The Nature of Things

The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell My rating: 2 of 5 stars It had been quite a while since I had checked in on Kurt Wallander, so the time seemed appropriate. I wondered if perhaps his creator, Henning Mankell, had allowed him to mellow out at all in the interim. Early in the book, as the author was describing Wallander, I came across a sentence asserting that the Swedish policeman was, in fact, quite a cheerful person. I had to laugh out loud. If there is one adjective that could likely never be honestly applied to Kurt Wallander it is "cheerful." As we meet Wallander in The Troubled Man , his life is in turmoil, as it almost always is, but there are new causes this time. He is turning sixty and staring mortality in the face. That frightens him. Plus, he is struggling with diabetes, having difficulty controlling his blood sugar. Most frighteningly of all, though, he is having memory lapses - memory blackouts, actually. He has instances of indeterminate length when he canno...

My rating: 3 of 5 stars At the heart of the several mysteries that Kurt Wallander and his team must investigate in this seventh book in the Wallander series are secrets. The victims all have secrets which make it difficult to get a grasp on the motives and reasons behind their victimhood, and, of course, the perpetrator, a serial killer, has the biggest secrets of all. He is a cipher, an anonymous man, someone that you would never notice. People look right through him and never see him. How will Wallander ever be able to find this invisible man? It begins with three young friends meeting in a nature preserve, dressed in elaborate 18th century costumes, in order to celebrate Midsummer's Eve. In the middle of their happy celebration, as they are lying on the ground, a gunman steps out from behind a tree and shoots all three in the head. He then hides the bodies in a temporary grave. Afterward, postcards start arriving from various sites around Europe informing the young people's ...

The dour Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, is now 50 years old. He has been diagnosed with diabetes, and he is making an effort to live a healthier life. He has taken up walking. He tries to eat and drink more sensibly. The result has been that he has lost some weight and he actually does feel better, at least physically. Emotionally, he's still a mess. His promising relationship with the Latvian policeman's widow, Baiba, has ended. He doesn't have a woman in his life. He's lonely and he has a tendency to become obsessed with every new woman he meets. His daughter suggests that he sign up with a dating service, but he is resistant to that idea.  At work, Wallander is frustrated. He feels unappreciated. His superior does not seem to trust him. He would like to quit, but his options are limited and he's looking at perhaps ten more years as a police detective whose career is going nowhere. He's a policeman whom technology is leaving behind. He doesn't understa...

The Fifth Woman  is the sixth in Henning Mankell's series of books featuring the morose Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, and in this one I felt that he finally hit his stride. It was well-written (also well-translated which was important since I was reading it in English) and kept the action moving, which kept me turning those pages. It was interestingly plotted and featured a goodly number of red herrings, some of which were never explained. By now, we are used to the fact that Wallander is a severely depressive personality who also suffers from hypochondria. He's always imagining he's coming down with something, a common cold, a heart attack, or whatever is the flavor of illness at the moment. But at the beginning of this book, we see a different Wallander. He has made a trip to Rome with his aged father who suffers from the beginnings of Alzheimer's. It is a trip that his father had long wanted to make and that had been long postponed. Both of them understand that i...

A problem that I have with almost all the Swedish novels that I read (and there seem to be quite a lot of them) is that often the language is incredibly stilted. Since I'm reading the books in English and I'm not familiar with the Swedish language, I can only assume that it is a problem with the translation, that it must be especially hard to render Swedish into English and make it flow easily over the page. Nowhere do I notice this problem more than with the books of Henning Mankell. I often feel like I'm reading a Saturday Night Live parody of a Swedish scene. That was especially true with  The Man Who Smiled . We're now more than a year after the time when Kurt Wallander, the famously depressive, dour, angst-ridden Swedish detective, was forced to kill a criminal in the course of duty. It was self-defense, but still he is riven with guilt and has had to take sick leave from his job because of his emotional distress. He has tried unsuccessfully to find solace in booze...

Reading Sidetracked by Henning Mankell, I found myself really wishing that Inspector Kurt Wallander would get some professional help. The man is so depressed that it makes me depressed just to read about him. Not that he doesn't have plenty of reason to be depressed. His personal life is a mess. He's still grieving for and missing his friend and mentor who died years before. He feels inadequate in his work and there are other stresses in his job as his department faces a budget crunch and possible staff reductions. There is a woman in his life and he wants to marry her, but she is the widow of a Latvian policeman who was killed in the line of duty and she's not so sure she wants to commit to a life with a  Swedish  policeman. (I can't say that I blame her.) His father has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and he seems to be deteriorating rapidly. The one bright spot in his life is his daughter with whom he finally seems able to build a positive relations...

Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander is a real sad-sack. His interpersonal relationships are a mess, totally unsatisfying. He's middle-aged and overweight and his heart often races with the slightest bit of exercise, leading him to fear that he's having a heart attack. Perhaps worst of all, he's come to doubt that he is any good at his job. He seems indecisive and unable to find and follow up clues to their logical conclusion. He suffers from serious bouts of depression. His life seems to be going downhill fast. Then, it gets worse. The time is April 1992 and in peaceful, democratic Sweden, a female estate agent disappears. Her husband reports the disappearance to the police and Inspector Wallander is on the case. He feels, instinctively, that the woman will never be found alive, but he doggedly pursues the clues that he has. However, nothing seems to make any sense, and, finally, when her body is found and suddenly a house nearby explodes, the case gets murkier and murkier. Th...

This was the second book in Henning Mankell's series of police procedurals featuring the dour Swedish detective inspector Kurl Wallander. It starts with two men on a boat. They encounter a red, unmarked life raft, adrift on the sea. Coming nearer, they see that there are two men in the raft - two very dead men. The two live men are returning to Sweden after delivering smuggled goods to their East German contacts. They can't afford to call attention to themselves by reporting the raft and the bodies so they decide to tow it closer to the coast where the tide will take it in to be discovered. Soon, the report of the finding of the two dead men comes to police inspector Kurt Wallander and the investigation begins. The first thing to be ascertained is who the men are and where they came from. Dental forensic analysis soon points to an Eastern European country as their point of origin, but there is no identifying information on the bodies or on the raft itself. After inquiries throu...

In Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell has created a seriously flawed but ultimately sympathetic character. This book, published in Swedish in 1991 and in English in 1997, is the first in the series featuring Wallander and I will be interested to see how the character changed and grew as the series progressed. Wallander is a police inspecter in Ystad, Sweden, and in this introductory book, he has a particularly violent and seemingly senseless crime to solve. An elderly couple have been brutally murdered in a remote farmhouse. Before she died, the woman uttered the word "Foreigner." Is that a clue to the identity of the killer or killers or was it just a meaningless sound from a dying and delerious woman? The murders occur on a cold night in January and the bleak cold of the Swedish wintry landscape permeates the story. Wallander assembles his team and they begin to work the case, but soon they are distracted by another murder. Information about the dying woman's final word ha...