Firewall

Firewall

By Henning Mankell

Forget Afghanistan.

Forget the Congo. Never mind Somalia, Rwanda or Colombia. Safe havens, all of them, compared to the world's most dangerous country. If the novels of Henning Mankell serve as any indication, the country in which you are most likely to be murdered in cold blood is undoubtedly Sweden. And it's not run-of-the-mill sort of violence one needs to fear while traveling the Great White Nørd but rather the grisly variety. The sorts of crimes that require a full forensic team to identify the remains. The sort of crimes that have remains rather than simply bodies. Mexico City is as secure as a bank compared to Stockholm, Malmo and Ystad.

Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander Series serves as a reminder to anyone thinking of traveling or (worse!) relocating to Scandinavia: Think twice, O weary traveler for thou goest forth into the realm of Scandinavian Crime fiction, the most specific pop culture genre after Spaghetti Westerns, Lucha Libre and German Scheiße videos.

Firewall is the eighth book in the Kurt Wallander Series but it is only the second (after Faceless Killers, the first in the series) that I have read personally. Firewall begins with the seemingly senseless and disturbingly violent (of course) murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls. Another man dies a natural death on the other side of town. But slowly Wallander and the Ystad Police Department begin to piece together a cyber-conspiracy that combines the two cases and expands its reach intercontinentally. Along the way there are any number of grisly and disturbing murders (just in case the original murder wasn't gristly and disturbing enough). And to think there are seven novels preceding Firewall (and that doesn't even account for the uncountably number of murders that occur in the novels of Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo). Given the population density compared with the total number of violent murders, well... Scandinavia is a dangerous place.

I was a bit concerned about jumping to book eight in the series. I worried that i was breaking the continuity of the narrative, and there were some unavoidable spoilers along the way, but I was surprised how well Henning was able to contain the story within the confines of Firewall without divulging the previous stories. I like that can always go back and read any of the books I skipped knowing that I haven't the faintest idea what will happen.

However, the jump was a little awkward in that it was a little like watching the original Rocky and then skipping to Rocky V without watching the slow degeneration of the series along the way. While I don't think the Wallander Series suffered the sort of fall Rocky suffered along the way, there did seem to be a degree of implausibility to the plot in Firewall that didn't exist in Faceless Killers. I wonder whether Mankell spent seven books upping the ante to the point where Firewall's narrative wouldn't have seemed so outlandish to someone who had read the entire series up to that point.

Furthermore, Firewall is not the sort of novel that could have aged well. Books that rely heavily on technology never do. It was published in 2002 and Mankell spends a lot of time explaining terms, such as "firewall", "server" and "code," that most of us understand, at least in principal, nowadays. Even if you aren't computer savvy, a reader in 2013 doesn't need a half page explanation about how banking transactions can be performed over the Internet. Naturally, Mankell could not have foreseen a world in which this would be common knowledge and nit-picking over a few dated references shouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this novel. But forewarned is forearmed.

But where the storytelling lapses into the realm of the dated or the implausible, the actual writing remains consistent to what a fan of Scandinavian Crime Fiction should expect. Ebba Segerberg's translation is hauntingly austere and completely lacking in idioms giving the novel a cold, stainless steel tone. As with Faceless Killers, Firewall reads like a veritable policing manual on how to (and sometimes how not to) run an investigation. Readers will enjoy the almost belabored way in which Mankell presents the facts of a case, dissects them and divides them, rethinks them and rehashes them and then does it again every time a new piece of information becomes available to the investigating team.

The constant reinterpretation of the facts is not only helpful to the reader but also in accordance to what a detective would do throughout an investigation. For all Firewall's implausibility, Mankell remains loyal to the spirit of policing in that he has written a consummate police force, but one that suffers from the same politics as real life forces. A police force that often stumbles and bumbles under pressure. A police force that is often understaffed and unappreciated. A police force that is populated by real people with real problems and real lives.

One might say that Mankell has written a wonderful novel about a typical police force, but this is the Scandinavia of the literary world. Mankell's typical police force is destined to clean up the world's most atypical crimes. And while Stockholm may weep, readers should rejoice.

But it's no wonder Wallander is consistently threatening to retire.

South of the Border, West of the Sun

South of the Border, West of the Sun

By Haruki Murakami

If you've never read a novel by Haruki Murakami, let me try to explain exactly what you should expect...

