![]() Apparently Sweden’s policy at that time was for open borders, and anyone who wanted to live in Sweden could enter the country easily, although they had to live in refugee camps temporarily while they applied for residency permits. This novel is set in 1990, just a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Sweden at that time was facing an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I did find that some of the larger issues raised in this novel were interesting, although like I said above I probably don’t have enough context to appreciate them fully. It’s spare in the boring way, and I found myself reading a few pages and then beginning to look for distractions. Its prose is spare, but it’s not spare in the Hemingway/Raymond Chandler/Raymond Carver sort of way. Like a human survivor of a successful frontal lobotomy, this novel can do everything that another detective novel can do, but it lacks personality. If anything, it seemed as if this novel was created by taking a good detective novel and lobotomizing it. Murray’s translation of Mankell’s prose) to be competent but bland. I’m not sure.įirst of all, I found Mankell’s prose (or, more precisely, Steven T. Maybe I’m getting tired of detective novels, or maybe some of the issues raised in the novel would be more interesting if I knew more about Swedish culture and politics. There is nothing in this premise to suggest that the novel shouldn’t be engaging, but I don’t know. Against a backdrop of a separation from his wife, a lack of communication from his adult daughter, a burgeoning affair with a married woman, his struggles with what is probably alcoholism, and a growing awareness of his father’s decline into senility, Wallander and his colleagues manage the investigation of a double homicide and its complicated aftermath. ![]() It’s premise is very ordinary and formulaic (not that this is a bad thing in detective novels, necessarily): Kurt Wallander is a seasoned detective who manages even the diciest cases with ease but can’t seem to keep control of his personal life. ![]() I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I wanted to or as much as I expected to. I don’t read detective novels very often, but I do tend to enjoy them when I do.
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