Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION MAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION MAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION MAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION MAN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the internationally acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander crime novels, a powerful stand-alone novel set in early-twentieth-century Sweden and Mozambique, whose vividly drawn female protagonist is awoken from her naïveté by her exposure to racism and by her own unexpected inner strengths.
Cold and poverty define Hanna Renström's childhood in remote northern Sweden, and in 1904, at nineteen, she boards a ship for Australia in hope of a better life. But none of her hopes--or fears--prepares her for the life she will lead. After two brief marriages both leave her widowed, she finds herself the owner of a bordello in Portuguese East Africa, a world where colonialism and white colonists rule, where she is isolated within white society by her profession and her gender, and, among the bordello's black prostitutes, by her color. As Hanna's story unfurls over the next several years in this "treacherous paradise," she wrestles with a devastating loneliness and with the racism she's meant to unthinkingly adopt. And as her life becomes increasingly intertwined with the prostitutes', she moves inexorably toward the moment when she will make a decision that defies all the expectations society has of her and, more important, those she has of herself.
Gripping in its drama, evocative and searing in its portrait of colonial Africa, A Treacherous Paradise is, at its heart, a deeply moving story of a woman who manages to wrench wisdom, empathy, and grace from the most unforgiving circumstances.
Author Notes
Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm, Sweden on February 3, 1948. He left secondary school at the age of 16 and worked as a merchant seaman. While working as a stagehand, he wrote his first play, The Amusement Park. His first novel, The Stone Blaster, was released in 1973. His other works included The Prison Colony that Disappeared, Daisy Sisters, The Eye of the Leopard, The Man from Beijing, Secrets in the Fire, The Chronicler of the Wind, Depths, and I Die, But My Memory Lives On. He also wrote the Kurt Wallander series, which have been adapted for film and television, and the Joel Gustafson Stories series. A Bridge to the Stars won the Rabén and Sjögren award for best children's book of the year.
He was committed to the fight against AIDS. He helped build a village for orphaned children and devoted much of his spare time to his "memory books" project, where parents dying from AIDS are encouraged to record their life stories in words and pictures. He was also among the activists who were attacked and arrested by Israeli forces as they tried to sail to the Gaza strip with humanitarian supplies in June 2010. He died from cancer on October 5, 2015 at the age of 67.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Through an odd series of circumstances, Hanna Lundmark escapes from poverty and, eventually, finds herself the owner of a prestigious brothel in Mozambique in the first decade of the 20th century. But racial strife and colonialism make this world foreign in ways Hanna cannot possibly understand, despite her growing influence in the city. When she attempts to intervene on a black woman's behalf, she quickly learns how cultural tensions can result in bloodshed. Rosalyn Landor narrates with a majestic, British-accented voice. She navigates the prose well, skillfully capturing the voice and viewpoint of Hanna. Landor also lends the book's other characters voices that are distinct and authentic, and her pacing and inflection add to the suspense of Mankell's prose. A Knopf hardcover. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In 1904, Hanna Lundmark, a young widow from poverty-stricken northern Sweden, arrives in Lourenco Marques, a coastal town in Portuguese East Africa. Following a series of unexpected events, she becomes the owner of a prosperous brothel of black prostitutes. Her new environment proves difficult to navigate, particularly its blatant racism. Nobody knows what to make of a rich white businesswoman, either. Black-white relations, evoked with subtle skill and mordant humor, are marked by mutual incomprehension and fear, and Hanna's attempts at friendliness and generosity toward her employees are met with unnatural silences. When she obeys her conscience and makes a gutsy decision against bigotry, the plot takes turns at once surprising and not. Mankell, Scandinavian crime fiction's brightest star, structures his latest around a true story from turn-of-the-century Mozambique. Considerable suspense derives from the tense atmosphere and the fact that neither Hanna nor the reader knows quite what will happen next. The tragic effects of colonialism in this divided land emerge slowly via a succession of shocking reveals. This powerful work boasts a courageous, well-drawn heroine and makes its points without stridency or didacticism. Since it's written by Mankell, an author of such high stature, it should get the large audience it deserves.