Imagine the most detailed dream you have ever dreamed. Imagine it stretching, not over a single REM cycle or even an entire night's sleep but rather an entire lifetime of sleep. Thousands and thousands of hours spent in a single forever-morphing dream. A dream so loosly-plotted that one suspects there is no plot whatsoever. Ah... but there is. All dreams have some sort of plot, even if we can't immediately identify it.

Imagine that an artist was able to render this epic dream of yours onto a canvas the size of a barn wall. Imagine that every square inch of that canvas was painted so meticulously that you needed a magnifying glass to appreciate the attention to detail. Where's Waldo? meets Jackson Pollock meets Inception. Your entire lifetime of dreams perfectly encapsulated on the side of a barn.

Now, imagine zeroing in on a section of that massive dream art. A section, perhaps the size of a standard Post-It note. 10cm x 10cm, perhaps. Imagine focusing in on that specific corner of the piece and scrutinizing it. There's still a lot going on in this tiny section of dream. It's that detailed! Go over the section with a fine-toothed comb. Rake it for every last feature. Uncover every single secret it has to offer. Open cupboards, find skeletons, read blood-splattered letters in dusty old drawers, decipher codes embedded in people's retinas. Understand and learn everything within that tiny fragment of your dream.

Imagine, then, taking that tiny section of dream and creating a three dimensional hologram of its area. Turning it and shifting it and examining it from every angle you can conceive. Toy with the image. Play with it. Turn it to negative, make it sepia-toned, black and white, technicolor. Adjust the pixelation, view it in ultra-violet, infra-red, CMYK, RGB, pantone. Give it sound, adjust the treble, toggle the bass and the frequency. Convert it into a radio wave, a gamma wave, a microwave. Bend it and mold it like silly putty. Smell it, taste it and feel each and every corner and crevasse of that dream fragment.

Imagine toying with that tiny section of your dream in every way you can envision. Imagine that tiny speck of your dream, that one trivial corner of your lifetime of dreams spelled out in infinite detail.

That's exactly what it's like to read a Murakami novel.

South of the Border, West of the Sun is another wild trip inside Murakami's barn wall.

The Snowman

The Snowman

By Jo Nesbo

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Scandinavians are morbid. They tend to be tall, blond-haired and blue eyed (as if that wasn't creepy enough). They have a propensity for burning churches. Their ancient mythology is brutal, savage and tragic and has spawned an entirely unlistenable sub-genre of metal music only appreciated in Scandinavia... and Brazil). They are just neat enough and tidy enough and socialist enough to make you assume they were all born Virgo and they seem to prefer their crime novels on the darker side of macabre.

(Aside: As if to accentuate the point, the Heavy Metal band, Morbid, was Swedish)

Whether it's the cyber-punk horrors of Steig Larsson's Millennium Series or the more sedate brutality of Henning Mankell's Wallander Series, the people of Norway and Sweden seem thrive on extreme violence and murder. When you add Jo Nesbo and his series of novels featuring Harry Hole into the mix, one has to wonder how three of the best (if not most morbid) writers of the last quarter century have all come from the Northern Europe. Must have something to do with lack of sunlight and fjords.

I mentioned three novelists, but as of the writing of this blog post, we seem to be down to just one. With the tragically premature death of Steig Larsson and the last of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels drifting ever so slowly out of the zeitgeist, it is Jo Nesbo that has remained to carry the torch of the Scandinavian crime fiction genre (that absurd title always reminds me of metal heads who go on and on about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal from the late 1970s). And much like Larsson with Lisbeth Salander and Mankell with Wallander, Nesbo has come equipped with a character every bit as intense and intoxicating as his predecessors: Harry Hole.

Detective Harry Hole is what would be produced if John McClane, Bruce Willis's legendary character from the Die Hard franchise somehow begat a child with Jimmy McNulty from The Wire. Brash, bold and dangerous but also self-destructive, and at times hopelessly lost and completely uncertain about his job, Harry Hole is a man with more personal demons than the people he arrests. He makes giant, terrible mistakes and, although not lacking in critical and analytical thinking, he makes wild, sweeping mistakes. Harry Hole is the Hamlet of Scandinavian crime fiction (though without the tragic endings). He is about the most humanized police officer you will ever read in a novel not written by Richard Price. While Lisbeth Salander is deftly hacking into your computer with nary a typo in her code, Harry Hole is mortally wounding the wrong person while trying to fight the urge to chuck a bottle of Jack Daniel's. How can you not root for this guy?

