MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Henning Mankell We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE FIFTH WOMAN by Henning Mankell /2011/the-fifth-woman-by-henning-mankell/ /2011/the-fifth-woman-by-henning-mankell/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:10:30 +0000 /?p=22140 Book Quote:

“When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 19, 2011)

I first read this 1997 novel (the sixth in Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander series) in 2004, and saw the television adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh last year. So the general outline was familiar; I even knew who the murderer was going to be. All the same, I read the book this time with just as much enjoyment as on the first occasion, and with even more appreciation of detail of its texture. Unlike most detective novels, this one is less about the eventual solution than the process of getting there. The review from the Rocky Mountain News quoted on the back of my edition has it exactly right: “a police procedural in which the main procedure is thought.”

The first short chapter (following a brief prologue) ends with both a murder and (unusually) a glimpse of the murderer: an elderly man, coming out at night to listen to migrating birds, falls upon a group of sharpened bamboo stakes placed point-upwards in a pit; the person watching his agony from the shadows is a woman. Not that Inspector Wallander and his small team of detectives in Ystad, on the Southern coast of Sweden, realize this at first; the reader almost always knows a thing or two more than they do; the interest comes in seeing how they get there. More victims will follow; although different, the cases seem connected as different phrases in the same language that the murderer is using to communicate with the world. But this is no more than Wallander’s feeling; translating that language, finding factual connections between the victims, deducing the murderer’s motive, all this will be the work of many months.

A few weeks ago, after reading PD James’ THE PRIVATE PATIENT, I wrote a review entitled “TMI” (too much information). For almost 100 pages, James handled nothing but exposition, introducing almost the entire dramatis personae in separate chapters of great detail. Only then could the murder be committed and the work of detection begin. Mankell, by contrast, has almost no exposition at all. He plunges the reader immediately into the daily work of the Ystad police force, investigating an apparently minor crime, a break-in at a flower shop, that will turn out to have greater significance later. Mankell’s great strength is his grip of texture; he reveals information in bits and pieces, as would happen in life. You meet the officers in the station as a group who are doing a job; any personal details you might discover about them come up almost accidentally, just as they might among colleagues in the workplace; the one exception is Wallander, whose family relationships do play a small part, but their effect is to emphasize the difficulty of balancing his personal and professional life. Although this is the sixth book in a series, there is none of those tedious side-bar summaries for those who missed the earlier novels, and the reader has no sense of being left out either. You never doubt that this is a real world, not something concocted for your entertainment.

A less realistic crime novel might filter the information reaching the investigators so that everything is either a Clue or a Red Herring. Mankell does nothing of the sort; business at the Ystad station does not stop for the murders, and much information comes in that has little directly to do with them — things such as the formation of a local vigilante group to make up for the perceived inefficiencies of the police. But vigilantism does turn out to be a running theme in this novel, and yet one more example of Mankell’s underlying subject: the rapid decline of law and order in Sweden. He sees it as an age where it is easier to throw something away than take responsibility for it, an era “when people stopped darning their socks.”

Mankell’s novels have all tended to balance an inner focus on a small area of Sweden against an awareness of the outer world, especially Africa, where Mankell lives for part of each year. Even so hermetic a novel as the excellent Italian Shoes (not a Wallander story) has tentacles reaching into other continents. Of note, in one of his most recent novels, The Man from Beijing, in my opinion the balance tipped too far towards the global scene, losing the meticulous sense of local life which is his anchor. It would appear that The Fifth Woman also has an African connection; the prologue begins with a killing in the Sahara: four nuns and a fifth woman, a Swedish tourist, whose death has been suppressed by the local authorities. The back cover suggests that the fate of this Fifth Woman will be integral to the solution of the case, but the connection is merely catalytic. The true meaning of the title will appear as other women appear in the Swedish shadows, and the half-seen world has deadly impact on the real one.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 50 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:

 
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> /2011/the-fifth-woman-by-henning-mankell/feed/ 0 ITALIAN SHOES by Henning Mankell /2011/italian-shoes-by-henning-mankell/ /2011/italian-shoes-by-henning-mankell/#comments Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:36:18 +0000 /?p=19569 Book Quote:

“A naked man in the freezing cold, with an axe in his hand, opening up a hole in the ice? I suppose, really, that I hope there will be someone out there one of these days, a black shadow against all the white — somebody who sees me and wonders if he’d be able to stop me before it was too late.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUL 31, 2011)

This is a compact sonata of a novel, composed in four “movements.” The title of the last, “Winter Solstice,” might have been a better title for the whole book, set mainly on a small frozen island off the coast of Sweden. It is certainly an appropriate image: the solstice is the darkest part of the year; after it, the days will get longer, but it will still be winter for a long time. This is a book about resurrection, thaw, the slow flowering of the frozen spirit, but it promises few miracles, and even at the end there are setbacks and reversals — a feeling Nordic people must know well in their long wait for Spring.

Fredrik Welin lives alone on his rocky Baltic island, in a decaying house with an anthill slowly engulfing the table in the living room, breaking the ice on the sea each morning for the chilling plunge that is his principal means of assuring himself that he is still alive. He is not a good person, as other characters in the book will tell him; he is too ready to shrug off his responsibilities. As a young man, he abandoned a woman who loved him. Later, at the height of his career as a surgeon, he abandoned medicine after one horrible mistake. Now in his sixties, he has essentially abandoned life. His only contact with the outside world is the irritating mailman; “it’s not easy when your closest friend is somebody you dislike.”

Then one day he sees a figure on the snow outside his door, an old woman with a walker. It is a figure from his past come back to claim him, to demand an accounting for broken promises, implacable as a Fury, yet offering gifts in return: the opportunity once again to care about others, to move beyond his island fastness, to find a family. Rebirth is painful, and the book is full of violence and anger — but also happiness. Twice, the emotions are so strong that Welin flees back to his island. His is by no means a steady progress, more like a game of Chutes and Ladders; there is one especially shocking turnaround just as you think you’re coming into the home stretch. Mankell resolutely avoids easy endings; but the understated ending he does write is quietly moving and absolutely true.

There are several different Henning Mankells. Welin’s imperfections as a family man are an extension of Kurt Wallander of the detective novels, only without the crime. He has used the Baltic archipelago setting before in his WW1 psychodrama Depths, but this novel is modern, and thankfully less psychotic. Less isolated too, but the global politics that have been a concern of several of his later novels, most especially The Man from Beijing, are only a distant aura. But still a perceptible one; two of the women who enter Welin’s life are involved in a world beyond Sweden, mostly combating intolerance and greed. One of the characters has gone on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in search of God, but failed to find Him. “When I closed that church door behind me, there was nothing else left. But I realized that this emptiness was a sort of consolation in itself.” Mankell works with emptiness, turning it from negative space into a positive one, even a sacred space in a secular world. Long before Christianity, the Winter Solstice has always been associated with religious rites, a magic too mysterious for mere words.

And the title Mankell did choose? A small detail merely, a pair of handcrafted Italian Shoes, made over a period of months by an old Italian craftsman living in retirement in the Swedish forest. A sacrament also, they are a small example of the search for perfection, and a reminder of love where other loves have failed.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 35 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Henning Mankell
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> /2011/italian-shoes-by-henning-mankell/feed/ 0 THE TROUBLED MAN by Henning Mankell /2011/the-troubled-man-by-henning-mankell/ /2011/the-troubled-man-by-henning-mankell/#comments Sat, 09 Apr 2011 16:21:13 +0000 /?p=17284 Book Quote:

“Was his life really so restricted that major events taking place in the outside world never had much effect on him? What aspects of life had upset him? Pictures of children who had been badly treated, of course – but he had never been sufficiently moved to do anything about it. His excuse was always that he was too busy with work. I sometimes manage to help people by making sure that criminals are removed from the streets, he thought. But aside from that? He gazed out over the fields where nothing was yet growing, but he failed to find what he was looking for.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (APR 09, 2011)