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WE forget, in these postcolonial times, that until comparatively recently the world was replete with empires. I was born in a corner of the British Empire, in West Africa, in a colony known as the Gold Coast, and the Africa of those days (the early 1950s) was divided among several empires: British, French, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese (the Germans having been expelled in World War I and their colonies appropriated). The Portuguese had been there longest, since the 15th century, and their colonies - Mozambique, Angola and Guinea - were surprisingly integrated compared with others. The Portuguese had abolished slavery by the end of the 19th century, the death penalty had been rescinded (apart from cases of treason), and intermarriage between the settler class and the local Africans was tolerated, thereby earning the Portuguese colonies a louche reputation for decadence and immorality, particularly from the point of view of the British. A chapter of my second novel, "An Ice-Cream War," was set in Portuguese East Africa (as Mozambique was then known) during World War I, and as I did my research this attitude of prurient revulsion on the part of its British colonial neighbors was particularly striking. Henning Mankell's fascinating new novel, "A Treacherous Paradise," is largely set in Mozambique during the early years of the 20th century. But the story starts in Sweden. A young girl, Hanna Renstrom, is sent away from her isolated rural home because her family, confronting a famine, can no longer feed all its members. Assisted by a fur-wearing, sleigh-driving businessman, Hanna secures a place as a cook on a Swedish steamship bound for Australia, hauling a cargo of timber. On the first leg of the journey she marries the third mate, who promptly dies of fever off the coast of Africa. Eyeing the shoreline and the Portuguese city of Lourenço Marques as the steamer takes on supplies, Hanna, a very young widow, only 18, spontaneously decides to jump ship and make a new life on the African continent. Now her adventures really begin. Mankell, as it happens, divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique and has great familiarity with both countries. His juxtaposition of the two - cold north versus hot south, Swedish temperament combining with African license - gives the novel its unusual flavor. It often reads like a fable or a folk tale, as this young Swedish girl encounters the cruel realities of African colonial life. Having fled her ship, she checks in to a hotel, only to discover that it's Lourenço Marques's most prestigious brothel. After just a few weeks the brothel keeper, a man called Vaz, asks her to marry him, which she does. Then he also dies, and Hanna finds herself running the business in his place - with considerable aplomb and success. The brothel, called O Paraiso ("The Paradise," giving the novel's title one of its nuances), is a curious, surreal place. Vaz's pet chimpanzee, Carlos, who wears clothes and serves refreshments to clients from a tray, becomes attached to Hanna and is a constant presence. Hanna also develops strong relationships with her "girls" and some of her clients, and the narrative reflects the bizarre, anecdotal, meandering nature of the brothel keeper's life. Increasingly wealthy and becoming a person of some local stature and influence, Hanna discovers that paradise can be treacherous. One young black woman who has killed her white brute of a husband is found dead, hideously mutilated, in her jail cell, despite Hanna's efforts to save her. With her strange paradise well and truly besmirched, Hanna finds some comfort in the arms of the victim's brother. Soon she leaves Lourenço Marques and travels north to Beira, Portuguese East Africa's second city, and there, in the Africa Hotel, she hides the diary she's been keeping and disappears. She is never heard of again until, almost a hundred years later, her diary is discovered. In an afterword, Mankeli explains the origins of the novel: in fact there was a Swedish woman who ran a brothel in Lourenço Marques at the beginning of the 20th century, a woman who dutifully paid her taxes (hence the documentary evidence of her existence) but about whom nothing more is known. From this starting point, Mankeli has constructed his fantastical narrative. He has, on the whole, been well served by his translator, Laurie Thompson, who renders Mankell's Swedish into a simple and enchanting English: "Somebody called Elin ought to be slim and delicately formed, with hands like milk and fair hair hanging down over her back. But . . . Elin Renstrom . . . was powerfully built with lank reddish-brown hair, a large nose and teeth that were not quite regular. They gave the impression of wanting to jump out of her mouth and run away. Elin Renstrom was certainly not a beautiful woman. And she knew it." Occasionally there's a slip into colloquial anachronism (did Swedish people say "O.K." in 1905?), and there are instances of other lapses and cuches: "He wasn't messing her about"; "If the bottom line was that there was no way in which she could help the imprisoned woman. . . ." But over all, the novel's tone - reminiscent of Latin American magic realism, transplanted to Africa - makes it work. Carlos the chimp might have come out of a García Márquez novel, and the richly colored details of brothel life could be from a sprawling Jorge Amado tale. The translator's task is always a fraught and personal one: fidelity to the original or fidelity to a linguistic fluency in the new language? For the reader who isn't familiar with Swedish, and who, upon opening "A Treacherous Paradise," is unable to make comparisons between the languages, the latter inclination is, I believe, always preferable. Translated novels must read well, above all, without sacrificing accuracy. We need literature in translation: it's a great boon to our various cultures, as the sensuous, beguiling tapestry of "A Treacherous Paradise" makes abundantly clear. Mankell's novel often reads like a fable, as his heroine encounters the cruel realities of African colonial life. William Boyd's James Bond novel, "Solo," will be published in October.