In fact, I spent a lot of time wondering whether Hole was a metaphor for how Nesbo views Norwegians on the world scene. At one point in the novel one of the characters, Arve Stop a media personality, laments that Norway loves the loser. Losers provide stories with grit and tragedy and pain. Winners are uninteresting by nature. One wonders whether Harry Hole is the embodiment of this sentiment. If so, Norwegians have a lot in common with Canadians. It comes with the territory of sidling up next to an economic  and military powerhouse. But I digress.

The Snowman recounts the events of Norway's first really artistic serial killer and it's up to Hole, Oslo's best if not brightest, to lead the investigation. The killer, dubbed the "The Snowman" due to his penchant for building snowmen at the scene of each of his crimes, has somehow flown under the radar of the police for a couple of years. When a new detective, Katrine Blatt, joins the Oslo police force she and Hole begin to make the connections between the victims of several missing persons reports. A series of increasingly grisly murder scenes seem to validate the assertion that they are dealing with something more than the average Norwegian gangland killings and Scandinavian church burners. As the crimes begin to spiral ever closer to Harry Hole, it becomes evident that the killer is engaging in a battle of wits with the policeman himself. Something rotten north of Denmark.

The story is incredibly complex with all sorts of the twists and turns one expects from good crime writing but without the implausible elements that leave many readers rolling their eyes. Often a writer tries to make that one last twist to shake off those final readers who may have actually solved the mystery before the protagonist leaving a bitter taste of the ludicrous in the reader's mouth. Nesbo doesn't go in for such shenanigans. While Nesbo certainly serves enough twists and red herrings to open a seafood bar and grill, they were done with the panache of a writer working at the top of his game. It took the entire first half of the novel for me to realize that trying to stay ahead of the investigation was futile because Nesbo was manipulating the reader with the deft and clarity of vision. Nesbo knew exactly where both the story and the reader were going.

I admit, I had the culprit pegged somewhere toward the end of the second third of the novel but it didn't seem to matter. In fact, I'm actually pretty confident that Nesbo wanted me to guess the killer by then. Like the characters in his book, Nesbo was playing me right into his hands. Knowing the killer hardly dissuaded from the enjoyment of the novel. I simply needed to understand how it all went down. I continued on, often like a reader possessed. The Snowman is so psychologically intense that over the course of the week I spent reading it, my wife repeatedly asked whether something was bothering me. I would always answer with: "Yes... The Snowman is bothering me."

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the superb translation done by Don Bartlett from the original Norwegian. Obviously, I didn't read this in its original language (my Norwegian is a little rusty after 37 years of having never once studied it) but Bartlett conveyed what I can only assume was the intensity and ferocity of the narrative without much compromise. What little may have been lost in translation was lost to me and if the story suffered as a result I was none the wiser.

If you are lamenting the end of the Wallander series or still in mourning over the untimely death of Steig Larsson and you haven't yet read or even heard of Jo Nesbo I strongly urge you to get out there and pick up a copy of The Snowman (or any of the other novels featuring Harry Hole). If you are already a

Seven Days at the Silbersteins

Seven Days at the Silbersteins

By Etienne Leroux

Living in a non-English speaking country is a challenge for a reader. For me, books are often hard to come by and while it's not impossible to get them (there are bookstores in Taipei, three hours by train and Amazon does ship to Taiwan), it can be feast or famine at times. while my Kindle has eased some of the worst famines, I'm certainly not living in a place of unlimited access to books.

Despite the challenge inherent to a reader in Taiwan, there is an interesting side-advantage that I never considered but turns out to be true. Living in a medium-sized city with a small population of English speakers from all over the world has provided me with the chance to read a wide assortment of English literature from countries I would otherwise have ignored (unwittingly, of course). If I still lived in Canada I would be inundated with Canadian and American literature with a smattering of English novels to fill the gaps. Aside from the odd worldwide curiosity, I would hardly get exposed to the depths of Australian literature, or New Zealander, or South African.

As it turns out, I've had the opportunity to read a lot of interesting books from around the world due to the fact that I live in an international expatriate community and Seven Days at the Silbersteins is a prime example of a book I would have never read otherwise.

Seven Days at the Silbersteins is a classic South African novel by Etienne Leroux. Originally published in Afrikaans in 1962, Seven Day at the Silbersteins is a classic in it's original language. I'm not sure if this book is widely available outside Sotuth Africa. This particular English translation was done by Charles Eglington. Needless to say, I imagine this book would be difficult to find in a North American bookstore. Despite such obscurity, Seven Days at the Silbersteins won the Herzog Prize, the highest award in Afrikaans literature.

