Book Report

I read on The Local where the BBC is adapting a series of films from the mystery novels of Swedish writer Henning Mankell. Kenneth Brannagh is set to portray Det. Kurt Wallander in the films so I figured I'd read one of the books before I saw any of the films. I wanted to see what the books were all about before Brannagh puts his stamp on the character, so I went to my local library and I checked out the first Kurt Wallander mystery to be translated into English:
I can honestly say while this is the finest Swedish mystery I have ever read, it left me kind of cold. Pun intended.

It was not so much a mystery as it was a novel about a Swedish cop who while trying to catch the murderers of an old Swedish farmer and his wife goes through some bad shit in his personal life. Wallander's wife has left him before the novel starts and he's wallowing in self pity over the break up of his marriage, his daughter is estranged from him, his father is teetering on the brink of dementia or Alzheimer's, he's got the hots for a married co-worker, and he's got drinking problems. And to top everything else off he's got to deal with a wave of anti immigrant sentiment that is sweeping his country.

You get a very acute sense of place in this book. Mankell's Sweden is one of small towns filled with lots of people with all kinds of secrets to keep. The rain, fog, snow, and ice hang over everything. When he writes about the warmer months in his book you get the sense that the harsh Swedish winter shapes things even then.

I liked this book not because I thought the plot and characters were all that great, in fact I didn't think they were that great at all. Nope, I liked it because it gave me a snapshot into a country that I'll probably never visit and because like foreign films tell stories in ways that are different than the way American filmmakers tell them, this novel was laid out and told differently than the way most Western mystery writers tell them.

I may not ever read another Kurt Wallander mystery but I'm glad I read this one.