Guardian Review
Mankell takes a fascinating historical fragment as the basis for this tale of Portuguese Africa. In the early 20th century, one of the biggest brothels in Lourenco Marques (now Mozambique's capital, Maputo) was owned by a white Swedish woman. She crops up in tax records, but we know nothing else about her. Mankell names her Hanna and gives her a thoughtful nature (she "radiates an aura suggesting she is a totally genuine human being") and a harsh backstory: she grew up in Sweden's remote north, was pushed out by her poor family and ended up on a boat to Australia but never got there. The most successful parts of the novel portray the brutal life of Lourenco Marques - the black population lower their gaze to whites who may beat them for a slight, while the whites fear that outward pliability hides defiance. Hanna's decency is undermined by the society she finds herself in; when she embarks on a personal crusade, the town closes ranks. Mankell's writing can be drab but he tells a good story, and this is a grimly believable picture of how colonialism denigrates both servant and master. - James Smart Mankell takes a fascinating historical fragment as the basis for this tale of Portuguese Africa. In the early 20th century, one of the biggest brothels in Lourenco Marques (now Mozambique's capital, Maputo) was owned by a white Swedish woman. She crops up in tax records, but we know nothing else about her. - James Smart.
Kirkus Review
The chronicler of Kurt Wallander (The Troubled Man, 2011, etc.) sets his sights on something dramatically different: the African odyssey of a young turn-of-the-century Swedish woman that's based on facts--just not very many facts. Five years after her lumberjack father's death in 1899, Hanna Renstrm's mother, Elin, sends the 18-year-old off to businessman Jonathan Forsman's home in coastal Sundsvall, where the chances of survival look brighter. Forsman not only treats Hanna kindly and respectfully and gives her a job as a maid, but arranges her passage to Australia as a higher-salaried cook on a ship he partly owns. Hanna finds love aboard the Lovisa, but barely a month into her marriage to third mate Lars Lundmark, a fever carries him off. Armed with 50 in widow's benefits, and lacking any strong ties to the ship or its destination, Hanna decides on the spur of the moment to steal away while the Lovisa is docked one night in Loureno Marques and runs smack into another world. When she finds that she's seriously ill, she begs help from women she thinks run a hotel. They're actually prostitutes in Senhor Attimilio Vaz's brothel, O Paraiso, and he's the highest-contributing taxpayer in all of Mozambique. Here, Hanna once again finds unexpected kindness and romance even before she ends up as the owner of O Paraiso, but this time, the world in which she's landed is shot through with a racism so pervasive that it defines every human relationship, and Hanna's closest and most enduring emotional connection turns out to be with Carlos the monkey. Hanna's adventures, based on elliptical hints from the journal of a real-life Swedish madam in 1905 Mozambique, make a story as magical as a fairy tale and just about as brutal too.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Basing his work on a sliver of early 20th-century tax records in Mozambique, Mankell, who's best known for his series of mysteries featuring Kurt Wallender, has fashioned the story of Hannah Renstrom Lundmark Vaz. At age 19, Hannah leaves Sweden as cook on a ship bound for Australia. A whirlwind courtship with a crew member finds her married and widowed within two months of leaving home and leads her to abandon ship in Lourenco Marques. She stays at what she thinks is a cheap hotel, though she soon realizes it is a highly successful bordello, whose owner, Vaz, proposes to her. Shortly after their marriage, he also dies, leaving Hannah very wealthy and in charge of his business and investments. The area's rampant racism bothers Hannah and is the cause of some unpopular actions that don't always fit with her seeming detachment. Rosalyn Landor does a wonderful job with the narration, especially with the Swedish personal and place names; her reading of Hannah is effectively remote. VERDICT Recommend to fans of Paul Theroux, The Bean Trees, or books set in colonial Africa.