On the surface it is the story of Henry Van Eeden, a young, well-educated South African who is escorted to the vast Silberstein estate by his uncle, J.J. in order to meet Salome, the young girl he is betrothed to marry. Henry spends seven days at the Silberstein's winery and cattle ranch (called Weldevonden) meeting the family (of which the enigmatic Jock reigns supreme), attending parties populated by eccentric gentry and farmers and, mysteriously enough, not meeting Salome. She is in attendance at all the functions, but Henry remains uncertain as to which guest is his fiancee until the very end. The surface story is the literary equivalent of a Three's Company episode.

But this novel cannot be read on a surface level. Leroux's prose is dense with philosophical and social implications. Written as a time of social awakening in South Africa, the text is a bizarre trip that examines the nature of good versus evil, the essence of salvation, the formlessness of being and the divine among a plethora of other themes. At another level, Seven Days at the Silbersteins is a literary awakening of the Afrikaans voice at a time when South Africa was itself awakening from several decades of crippling apartheid to find themselves increasingly the pariah on the world stage. I get the impression that this novel and its highly liberal ideas when a long way toward softening the Afrikaans stance on race relations in South Africa, but I could be wrong.

The prose is so dense that it takes a linguistic machete to hack through its layers. One of the central themes of the book is the notion of reality vs. illusion and the book often diverges into bizarre twists and turns that are sometimes difficult to understand. Leroux is concerned with the the notion of masks and hidden realities and this not only comes out in the surface narrative but also on various philosophical levels. This obsession with illusion and reality is perfectly manifest in the ongoing interplay between the very real Henry and the illusory Salome, whose presence is entirely definite, but at the same time, entirely indefinite.

While the novel itself is short (only 157 pages) the writing is so dense and layered that it should be read slowly in order to really chew the philosophical fat. Each chapter represents a particular day and each chapter descends deeper into a world where very little is certain and everything seems possible. But don't get me wrong, aside from the deeper themes of the novel Seven Days at the Silbersteins is very much a piece of humor. Watching Henry stumble and bumble about his future in-laws estate, being continuously misunderstood and misinterpreted (often to his advantage) is a lesson in good comedic writing. The pacing is as it should be. Quick on story and long on thought.

If you are into philosophical comedy and/or Afrikaans literature (and I know you are!), this is as good a place to start.

Shout Out

Despite the fact that she has really culled back her posting recently (boo!), I really dig what Erin has to say over at Erin Reads. Excellent blog. Check her out!

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

By Milan Kundera

This novel is far too difficult to write about. It is a book with seven very loosely related narrative strands that, as the title suggests, center on the themes of laughter and forgetting. It's a damned good book. Far too good to have me hack away at the keyboard trying to dissect it for you.

See, I write my blogs on the same day I finish my books, so I'm not your best source for literary criticism. I'm really all about specific feeling of a reading. That's why I write what I write so quickly following the read. I don't want to get too far into my next book without chronicling what may have been on my mind during the previous book. If you're looking for literary criticism on the web, go to Publisher's Weekly.

Anyway, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a very textured narrative. Of course it is. It was written by Milan Kundera. It would be the acme of arrogance to assume that I can deconstruct (or even retell) a novel such as this in a forum such as this. I am simply not equipped, either chronologically or academically, to deal with this sort of book but I can say this: I thought it was The best book I've ever read by Milan Kundera. Immeasurably better than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It's much more personal, more human, more evocative. It strikes a deeper chord within and resonates. It echoes off of every fiber of your being an forces you to remember what you thought you had forgotten. It's a novel that could shatter your soul, or stitch it back together, depending on who you are, where you are and what you had for lunch. If there were a pop music equivalent it would be Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth. If it were a film it would be Donnie Darko. The Book of Laugher and Forgetting is a gift. One that is well left alone by the likes of me.

But there did exist a single sentence from this novel that struck me particularly hard and I wanted to share it with fellow bloggers and blog readers and lurkers alike. It a startling premonition of a world that Kundera had yet to behold in 1979.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Welcome to the blogosphere! Is anyone listening? Does anyone understand?

The Stranger (L'Etranger)

The Stranger (L'Etranger)

By Albert Camus

Translated by Matthew Ward

Yes, yes. Albert Camus is one of the most important 20th-century French writers and a Nobel Prize winning novelist.