Henning Mankell’s Wallender mystery series has come to an end with The Troubled Man, the last book in this popular series that was also made into several movies for public television with Kenneth Branaugh playing the part of Wallander. Wallander has turned sixty in this book and he is obsessed with looking back on life and not seeing much for his future except growing old. He dwells on the past a lot. At one point he considers entering a restaurant that he used to patronize, that had a waitress there he liked, but he changes his mind. “He knew why he didn’t go in, of course. He was afraid of finding somebody else behind the counter, and being forced to accept that here too, in that café, time had moved on and that he would never be able to return to what now lay so far away and in the past.”

Wallander is a police detective who carries the world on his shoulders. He suffers from diabetes, drinks too much and is very lonely. He often dwells on the dark side of life. After his fiftieth birthday party, thrown by his colleagues, he starts to write a list of everyone he knew who has died. The list depresses him so much that he has to stop because there are so many suicides on the list.

Recently, Wallender went on a drinking binge and for some reason took his police revolver with him, leaving it at a restaurant. He was reported and put on administrative leave. During the time he is on leave, his daughter Linda has a baby. This is the one bright spot in his life. He agrees to go to Linda’s prospective father-in-law’s 75th birthday party. While there, Linda’s prospective father-in-law, Hakan Von Enke, tells him a very troubling story. Early in the 1980’s, while he was in the navy, he was an officer on a Swedish submarine. The Swedish submarine detected a Russian submarine in Swedish waters where it should not be. Remember, this was still the height of the cold war. The protocol was to scare the ship and if the ship did not retreat, the protocol was then to drop depth charges to force it to the surface. For some unknown reason, the commander was told to leave the ship alone. The ship was let go and Von Enke has become obsessed with what or who was behind this order. On top of that, he is acting fearful, as though there is someone after him. At one point in his conversation with Wallender, he hears a noise and his hand goes inside his jacket. Wallender suspects that Von Enke is carrying a gun. There is also someone suspicious lurking outside the window.

A short time after Wallender and Von Enke have this talk, Von Enke disappears. He leaves for his morning walk and never returns. On top of that, Louise, his wife, also disappears some time later. Wallender decides that he needs to look for them and find out what happened. After all, they are Linda’s prospective in-laws. He is still on administrative leave when he begins to look for them, fairly sure that their disappearance is connected in some way to the story about the submarine. Wallender gets to learn a lot more about the cold war than he ever knew before. Once Wallender is back at his job, though he is not officially part of the investigation to find the von Enkes, he continues to look for them. Suffice it to say, nothing is what it seems and the plot unfolds with many unexpected twists and turns leaving the reader spellbound. Most importantly, this book reflects real life and the consequences, both intended and unintended, of past actions.

Though this is a mystery, it is much less action driven than a typical American mystery. We get to know a lot about Wallender: his fears about aging, his loneliness, his philosophy of life and his generalized depressive attitude. The book has many twists and turns but is ultimately character driven. It is a fine book about a detective that has won the hearts of many readers. I know that I will miss him a lot. However, Mankell is very versatile and besides mysteries he has recently written a fine book called Daniel. Whatever genre Mankell chooses to continue with, I look forward to reading his books.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 65 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Henning Mankell
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> /2011/the-troubled-man-by-henning-mankell/feed/ 0 DANIEL by Henning Mankell /2010/daniel-by-henning-mankell/ /2010/daniel-by-henning-mankell/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:22:54 +0000 /?p=14144 Book Quote:

“I’m a little boy, he thought. I have travelled much too far away. My parents and the other people I lived with are dead. And yet they live. They are still closer to me than the man called Father and the woman who doesn’t dare come close enough for me to grab her. My journey has been much too long. I am in a desert I do not recognize, and the sounds that surround me are foreign.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (DEC 15, 2010)

Sometimes we open a book and become totally immersed. We are enthralled. That’s how I felt while reading Daniel by Henning Mankell. Traditionally known for his Swedish mysteries in the Wallander series, Mankell travels far afield from his usual writing in Daniel. Here we are given the treasures of writing that examine the internal, the stuff of the heart and mind. It is a small book in size but it is huge in scope and packs a big wallop.