-Suanne Roush, Seminole, FL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue Africa Hotel, Beira, 2002 One day in the cold month of July, 2002, a man by the name of José Paulo opened up a hole in a rotten floor. He was not trying to make an escape route nor was he looking for a hiding place, but he intended to use the damaged parquet flooring as firewood since the cold of the African winter was harsher than it had been for many years. José Paulo was unmarried, but he had taken over responsibility for his sister and her five children after his brother-in-law, Emilio, had suddenly disappeared one morning, leaving behind nothing but a pair of worn-out shoes and a number of unpaid bills. His debts were owed almost exclusively to Donna Samima, who ran an unlicensed bar close to the harbour where she served tontonto and home-brewed beer with an astonishingly high alcohol content. Emilio used to spend his time drinking and talking about the time in the distant past when he had worked in the South African gold mines. But many people maintained that he had never set foot in South Africa, and had certainly never held down a steady job in his life. His disappearance was neither something expected, nor something unexpected. He had simply slunk away during the silent hours just before dawn, when everybody was asleep. Nobody knew where he had gone to. Nor would anybody miss him all that much, not even his own family. It is doubtful whether Donna Samima missed him, but she did insist that his bills should be paid. Emilio, the talker and drinker, made virtually no impression on anybody even when he was in the vicinity. The fact that he had now disappeared made no real difference. José Paulo lived with his sister's family in the Africa Hotel in Beira. There had been a time, which now seemed both distant and incomprehensible, when this establishment had been considered one of the grandest hotels in colonial Africa. It was ranked as comparable with the Victoria Falls Hotel, on the border between Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia before those countries achieved -independence and became known as Zimbabwe and Zambia. White people came to the Africa Hotel from far and wide in order to get married, celebrate anniversaries, or simply demonstrate the fact that they belonged to an aristocracy that could never imagine that their colonial paradise would one day collapse. The hotel had been the venue for tea dances on Sunday afternoons, swing and tango competitions, and no end of people had been photographed standing outside its imposing entrance. But the colonial dream of paradise was doomed. One day the Portuguese abandoned their last fortresses. The Africa Hotel started to crumble the moment the former owners had left. The deserted rooms and suites were occupied by poverty-stricken Africans. They deposited their few belongings in the carcasses of what used to be upright pianos and Steinway grands, in dilapidated boudoirs and bathtubs. The beautiful parquet floors were chopped up and used as firewood when winter was at its coldest. Eventually there were several thousand people living in what had once been the Africa Hotel. Anyway, one day in July, José Paulo made a hole in the floor and chopped up the parquet. It was freezing cold in the room. The only source of heat was an iron cauldron in which they cooked their food over an open fire. The smoke was channelled out through a smashed and badly repaired windowpane by means of an improvised chimney. The half-rotten flooring had already begun to smell thanks to its neglect. José thought there must be a dead rat underneath it spreading the stench of decomposition. But when he investigated, all he could find was a little notebook with a calf-leather binding. He managed to spell out a strange name written on the black cover. Hanna Lundmark. Underneath the name was a year: 1905. But he was unable to make head or tail of what was written inside it. It was in a language he didn't recognize. He turned to old Afa-nastasio who lived further down the corridor, in room 212, and was regarded by all those packed inside the hotel as a wise man, because in his youth he had survived a confrontation with two hungry lions on a deserted road outside Chimoio. But not even Afanastasio could read the text. He approached old Lucinda, who lived in what used to be reception, for assistance, but she didn't know what language it was either. Afanastasio suggested that José Paulo should throw the book away. "It's been lying there under the floorboards for ages," said Afa-nastasio. "Somebody hid it there in the days when the likes of us were only allowed to enter this building in the role of waiters, cleaners or porters. No doubt this forgotten book tells an unpleasant story. Burn it. Use it as fuel when it gets really cold." José Paulo took the book back to his room. But he didn't burn it, without quite knowing why. Instead he found a new hiding place for it. There was a cavity underneath the window ledge where he used to stash away any money he occasionally managed to earn. Now the few filthy banknotes could share the space with the black notebook. He never took it out again. But he didn't forget about it. 1 It is 1904. June. A scorching hot tropical dawn. In this far distant here and now, a Swedish steamship lies motionless in the gentle swell. On board are thirty-one crew