{"id":5971,"date":"2016-10-03T13:27:59","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T13:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5971"},"modified":"2016-10-03T14:06:26","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T14:06:26","slug":"hakan-nesser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=5971","title":{"rendered":"Hakan Nesser"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>Hakan Nesser,\u00a0A Summer with Kim Novak<\/em>\u00a0(1998; trans. 2015) and\u00a0The Living and the Dead in Winsford<\/em>\u00a0(2014; trans. 2015)\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Review by Lee Horsley<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Swedish crime writer Hakan Nesser is best known for his highly successful police procedurals, the Van Veeteren series \u2013 ten novels (1993-2003), all available in English. He has also, however, written numerous stand-alones, only two of which have been translated into English, both in 2015:\u00a0A Summer with Kim Novak<\/em><\/a>, originally published in 1998, and\u00a0The Living and the Dead in Winsford<\/em><\/a>, published in Swedish in 2014. \u00a0The freshness and immediacy of these stories owe a lot to the fact that (unlike the usual police procedural) they are in the first person. Both carry us touchingly and convincingly into the minds of vulnerable characters living through times of extreme uncertainty and change.<\/p>\n

A Summer with Kim Novak<\/em>\u00a0is a captivating, well-crafted murder mystery, and readers are kept in suspense until the final pages about\u00a0who was responsible for\u00a0\u201cthat\u00a0grisly act\u201d. The narrator, Erik, looking back on his fourteen-year old self, relives\u00a0\u201cthe Incident\u201d:\u00a0it is the reason he remembers the summer of 1962 \u201cmore clearly than any other summer of my youth. It cast its dismal pall over so many things.\u201d But there was also \u201cso much more to it\u201d \u2013 most importantly, the experience of being young.\u00a0 In spite of the act of violence at its centre, Nesser\u2019s novel has\u00a0the charm of a gentle, funny coming-of-age story.<\/p>\n

With Erik\u2019s whole world overturned by the serious illness of his mother, he spends the summer at the family\u2019s lake-side cottage with his friend Edmund, his elder brother Henry \u2013 and, turning up nearby, \u201cKim Novak\u201d, the very image of the actress, a gorgeous substitute teacher from their school, accompanied by her extremely unpleasant fianc\u00e9e. The quirkiness of the boys\u2019 adventures and the awkwardness of their adolescence are beautifully conveyed. The pace of the novel captures the leisure of a summer idyll: \u201cOn our first few days at Gennesaret, we surveyed our kingdom\u2026 In the summertime, there was never any need to rush; time was an ocean one thousand times the size of M\u00f6ckeln: you did as you pleased.\u201d They seem to float unhurriedly towards calamity and loss of innocence. And, when disaster strikes, we find ourselves completely engrossed by the causes and consequences of \u201cthat fateful event\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Like\u00a0A Summer with Kim Novak<\/em>,\u00a0The Living and the Dead in Winsford<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0set in an intensely realized landscape and patiently, vividly creates a disempowered character in whose fate we feel very closely involved. Here, we are following a woman on her own, a former TV presenter, Maria Holinek. In contrast to the earlier novel\u2019s poignant tale of the end of innocence,\u00a0The Living and the Dead<\/em>\u00a0creates a tense, edgy account of the dangers confronted by a woman who is far from innocent \u2013 the wife of a missing professor who has herself gone missing, fleeing to an isolated cottage in the village of Winsford on Exmoor. She is \u201cwriting in order to avoid going mad \u2013 the gradual eroding madness of solitude \u2013 and in order to outlive my dog.\u201d Maria is at a moral and emotional crossroads, not just in hiding but dislocated from her entire past: \u201cI had gone astray in my inner landscape, and that was due quite simply to the fact that it had been changed. Or erased.\u201d We are only gradually able to piece together the events that have led to her inner turmoil, and we read anxiously to find out what she is escaping from, what happened in a remote bunker on the Baltic coast, and what will become of her.<\/p>\n

A Summer with Kim Novak<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Living and the Dead in Winsford<\/em>\u00a0are both, quite literally, \u201cblood on the beach\u201d novels, highly recommended as touching, suspenseful, utterly absorbing summer reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hakan Nesser,\u00a0A Summer with Kim Novak\u00a0(1998; trans. 2015) and\u00a0The Living and the Dead in Winsford\u00a0(2014; trans. 2015)\u00a0 Review by Lee<\/p>\n

Continue readingHakan Nesser<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[119,101,35,117],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5971"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5971"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6041,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5971\/revisions\/6041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}