A Swedish critique

Reading my way through the crime decalogue of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, the famous Swedish writers, creators of police detective Martin Beck. This latest reading spree was triggered by finding the first volume in a bookshops' discount bin on a pavement in Picton. (Fortunately, Wellington's central library has most of the others, recently republished by Harper Perennial).

Many emotions are swirling around us here at the moment as people we care about suddenly lose their jobs and are in financial trouble. So I escape briefly into this other world. I have read five books so far, without analysing very much. It is a relief that they are both intelligent and light.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö were a wife and husband team. Their aim was to provide an accurate description of police at work (what is called 'police procedural') while also depicting Swedish society and its problems: they were communists and readers may often themselves siding with the common man, the worker struggling to makes ends meet whereas rich insensitive folk live it up.

Given what is happening in the world economically, their point of view seems pretty accurate to me: destruction of the middle classes, while a vast proletariat is created which exists purely as a market for the goods and services churned out by the wealthy one percenters. A return to the social structure of the Victorian era.

The Occupy movement had a point, even though their efforts were disjointed and lacked clear goals.

Added some days later : Read their last book in the Martin Beck series, The Terrorists. Some parts of it read like a political tract, but it is still a page-turner. And their last word is 'Marx'.

Concerning

From Bodil Malmsten's blog Finistere - translated from Swedish with the help of Google Translate:

Mitt Romney, tax evader, presidential candidate
Vanity Fair August 2012

Sweden is not the United States. This is not America, but still. The money, all Mitt Romney's money, his personal money, private equity, how much money banks and big companies donate to Mitt Romney's campaign; how we think when we think about money, whether we consider the distribution of money, how we think about taxes, how we think about having and not having, how we think about money - this is not about Mitt Romney, the elections in the US - this concerns everyone everywhere, every day.

Henning Mankell

First day back at my desk after a long long holiday - no writing, lots of reading.

The latest book was by Henning Mankell, who is Swedish and writes great thrillers and absolutely bad novels. (There is more to him than that, you can look it up on one of the many fan sites.)

His detective inspector is a classic, getting old on his own, with an ex-wife he loves and a daughter he does not see as often as he would like to. The stories take place in a little town in Sweden, which reminds me - maybe wrongly - of a windswept Dutch town by the sea where I spent a holiday when I was young. I enjoy the Swedishness he describes, it satisfies my curiosity about that country.

The novels on the other hand seem to be all ego - one suspects that the central character in Italian Shoes is Mankell himself, in character if not in actual fact, living by himself on a remote island - the second time Mankell has used that setting. Mankell intrudes into his novels, both telling and showing. His female characters have no depth, they seem to differ only in name, despite diverse backgrounds and different ages. The interactions can be violent and unexpected - they don't always make psychological sense. In this book, the best-drawn character is the hypochondriac postman, I'd have liked to hear more about him.
Mankell overwhelms us with unnecessary detail - I suspect that he writes down everything that he sees and hears and that everything goes into his books, maybe because it is real. Real does not always make good reading.

If you read Mankell, stick to his Inspector Wallander stories, they are truly good. One of them was recently selected by a well-known US newspaper as a best-seller. And a film is being produced too.

Gotta go.