members, one of them a woman. Her name is Hanna Lundmark, née Renström, and she is working on board as a cook. In all, thirty-two people were due to make the voyage to Australia with a cargo of Swedish heartwood, and planks for saloon floors and the living rooms of rich sheep farmers. One of the crew has just died. He was a mate, and married to Hanna. He was young, and keen to go on living. But despite being warned by Captain Svartman, he went ashore one day while they were topping up their supplies of coal in one of the desert harbours to the south of Suez. He was infected with one of the deadly fevers that are always a threat on the African coast. When it dawned on him that he was going to die, he started howling in fear. Neither of the men present at his deathbed--Captain Svartman and Halvorsen, the Ship's Carpenter--could make out any last words that he uttered. He didn't even say anything to Hanna, who was about to be widowed after a marriage lasting only one month. He died screaming and--eventually, just before the end--roaring in terror. His name was Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark. Hanna is still mourning his death, having been devastated by what happened. It is now dawn the day after his death. The ship is not moving. It has heaved to because there will shortly be a burial at sea. Captain Svartman does not want to delay matters. There is no ice on board to keep the corpse cold. Hanna is standing aft with a slop pail in her hand. She is short in stature, high-breasted, with friendly eyes. Her hair is brown and gathered in a tight bun at the back of her head. She is not beautiful. But in a strange way she radiates an aura suggesting that she is a totally genuine human being. The here and now. She is here. On the sea, on board a steamship with two funnels. A cargo of timber, on its way to Australia. Home port: Sundsvall. The ship is called Lovisa. She was built at the Finnboda shipyard in Stockholm. But her home port has always been on the northern Swedish coast. She was first owned by a shipping company in Gävle, but it went bankrupt after a series of failed speculative deals. And she was then bought by a company based in Sundsvall. In Gävle she was called Matilda, after the shipowner's wife, who played Chopin with clumsy fingers. Now she is called Lovisa, after the new owner's youngest daughter. One of the part-owners is called Forsman. He is the one who arranged for Hanna Lundmark to be given a job on board. Although Forsman has a piano in his house, there is nobody who can play it. Nevertheless, when the piano tuner comes on one of his regular visits, Forsman makes a point of being there to listen. But now the mate Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark has died, killed by a raging fever. It is as if the swell of the sea has become paralysed. The ship is lying there motionless, as if it were holding its breath. That's exactly what I imagine death to be like, Hanna Lundmark thought. A sudden stillness, unexpected, coming from nowhere. Death is like the wind. A sudden shift into the lee. The lee of death. And then nothing else. 2 At that very moment Hanna is possessed by a memory. It comes from nowhere. She recalls her father, his voice, which had become no more than a whisper by the end of his life. It was as if he were asking her to preserve and cherish what he said as a valuable secret. A mucky angel. That's what you are. He said that to her just before he died. It was as if he were trying to present her with a gift, despite the fact--or maybe because of the fact--that he owned next to nothing. Hanna Renström, my beloved daughter, you are an angel--a right mucky one, but an angel even so. What exactly is this memory that she has? What were his exact words? Did he say she was stony, or mucky? Did he leave it up to her to choose, to decide for herself? Stony broke, or mucky? Now as she recalls that moment, she thinks he called her a mucky angel. It is a distant memory, faded. She is so far distant from her father and his death. From there, and from then: a remote house on a bank of the cold, brown waters of the River Ljungan in the silent forests of northern Sweden. He passed away hunched up and contorted by pain on a sofa bed in a kitchen they had barely been able to keep warm. He died surrounded by cold, she thinks. It was extremely cold in January 1899, when he stopped breathing. That was over five years ago. The memory of her father and his words about an angel disappear just as quickly as they came. It takes her only a few seconds to return to the present from the past. She knows that we always make the most remarkable journeys deep down inside ourselves, where there is no time or space. Perhaps that memory was designed to help her? To throw her the rope she needs in order to climb over the walls confining her within an atmosphere