When the story opens, Arvid’s mother has just discovered that she has a recurrence of cancer, and she has decided to take the ferry from Norway back to her “home,” on Jutland. Arvid has had a testy relationship with his mother over the years and has not talked with her in a while, trying to avoid telling her that he and his wife are getting a divorce, but when he gets a message that his mother has left home, he, too, takes the ferry to Jutland. During this time, he is inundated with memories, which come at random from different times in his life—his decision to become a communist, then leave college and join the “proletariat” working in the factories (like his parents); his memories of vacationing in Jutland as a child; the loss of the brother who came just after him in birth order. Throughout, however, he returns to stories of his mother, who, when he decided to leave college and give up his chance to escape the kind of life she and her husband had been living, smacked him, hard, across the face. Ultimately, Arvid becomes a character so real that even the author has said, “I recognize myself in him…”
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In the third novel in this outstanding mystery series to be released in the US, alcoholic police inspector Harry Hole, “the lone wolf, the drunk, the [Oslo Police] department’s enfant terrible…and the best detective on the sixth floor” has been AWOL from his job for a month, on a bender which he seems unable to end. His life is a disaster from which he seeks temporary solace by drinking himself into oblivion. Norwegian author Jo Nesbo begins this novel with the best three introductory paragraphs that I have read in years. Ostensibly a description of a water leak which works its way from a fifth floor apartment into the apartment below, it is, in reality a menace-filled mood-setter which presages real horror. And when the ceiling in the fourth floor apartment starts to leak on the young couple preparing a pot of potatoes on the stove, Nesbo’s truly wicked sense of humor kicks in, to re-emerge at other critical points in the novel. (A terrific mystery.)
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More like a fiendish sudoku puzzle than a traditional police procedural, this blockbuster novel, set in Oslo, challenges alcoholic Inspector Harry Hole to find solutions to four cold-blooded murders, which may or may not be related. A “square peg” in the police department, Hole does jot hesitate to do things his own way, often infuriating his peers while still inspiring (sometimes grudging) respect for his honesty. A bank robbery in which a gunman executes his female hostage because the bank manager exceeds twenty-five seconds to fill a bag with money is just the start of the non-stop action. As Harry Hole investigates the similarities between this robbery and the stunning earlier robberies by Raskol Baxhet, a gypsy now incarcerated, the reader is jerked every which-way, his/her perceptions constantly changed as new information emerges about the characters and the past. A terrific mystery.
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To Siberia, the latest of Petterson’s novels to be translated into English, continues these themes. Nominated upon its publication in 1996 for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (which Petterson won in 2009 for I Curse the River of Time, not yet available in English), it is set in Skagen, in Denmark, at the tip of Jutland. The unnamed speaker, who is aged five when the novel opens, is a worrier—a little girl worried about the fierce-looking lions who guard the gate to a nearby house and about her father’s ears freezing and falling off when he does not wear a hat. Almost anonymous, the little girl comes closest to having a name when her devoted brother Jesper refers to her as “Sistermine.” The two are extremely close, though Jesper is three years older, and they spend much time together, sharing their dreams. Jesper plans to become a Socialist and go to Morocco, while Sistermine intends to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Dark and often bleak, To Siberia uses its title as a symbol of the yearnings of the main character, and the reader recognizes almost from the outset that she is already in Siberia, emotionally.
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Voted the The Best Mystery of All Time by Norwegian Book Clubs, author Jo Nesbo focuses on the long-term resentments of the now-elderly Norwegian veterans of the Eastern Front who were branded traitors to their country in 1945. These characters and their agendas join in 1999 with the ultra-conservative political agendas held by many Norwegian young professionals, and the still-flourishing neo-Nazi party. This union creates an explosive political and social environment which award-winning Norwegian author Jo Nesbo develops into a thriller full of hatred, violence, and mayhem. Creating parallel narratives, Nesbo alternates the battles and interactions of Norwegian soldiers on the Eastern Front, with the everyday battles of Inspector Harry Hole to preserve order in Oslo against those who sincerely believe that “In His wisdom God so ordained it that an inferior creature is never happier than when serving and obeying a superior creature.”
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