Yes, yes. The Stranger is an exquisitely philosophical novel exploring the themes of colonialism, existentialism and nihilism.

Nihilism? Fuck me. I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos!

Yes, yes. Meursault is a champion of free will and a brave literary figure who personifies the meaninglessness of life.

Yes, yes. It's a great read.

All this is true and then some. The Stranger is a really good book on many levels. But the only thing I could think of while reading this novel was: "Well, now I know where The Cure got the title of the song Killing an Arab."

Am I wrong or am I just an asshole?

Every Man Dies Alone

Every Man Dies Alone

By Hans Fallada

"Would you rather live for an unjust cause than die for a just one?"

Every Man Dies Alone is Hans Fallada's extraordinary novel of crippling repression, resistance and the triumph of life in Germany under Nazi rule. It follows the compelling story of Otto and Anna Quangel, an aging couple whose only son has been unceremoniously killed in France early in the war. In response to their grief, they begin to write anti-Nazi postcards and drop them around Berlin. Although this is a work of fiction, this novel is based on the true story of Otto and elise Hampel who committed similar acts of civil disobedience and were executed in Plotzensee Prison. Italian chemist (and holocaust survivor) Primo Levi called Fallada's book: "The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis."

Concurrently, the novel follows the antics of several characters inside the Gestapo as try, fail, continue to fail and then ultimately succeed in solving the case. While the story of the Quangels and their circle of everyday Germans is interesting, I found the murderous and petty machinations of the Gestapo far more riveting, especially knowing that these monsters agents will eventually get their culprits and the fear that goes with not knowing exactly what they will do once they get them.

In discussing the Third Reich it is so easy to lose site of the fact that there existed a large population within Germany who actively plotted against the Party from distributing anti-Nazi leaflets to harboring their Jewish friends and neighbors.

Before I get to my more philosophical musings on this subject I should review this book a little. If you are looking for some light summer reading, pass this one by. I was glad that the weather remained gloomy and cold while I read this book, otherwise it would have really brought me down. Every Man Dies Alone is one of the bleakest books I have ever read. Along the lines of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and George Orwell's 1984, Every Man Dies Alone starts off bleak, remains bleak and ends on a sad note. However, along the way there are glimmers of hope and, like I mentioned before, the triumph of the human spirit.

To say that this book deals with some weighty issues is an understatement. To say that this book, first published in German in 1947 (not translated to English until 2009), has little value upon readers in 2011 is categorically false. I found that this book spoke to me in a way that many other books with similar themes have not. Through its bleak, hopeless tone, Hans Fallada speaks a message through the generations and, if anyone is listening, it could very well save us a repeat performance of these historical shenanigans.

When I started this book, I was caught up in a discussion over Facebook about the usefulness of conspiracy theories and whether or not their vocal and ofttimes obfuscating manner was not perhaps a detriment to a large cause of change and social justice. Whether a horde of people yelling often nonsensical theories perhaps clouded issues that might otherwise gain more tread in this world. I wasn't speaking against freedom of speech (I would never, ever do that), just the jumbling of messages that could be something more fluid, more tangible, more cohesive. Millions of voices screaming billions of theories seemed counter-productive against an establishment with one common, conservative and potentially dangerous voice.

After reading Fallada's novel and delving into the tyrannical fear of Nazi Germany, I think I may have changed my tone on this point. Shouting from the rafters is exactly the sort of thing we should all be doing, and often. Silence is equal to support. If you don't speak out when you have a chance, what will you do when you lose that chance? This is the sort of stuff we as citizens of this world are dealing with every hour of every day.

Got a problem with your leader? Do something about it. Dislike the environmental practices of a local industry? Make it known. Think someone in a position of power is lying to you? Call them on it. Sitting idly by and saying things like: "That's somebody else's problem" is exactly the sort of attitude that allowed for the emergence of the Nazi State in Germany and, given that Adolf Hitler is poised to exit from our collective consciousness in the next generation or so, this sort of rampant, oppressive power is very much ripe for a return. Question everything. We owe it to ourselves.

For Otto and Anna they began their revolution far too late but at least they had the guts to do something. Far better people did far less. They realized an inherent truth about their government at a time when doing even the smallest act against the state meant death not only for them but also for anyone associated with them. In a climate of crushing fear it's a wonder that people had the courage to do even as little as the Quangels. Far more simply kept quiet and hoped and waited for it all to end.

There is so much to gain from reading Every Man Dies Alone. This should be required reading for any student of critical thinking.

Silence can be violence.