In the Kalahari Desert in 1878 live a group of Bushmen known as the San people. They are being raped and pillaged by the Colonialists who murder every one they can. When 9 year-old Molo’s family is killed, he is in hiding and manages to escape the rampage. He is eventually caught, however, by a Swedish man named Anderssen who puts him in a small cage and pulls him to the nearest settlement. There he is seen by Hans Bengler, a Swedish wannabe scientist, who trades something for him. Hans calls Molo “Daniel” and requires that Daniel call him “father.” Neither knows the other’s language. Daniel pines for his parents, Be and Kiko.

Bengler has traveled to Africa to collect insects and with the goal of finding an insect never catalogued before.  After he finds a beetle that he thinks has never been seen in Europe, he returns to his home in Sweden and brings Daniel with him. Daniel keeps trying to escape in order to get back to his home in the sand so Bengler resorts to tying him up at night.

The first part of the story is in the form of a long letter written by Bengler to a prostitute he used to visit regularly in Sweden. He tells Matilda of his adventures, of finding the beetle and finding Daniel. Bengler teaches Daniel to speak some Swedish and how to open and close doors with the appropriate etiquette. He also teaches him to bow and to say “My name is Daniel and I believe in God.” Naturally Daniel is not aware of what his words mean but he is supposed to say them to everyone he is introduced to. Bengler has some plans for Daniel but he has little money and all the plans fall through, including showing Daniel off in a circus.

Most Swedes in the nineteenth century have never seen a black boy before and Daniel is a new sight for them. Along with Bengler, Daniel goes through one sad set of affairs after another. Not knowing the culture, Daniel doesn’t know the basic things such as how to eat, where to urinate, how to dress. He’s never worn shoes before and hates the feel of them on his feet. He begins to pick up the language but attempts to remain mute. He listens and observes, trying not to speak.

The second part of the book is told from Daniel’s perspective. His culture becomes known to the reader as Daniel dreams about his parents and they give him advice and are with him emotionally. Daniel wants to join them again and to do this he thinks he must learn to walk on water so that he can return to Africa. He practices walking on water but can not master the task. He even asks a minister how Jesus managed to walk on water and is met with anger. Daniel finally realizes that he will never master this task and his heart sinks. He must find another way to return to his land.

During the course of Daniel’s struggles to return home, he is witness to atrocities committed by Bengler, sent to live with another family and has his life turned upside down multiple times. What keeps him sane are the memories of his family and their visits to him in his thoughts and dreams. He especially wants to return home to the sand so that he can finish a drawing of an antelope that has religious and mystical meaning for him. Daniel meets a young woman who is emotionally disturbed and the two of them decide to try and travel to Africa together.

Daniel of the Old Testament was a prophet, a captive, and received an education. In a metaphorical sense, Mankell’s Daniel meets these criteria. However, he never accepts his “new” home and does not advance in society as the biblical Daniel does. Mankell’s Daniel, even at the young age of 9 years old, is a person of deep roots and memory. He knows where his home is and where his bearings are.