of unremitting sorrow? But she can't run away. The ship has been transformed into an impregnable fortress. There is no escape. Her husband really is dead. Death is a talon that refuses to release its grip. 3 The pressure in the boilers has been reduced. The pistons are motionless, the engines ticking over. Hanna is standing by the rail with her slop pail in her hand. She is going to empty it over the stern. The mess-room boy had wanted to take it from her when she was on her way out of the galley, but she had clung on to it, protected it. Even if this is the day she is going to watch her husband's body being tipped into the depths of the ocean, sewn into a canvas sailcloth, she does not want to neglect her duties. When she looks up from the pail, which is filled with eggshells, it feels as if the heat is scratching at her face. Somewhere in the mist to starboard is Africa. Although she cannot see the faintest trace of land, she thinks she can smell it. He who is now dead has told her about it. About the steaming, almost corrosive stench of decay which you find everywhere in the tropics. He had already made several voyages to various destinations. He had managed to learn a few things. But not the most important thing: how to survive. He would never complete this voyage. He died at the age of twenty-four. It's as if he was trying to warn her, Hanna thinks. But she doesn't know what he was warning her about. And now he's dead. A dead man can never answer questions. Somebody materializes silently by her side. It's her husband's closest friend on board, the Norwegian carpenter Halvorsen. She doesn't know if he has a first name, despite the fact that they have been together on the same ship for more than two months. He is never called anything but Halvorsen, a serious man who is said to go down on his knees to be readmitted into the Church every time he comes home to Brønnøysund after a few years at sea, and then signs on again when his faith can no longer sustain him. He has large hands, but his face is kind, almost feminine. His stubble seems to have been painted on and powdered by somebody trying to be cruel to him. "I gather there's something you need to ask about," he says. His voice sings. It sounds as if he's humming when he speaks. "The depth," Hanna says. "Where will Lundmark's grave be?" Halvorsen shakes his head doubtfully. She suddenly has the impression that he is like a restless bird about to fly away. He leaves her without a word. But she knows he will find out the answer to her question. How deep will the grave be? Is there a sea bottom where her husband can rest in peace, in his sewn-up canvas shroud? Or is there no bottom, does the sea continue downwards into infinity? She empties her pail of eggshells, watches the white seabirds dive down into the water to capture their prey, then wipes the sweat from her brow with the towel she has tied to her apron. Then she gives way to the inevitable, and screams. Some of the birds riding the upwinds, waiting for a new slop pail to be emptied, flap their wings and strive to escape from the sorrowful howl that hits them like hailstones. The mess-room boy Lars peers out in horror from the galley door. He is holding a cracked egg in his hand, observes her furtively. Death embarrasses him. Needless to say, she knows what he is thinking. She's going to jump now, she's going to leave us because her sorrow is too great to bear. Her scream has been heard by many on board. Two sweaty deckhands naked from the waist up stand by the side of the galley and gape at her, next to where one of the long hawsers is coiled up like a gigantic snake. Hanna merely shakes her head, grits her teeth and goes into the galley with her empty pail. No, she is not going to climb over the rail. She has spent the whole of her life keeping a stiff upper lip, and she intends to continue doing so. The heat of the galley hits her hard. Standing next to the stoves is similar to the life of the stokers down below in the engine room. Women in the vicinity of boilers and lighthouses bring bad luck. The older generation of seafarers is horrified by the thought of having women on board. Their presence means trouble. And also arguments and jealousy among the men. But when shipowner Forsman announced that he wanted Hanna to join the crew, Captain Svartman agreed. He didn't worry too much about superstition. Hanna picks up an egg, cracks it, drops the contents into the frying pan and throws the shell into the slop pail. Thirty living sailors must have their breakfast. She tries to think only about the eggs, not about the funeral that is in the offing. She is on board as cook: that situation has not changed as a result of the death of her husband. That's the way it is. She is alive, but Lundmark is dead. Excerpted from A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
