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Summary
Summary
WithBlackwater,Kerstin Ekman made one of the most memorable English-language debuts by a European author in recent years. Under the Snowopens with a phone call from an outlying village to police constable Torsson, and the news is of a mah jong party turned sour. A brawl broke out and a man named Matti was accidentally killed. When he questions the villagers, Torsson notices some minor discrepancies in their stories, but writes them off as unimportant. It is not until a few months later that he is forced to reopen the case: David, an eccentric artist and old friend of Matti, has arrived in town for a visit with no knowledge of the death. David has an uneasy feeling about the whole affair, and when he finds Anna Ryd, the town's beautiful English teacher, running away with a bag containing a noose with human hairs on it, he makes it his business to find out what happened. Gradually the facts of the case come to light and dark deeds which were covered up in the snow and darkness of winter are finally brought to light under the relentless summer sun.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers of Swedish writer Ekman's highly praised 1996 thriller, Blackwater, will be pleased to find this first English translation of another of her outstanding psychological novels. Written in 1961, this taut and atmospheric narrative is set in Rakisjokka village inhabited mostly by the indigenous Sami and so remote that in winter it's accessible only on skis. On a lightless winter day, dour, overweight Constable Torsson comes from a nearby town to investigate the death of moody Swedish art teacher Matti Olsson. The villagers claim that Matti's death was accidental; following a fractious mah-jongg game, they say, a drunken, depressed Matti wandered out into the snow and froze to death. Though Torsson doesn't believe he's heard the full truth (particularly after he finds a blood-speckled mah-jongg tile in Matti's classroom), he apathetically accepts the villager's explanations. Then, six months later, David Malm, an art-school buddy of Matti's who's unaware of his death, impulsively decides to visit his friend. On the way, he encounters Rakisjokk's beautiful schoolteacher, Anna Ryd, and finds not only that she is apparently fleeing town but also that she has a knapsack that holds a noose with tangles of human hair. David confronts Torsson and challenges him to reopen the investigation. For his part, Torsson's curiosity and wish to prove himself are stirred by the presence of the wisecracking, arrogant David. The young man's crafty intelligence and Torsson's knowledge of Sami culturenot to mention his latent perceptiveness about human motivationhelp the duo to uncover the reasons for the villagers' defensive evasions of the truth. The denouement is a shocker, though some readers may consider it too neat. Ekman is adept at sketching the complex forces that bind the residents of a small town in an inhospitable place. Compelling descriptions of landscape, climate and both Swedish and Sami culture add fascinating background. But Ekman's skill at understated characterization is the quality that lifts her novels out of the genre and into universal resonance. Here, she movingly portrays the unlikely partnershipand subtle moral growthof two flawed men. (Jan.) FYI: Another early Ekman novel, Witches' Rings, was reviewed in Forecasts, Nov. 10. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Another engrossing literary thriller from the eminent Swedish novelist whose books in English translation (Witches' Rings, p. 1549, etc.) seem to be the most warmly welcomed Scandinavian fiction since Peter H'eg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. Like that international success, this eerie novel takes place in a frozen wasteland: the remote northern village of Rakisjokk, near the Finnish border (""You might say,"" grumbles one character, ""this is where the world comes to an end""). A young artist named Matti Olsson has died there, frozen to death in the snow after a drunken row at, of all things, a mah-jongg party. Following an initial investigation that accepted Rakisjokk's communal declaration of accidental death, Constable Torsson from nearby Orjas is persuaded by David Malm, Matti's old friend and fellow painter, to return to this taciturn wilderness and follow up a teasing new piece of evidence. What they gradually learn--in a neatly constructed narrative that Ekman cleverly distributes among the viewpoints of several variously involved characters--is that Matti may or may not (as alleged) have attempted to destroy his own canvasses, that the beautiful English teacher Anna Ryd had good reason to dispose of that bag containing a coil of rope with human hair clinging to it, and that Matti's death may be connected to the earlier disappearance of a younger woman with whom he was possibly involved. Constable Torsson, an overweight, wheezing, complaining delight of a character, puts it all together impressively--even when his interrogations are complicated by the mysterious shooting of two reindeer, a missing mah-jongg tile, a constantly barking elkhound, and the revelation that just outside Rakisjokk there exists a former passesadie (""place of sacrifice""). Most impressive of all is Ekman's dazzling surprise ending, in which the murderer's detailed confession, told in the first person, immediately precedes the disclosure of that character's identity in the brilliant concluding pages. Irresistible: Save this one for a wintry night by the fireside. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ekman's first novel to appear in English, Blackwater (1996), was greeted with widespread acclaim here. This much earlier work, originally published in Sweden in 1961, is less accomplished, though not without merit. A phone call from a remote north Sweden village sends police constable Thorsson on a journey across a frozen lake to investigate the death of an art teacher. The few inhabitants of the isolated village are closemouthed about what happened, leaving Thorsson to conclude that the death was accidental. Then a friend of the victim turns up, stirring the pot and forcing Thorsson to reopen the investigation. Landscape is the driving force here, as the endlessly dark winters and oppressively sunlit summers take their toll on fragile human emotions. If the plot seems oddly unformed, and the characters never quite lose their arctic chill, the vivid setting still holds one's interest. Watch for more Ekman; along with Henning Mankell, she brings the richness of the contemporary Swedish mystery to an English-speaking audience. --Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
From the author of Blackwater (LJ 1/96) comes another psychological thriller set in a small village in northern Sweden. It is the dead of winter when Police Constable Torsson receives a call from Rakisjokk that artist and teacher Matti Olsson has been killed, forcing Torsson into a 25-mile trek on skis across the frozen lake. When he arrives, however, the inhabitants are strangely reticent, stories do not match one another, unexplainable details appear, and Torsson is unable to blame anything except the fearful cold for Olsson's death. It is only by accident that the case is reopened when Olsson's unsuspecting friend David Malm makes a summer visit and encounters a girl who has hit a reindeer with her car. In the car, Malm discovers a knapsack containing a bloody noose covered with human hair, and he forces Torsson to return to the isolated community, now bathed in perpetual sunlight. Slowly and painfully, the two penetrate the peculiar psychology of people who live half their lives in darkness, cut off from the rest of the world. Ekman's brilliant evocation of a place and culture above the Arctic Circle is as compelling and mysterious as the crime itself. Highly recommended.Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