This is a deep book, a book of journeys and pitfalls, but Daniel never gives up. No matter what he must face, he knows where he needs to go and what he must do to find himself and his home. Mankell, who lives part-time in Sweden and part-time in Mozambique, has created a small masterpiece and has shown his ability to change genres and create something new and wonderful. (Translated by Stephen T. Murray.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-9from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: New Press, The (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Henning Mankell
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> /2010/daniel-by-henning-mankell/feed/ 0 THE MAN FROM BEIJING by Henning Mankell /2010/man-from-the-beijing-by-henning-mankell/ /2010/man-from-the-beijing-by-henning-mankell/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:38:15 +0000 /?p=7850 Book Quote:

“I understand that this letter will wreak havoc with your investigation. But what we are all searching for, of course, is clarity. I hope that what I have written can contribute to that…. The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances built on facts, is the day on which our system of justice collapses completely.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (FEB 16, 2010)

Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing, ably translated by Laurie Thompson, opens in January 2006. It is eerily quiet in the northern Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen. No smoke rises from the chimneys and not a soul stirs. A photographer studying deserted villages in Sweden arrives and knocks on doors, but no one answers. Fearing that something is wrong, he breaks into one of the houses and to his horror, “there was an old woman lying on the kitchen floor. Her head was almost totally severed from her neck. Beside her lay the carcass of a dog, cut in two.” This isolated place will soon make headlines as the scene of a massacre “unprecedented in the annals of Swedish crime.” An unknown assailant used an extremely sharp weapon to torture and cut up his victims.

After Detective Vivian Sundberg and her team survey the carnage, they call for reinforcements, but even experienced law enforcement officials are stymied by the slaughter of nineteen people, most of them elderly. Equally puzzling is the fact that three individuals living in Hesjövallen were left alive. A district judge, fifty-seven year old Birgitta Roslin, has a personal interest in the matter (her mother grew up in Hesjövallen), and we get to know Roslin intimately. She takes her job seriously, suffers from recurrent panic attacks and high-blood pressure, has four grown children whom she sees infrequently, and worries about the future of her passionless marriage. Her fate will be inextricably tied up with the mass murder, which grew out of terrible events whose roots lie in the distant past.

The beginning of the book has an epic sweep and is absolutely mesmerizing. Mankell takes us to China in 1863, where the peasants live in squalor and are oppressed by wealthy and avaricious landowners. The author poignantly recounts the odyssey of three orphaned brothers who travel to Canton to find work. Eventually, they cross the path of predators who transport them in chains to the United States, where they spend many backbreaking hours cleaving mountains and laying rail lines for the transcontinental railroad. Because one of the brothers manages to survive long enough to leave a detailed diary, the tale of his family’s suffering will have grave consequences more than a century later.
Birgitta, whose mother grew up with foster parents in Hesjövallen, uses her sharp judicial mind to form a theory about the killings, based on the fact that a Chinese man was seen in the vicinity of Hesjövallen around the time of the murders. Since the police do not take her ideas seriously, she takes advantage of an opportunity to visit China with an old friend, Karin. There, Birgitta visits the Forbidden City, sees the Great Wall, and reminisces about her younger years as a radical who supported Mao’s ideals of solidarity and liberation. She also tries to learn the identity of the man behind the mass execution in Sweden. Unfortunately, her inquiries place her in danger, since she is being watched by a powerful and psychotic villain who will dispose of her if she gets too close to the truth.

Here, the novel starts to lose steam, as Mankell not only reveals the identity of the killer (a one-dimensional monster), but also introduces too many extraneous characters and subplots. Also irritating is the incredible ineptitude of the Swedish police, who are so clueless that Birgitta has to do their job for them. In addition, the pace of the narrative is slowed by tedious and heavy-handed passages in which various individuals lecture about China’s path to the future. Should this emerging superpower make more of an effort to stay true to its communist roots instead of succumbing to the lures of capitalism? Mankell has combined a crime story with a depiction of a female jurist’s midlife crisis and a polemic about China’s efforts to become a worldwide economic and political force. This is far too much baggage for one work of fiction.

The Man from Beijing might have been more satisfying had the author focused throughout on the massacre and on Birgitta’s efforts to solve the mystery and put her troubled life back together. As it stands, Mankell has written half of a good novel. The second half is a bit dreary and diffuse, and it will take some persistence to stay the course for the entire 366 pages.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 186 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (February 16, 2010)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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