can adorn it, if one eats meat. In addition there are fry breads and donuts, bagels and bialys. The bialys were so much better than store-bought that I shall probably never buy another. I have yet to try to try the bagels, but look forward to it. (I have tried making bagels several times previously from variously sourced-recipes and all have been vaguely disappointing.)


Perhaps what I like most is that many of these breads can be most successfully made by preparing the biga or proofing dough the day before, which has the effect of lessening the work aspect of bread creation on the day of a big event, strengthening the texture, and enhancing the flavor. I prefer to make my breads this way now, since the flavor is so clearly impacted (I’m terribly spoiled) and I detest wasting an entire day to rising, kneading, shaping, etc. It has to fit in the schedule if it is going to be a part of my life.


I think this is a valuable addition to the library of even an occasional bread-maker because the flatbreads are nearly infallible, and this author uses a standing mixer to knead, which can take some of the mystery out of bread-making, but also gives access to many aspiring bakers. However I note the author, in his preface, suggests this is for the "serious baker with holes in their repertoire." I concede that one may take for granted the necessary oven stones and peels, brioche pans and experience of texture and stages of doneness, but this is too good not to share with everyone. Enjoy!



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